In 1958, I
launched into a one-year fellowship with National Institutes of Mental Health.
This was a means of getting caught up on bills during medical school. My wife
and I found the fun in making babies. By the completion of medical school and
internship we had ‘funned’ our way into making six babies.
But what was to be the subject of my research
as a National Institutes of Mental
Health post-sophomore fellow? In
retrospect, I should have researched the insanity of blissful baby making. We
were able to have six because they just cost of $50.00 bucks a pop and my wife
was able to have a contraction or two, leave her work in the basement of
Mississippi School of Medicine, take the elevator to the third floor and be
quickly delivered by the Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics. What a bonanza!
Meanwhile, I had to
come up with a research subject which had nothing to do with baby-making. There
is no deception headier than self-deception. Some reasonable readers may
abandon me at this point because the digressions will get deep. Yogi Berra once
said of his baseball team, ”We have deep depth.”
Just like kicking a
can in the middle of a dirt road, I stumbled on an article by an obscure
scientist in Sweden suggesting that the copper bearing enzyme, ceruloplasmin in
human blood, was connected with schizophrenia. So, I was able to distract from
my own insanity toward that of hapless mental patients. There were several
thousand folks with schizophrenia at Whitfield State Hospital but well out of
the reach of our medical school faculty and no one had ever heard of
ceruloplasmin. So, I felt safe. Whenever I passed someone in the hall, they
would ask why I had dropped out of medical school, and I would tell them about
my research on ceruloplasmin in schizophrenia. Their blank stare assured me that
I was safe in deep research.
Kicking the can
further down the road, what in the hell was my research design going to be
about? In a lark, I decided that I would study ceruloplasmin levels in schizophrenic crisis, in the crisis of major
depression and in the experience of
g-force by healthy naval pilots in the human centrifuge. This brings me to
another Berraism,” The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my
suitcase.” As I look back, there were several self-serving self-deceptions in
my suitcase. I was stealing away from the intensity of the schoolhouse( medical
school), from the intensity of marriage, and from the reality of parenting
itself.
But the
grandiosity did not end there. It appeared that the can got more interesting
every time I kicked it.
My boss in this
project was hosting the medical representative of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in
Berne Switzerland, Rudi Burge. I asked Mr. Burge if he knew of research on the
similarity of the ravages of schizophrenia and the effect of LSD-25. I mentioned
my project on ceruloplasmin. When his eyes glazed over, and I knew I had a
wedge. Within two weeks a gross( 144 100
microgram vials) of lysergic acid diethylamide arrived from Switzerland to use
as we saw fit. It was enough LSD-25 to drive Congress into insanity; but
this was 1958. Since then they have found other means.
Incidentally in the 1950’s through the 1970’s , the
Central Intelligence Agency, managed to get themselves into hot water by giving
LSD-25 in a project called MK-ULTRA to a variety of subjects including mental
patients, unwitting volunteers, prostitutes, government employees and line CIA
agents. Some recipients sued successfully because of lingering psychotic
symptoms. Many others probably wondered what happened.
Meanwhile Dr. Bob
Baringer( of St Augustine, Fl.) and I
launched our project on the changes in blood ceruloplasmin in acute stress on US
naval pilots, patients with acute exacerbation of schizophrenia, recipients of
electro-shock therapy (ECT), and finally on volunteers taking a single dose of
LSD-25. When Dr Baringer agreed to join me I knew that I had found a truly
supportive person. Both of us would enter our junior year of medical school in
1959. Perhaps it was because of our tenuous status as medical students we were
very cautious about giving LSD to volunteers. But also, I had taken a dose of
LSD and found the effects so profound and unpredictable that Bob, myself, and Dr. Oscar Hubbard of the faculty of the
Department of Psychiatry at Mississippi School of Medicine became the sole volunteers.
These digressions, though remote, are
crucial to following the issue at hand that the animals of Dominica faced in
developing their group process. This involves a kind of communication between
animals and humans alike that remains mysterious and controversial.
Suggested viewing: Wormwood: a Netflix true story about a CIA employee who
was an (unwitting?) recipient of LSD-25
Suggested viewing: Wormwood: a Netflix true story about a CIA employee who
was an (unwitting?) recipient of LSD-25
