Opinion – Psychedelic Turn: Racial bias excludes blacks and Latinos from the psychedelic renaissance

The American left-wing magazine The Nation published a month ago an article by Kali Holloway about racial discrimination in the psychedelic field. “The Secret Black History of LSD” is a must-read for anyone who believes that racism and consciousness expansion never go together.

It is difficult to conclude which is worse in the story, whether the past, the present or the future of psychedelia. But there is still time to right the crooked, unlikely as it may be.

In the 1950s and 60s, when the first LSD research began, pretos and pardos entered as cannon fodder in experiments without consent or the most basic notions of ethics. Consider the case of Private James Thornwell, the only black man in an American garrison in France.

Accused of embezzling documents in 1963, in the middle of the Cold War, he was interrogated with physical abuse for 99 days, says Holloway. In the 100th session, an Operation Third Chance team came on the scene, who gave LSD to the soldier without him knowing and proceeded with the brutal interrogation.

Thornwell thought he was going crazy. US Army notes recorded “extreme paranoid reaction” and “almost disabling”. It was concluded that the soldier was innocent, and he was summarily discharged from the force.

Only years later did he learn in detail what had been done to him, as he told in the documentary “Mission Mind Control” (1979). After 16 years of depression, nightmares and headaches, the former soldier sued his country’s government, received an apology from Congress and compensation in the amount of US$ 625,000.

Much shorter was the trajectory of Frank Olson, a (white) scientist at the CIA spy agency at the time of the MK-Ultra project, who gave him LSD without his knowledge as part of studies in search of a “truth serum”. Olson killed himself, or was thrown out of a window by company brucutus, an obscure episode covered in the Netflix series “Wormwood”.

Thornwell and Olson were not isolated cases. In 1979, 16,000 CIA documents came to light about the 25-year, $25 million project that was spent in the fruitless pursuit, during which hundreds, perhaps thousands of people — most of them black — unwittingly took LSD.

Participants were “recruited” for testing of more than 800 substances by the CIA. Human test subjects were mainly obtained from prisons in the states of Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and New Jersey, where inmates had no choice and the majority were black.

The experiments with human beings, in disagreement with the rules in force after the Nuremberg processes, had the support of the academy. In 1955 the CIA partnered with Tulane University in New Orleans to give LSD and the alkaloid bulbocapnine to black prisoners in the notorious Angola penitentiary.

The tests were conducted by professor of psychology Robert Heath. He had Harry Bailey as an assistant, who would testify years later that it was “cheaper to use blacks, not cats, because they were everywhere and they were cheap experimental animals.”

Another institution collaborating with MK-Ultra was the Addiction Research Center (ARC) at the US National Institute of Mental Health, led by Harris Isbell. Most of the patients were black drug addicts, whose “voluntary” participation was rewarded with doses of heroin and morphine…

Isbell described one of the tests in a 1956 article, says Holloway in the report in The Nation. Poor blacks were given LSD in a prison-like ward, while a control group of middle-class whites took half the blacks’ high starting dose — outside the ARC.

Whites took LSD for a maximum of eight days. Inmates were given the drug daily for 85 days, in increasing doses to counterbalance the development of tolerance. There was a case of a detainee subjected to the drug for 174 days. Isbell received in 1962 the Award for Merit of Service in Public Health.

The atrocities continued until the 1960s, when the civil rights movement against racism and the Vietnam War took hold. LSD and marijuana use spread among young hippies, prompting the declaration of the War on Drugs by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1971.

There began the long winter of serious research with psychedelics such as LSD and MDMA, which came to be widely used in hospitals and clinics, including in Brazil, to treat alcohol dependence and psychological disorders. Only at the turn of the millennium did studies begin to return, gaining momentum until they multiplied in the last decade.

Blacks, however, continue to be discriminated against by the so-called psychedelic renaissance. As this blog has reported, clinical trials are underway to regulate compounds such as MDMA and psilocybin from “magic” mushrooms in psychotherapy to treat depression and post-traumatic stress disorders.

In the scientific and cultural phenomenon, affluent whites predominate, somewhat like the progressive release of medical marijuana and then for adult use. Again, the poor black and Latino minorities in the US are marginalized.

The greatest weight of the War on Drugs fell on the population groups that make up the American prison mass. Although they suffer as much or more from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental disorders, they have no incentive to enroll in clinical trials with psychedelic drugs, for fear of re-stigmatization.

As a result, there is a huge underrepresentation of the population contingent in the statistics collected so far on the safety and therapeutic effects of psychedelics. Preferred guinea pigs, before, today blacks are excluded from the resurgence — something that amounts to adding moral insult, in the present, to the physical suffering inflicted in the past. “Insult to injury”, as they say in the US.

Structural racism is what it is. Not even libertarian science escapes.

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To learn more about the history and new developments of science in this area, including in Brazil, look for my book “Psiconautas – Travels with Brazilian Psychedelic Science”