by Jon E. Lewis
Currently, marijuana on the streets is very expensive. One can pay from US$200 to $600 an ounce. This is what I call the prohibition tariff. When marijuana is available as a medicine, the cost would be significantly less than other medications; it would cost about US$20 to $30 an ounce. You can’t tax it in the US because it is a medicine. So that would translate out to maybe about 30 cents for a marijuana cigarette.
So our chemotherapy patient could get, many people believe, better relief from the marijuana cigarette for 30 cents. This, in comparison to the ondansetron which would cost at the very least US$160 a day and, if he had to take it intravenously, more than US$600 per treatment.
Is your neighbourhood dopehead right, man, and a conspiracy exists against marijuana?: ALERT LEVEL 9
Further Reading
Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar, Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine, 1993
Jack Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes: Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy, 1998
Jana Ray, “Marijuana – A Medicinal Marvel”, Nexus, vol. 3, No. 5, August-September 1996, http://nexusmagazine.com/
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Elizabethan dramatist Christopher “Kit” Marlowe bequeathed the world a legacy of seven plays, sheaves of poems, a reputation for fast living . . . and mysteries galore. These begin where Marlowe’s own life ended, on 30 May 1593, when he was killed in a brawl over the “recknynge” (bill) in Widow Bull’s house in Deptford. Broadly, Marlowe is the centre of three conspiracy theories.
Marlowe wasn’t murdered, but faked his own death so as to escape the various charges hanging over his head. If he didn’t die on 30 May 1593, what did he do next?
Marlowe, an ex-spy, was killed to stop him talking.
Marlowe survived 1593 and became Shakespeare. (Some people think he also became Miguel Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, or at the very least translated that novel into English, and that he also found time to be all 47 translators of the King James Bible.)
Kit Marlowe, even by the louche standards of the Elizabethan theatre, was a rake and a radical. He was homosexual, atheistic and a member of the free-thinking “School of Night”, patronized by Walter Raleigh. At the time of his death he was on bail from the Star Chamber, where a sometime colleague in espionage, Richard Baines, had testified that the playwright had once stated “that all they that loue not Tobacco & Boies were fooles”. Marlowe looked set to have his tongue cut out. Or be hanged.
However, he had friends in high places – friends with the influence and the motive to make the playwright disappear before the Star Chamber hearing.
Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, the men who shared Marlowe’s last afternoon, were all linked to Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s spy chief, for whom Marlowe had also worked in espionage. Walsingham appears to have saved Marlowe’s head once before, when the playwright/spy was caught counterfeiting money in Holland, a capital offence. A charge of atheism and sodomy may have been too big for Walsingham to have removed from the charge sheet at the Star Chamber, but he certainly had the men and the know-how to fake a homicide. And a disappearance. Widow Bull’s house was right on the Thames, ideal for a quick exit to the Continent. The matter of a corpse to substitute for Marlowe’s was easy; there had been several recent executions in the Deptford area that could provide suitable candidates for the coroner’s report. John Penry, a non-conformist Puritan preacher aged 30, one year older than Marlowe, is the favourite. Penry was executed a couple of miles from Deptford on the evening before Marlowe’s death, and there is no known record of what happened to his body.
Arguably, the strongest evidence that Marlowe was “disappeared” rather than dispatched is the lenient treatment accorded the man who stabbed him in the eye, Ingram Frizer. He was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth a month after the allegedly fatal incident.
On the other hand, M. J. Trow in Who Killed Kit Marlow? (1992) suggests that the leniency extended to Frizer is proof that he did murder Marlowe – but on the orders of Lord Burghley, another of Elizabeth’s spymasters, who feared that loose-cannon Marlowe might spill embarrassing beans at his trial. A similarly plausible argument, that the Earl of Essex arranged Marlowe’s murder to clear the way to slandering Walter Raleigh, is deployed in Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning. This turned Samuel Tannenbaum’s 1926 classic The Assassination of Christopher Marlowe on its head, for Tannenbaum identified Raleigh as the organizer of the plot to kill Marlowe.
Those who hold that Marlowe survived his many enemies on 30 May 1593 generally propose that he then went into exile, first in France, later in Spain and maybe Italy. Naturally a writer as talented as Marlowe needed to carry on writing but, because of his new circumstances, he was obliged to adopt a nom de plume. It is at this juncture that the Marlowe conspiracy shades over into a Shakespearean one.
To those outside the ivory tower of Eng. Lit. academia, it may seem fantastic that the identity of the Bard, the world’s greatest playwright, is in doubt. There is no question that a theatrical impresario called William Shakespeare lived and died in Stratford-upon-Avon, but a number of scholars find it impossible to believe that he authored the plays attributed to him. How could a man with only a provincial grammar school education have written plays and poems which were rich in Latin and Greek? Many of the Classics that “Shakespeare” referenced and plagiarized were not even translated into English in the early 17th century, and would have been available only from the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge universities or rich collectors. Oddly enough, as “Marlovians” like to point out, Marlowe’s studies at Cambridge, together with the contents of his patrons’ libraries and his trips abroad as a spy, were exactly the training “Shakespeare” needed. Thus, the third Marlowe Conspiracy Theory suggests that Marlowe, living in exile and anonymity, continued to produce plays and poetry – but under the name William Shakespeare.
The strongest evidence that Marlowe was Shakespeare is timing. Shakespeare seems to have written nothing before 1593, the year of Marlowe’s death. The first work attributed to Shakespeare was the epic poem Venus and Adonis, registered in the Stationers Register on 12 June 1593 (two weeks after the incident at Widow Bull’s house). This was published with a dedication to Lord Burghley’s ward, the Earl of Southampton, which included two lines from a verse by Ovid that Marlowe had translated some years earlier.
After the registration of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare does not trouble the records again until he is paid for performances at Court in 1594; not until 1598 is there mention of him as a playwright. In that year he is cited as the author of 12 plays, emerging almost miraculously fully fledged as a great as well as a prolific dramatist. Since Marlowe’s handwriting would have been familiar to London printers, it would have been necessary to have his scripts copied by someone else before sending them off to print; in this context, the unexplained bequest to a copyist from Marlowe’s friend Thomas Walsingham becomes an interesting piece of circumstantial evidence in the “Marlowe is Shakespeare” debate.
There are those who suggest not only that Marlowe survived the Deptford incident to pen the plays of Shakespeare, but that during his European exile he translated the Spanish masterpiece Don Quixote into English.
Don Quixote was published in Madrid in 1604. By coincidence there is evidence from diplomatic records that an Englishman by the name of Christopher Marlowe was in Spain between 1599 and 1603. The first – and arguably the finest – English translation of the book was published in 1612, and attributed to one Thomas Shelton, who is reputed to have been the ever-present Thomas Walsingham’s brother-in-law. Marlovians, however, speculate that the spectral Shelton, who seems to have authored nothing else in his life, was the nom de plume of Marlowe and used by him to disguise his brilliant translation of Don Quixote … or even his authorship of that novel!
In July 2002 the memorial plaque to Marlowe in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner was unveiled. Next to Marlowe’s date of death is a question mark, setting in stone the mystery of Christopher Marlowe.
Christopher Marlowe was murdered by Elizabeth I’s government to prevent him talking: ALERT LEVEL 4
Christopher Marlowe’s death in 1593 was faked and he became Shakespeare: ALERT LEVEL 5
Further Reading
M. J. Trow, Who Killed Kit Marlowe?, 1992
Samuel Tannenbaum, The Assassination of Christopher Marlowe, 1926
Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 1992
ROBERT MAXWELL
The corpse of British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell was found floating near his yacht Lady Ghislaine off the Canary Islands on 5 November 1991. An investigation by Spanish authorities concluded that the overweight Maxwell had died of a heart attack.
His family accepted the findings. Many did not. Maxwell had no history of heart disease. The interest of conspiracists became particularly engaged when a forensic scientist disclosed that a perforation behind Maxwell’s left ear might have been caused by a needle. Speculation that Maxwell was murdered intensified when it became clear he had been evasive about his background: born in Czechoslovakia in 1923, he had escaped from the clutches of the Nazis in circumstances never adequately explained. From this conspiracists hypothesized that Maxwell was smuggled through Nazi-allied Croatia by Communist partisans and in return agreed to serve in the Russian NKVD (later KGB). The NKVD dispatched Maxwell to Britain as a refugee, where he exceeded all their hopes of infiltration by first serving in the Army, then setting up a publishing empire, and then securing election as a Labour MP. To ease Maxwell’s climb up the greasy pole of the printing/publishing industry, the NKVD brokered deals between Maxwell’s Pergamon Press and Eastern Bloc publishers.
Alas, the mighty fall. The Israeli secret service, Mossad, apparently discovered Maxwell’s identity as a Soviet spy while interrogating a KGB archivist. This was a bitter blow to Mossad – they’d thought Maxwell was working for them. In revenge, Mossad dispatched an underwater assassination team to terminally spoil Maxwell’s yachting holiday. Or so the story goes.
Mossad are the bugaboos of the conspiracy world. If the Freemasons didn’t do it, Mossad did. They are effective, as ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann found to his cost when they kidnapped him from South America and put him on trial for war crimes, but those who accuse them of every other conspiracy going often trail the odour of anti-Semitism.
A more plausible killer of Robert Maxwell is Maxwell himself. His vast business empire was starting to unravel. He had defrauded his own company pension fund, a happenstance about to come to public light. (Maxwell’s sons were later convicted of the crime.) What simpler way to escape the tightening noose of scandal and justice than by slipping under the gentle waters of the Canaries?
A footnote: Maxwell’s family had a financial interest in agreeing with the Spanish verdict on Robert Maxwell’s death. He was insured for $35.8 million against accidental death. For suicide the payout would have been nil.
Tycoon and Soviet agent Robert Maxwell was assassinated by Mossad: ALERT LEVEL 5
Further Reading
Tom Bower, Maxwell: The Final Verdict, 1996
MEN IN BLACK
Men in Black (MIBs) are mysterious figures who seek to conceal UFO evidence. Generally, they appear at a witness’s home after a sighting or an abduction, remove any physical evidence, and threaten the witness into silence.
Early reports of MIBs suggested they were US government agents, but in 1952 Albert Bender, the Connecticut labourer who founded the grandiosely titled International Flying Saucer Bureau (an organization that consisted of little more than himself and a decrepit duplicating machine), was visited by some. “All of them were dressed in black clothes. They looked like clergymen, but wore hats similar to homburg style . . . Feelings of fear left me. The eyes of all three figures suddenly lit up like flashlight bulbs, and all these were focused on me … It was then I sensed that they were conveying a message to me by telepathy.”
Bender was convinced the MIBs were aliens; certainly he heeded their message, and closed down his organization, telling only a few trusted confidants about the visit. One confidant, Gray Barker, went on to write a definitive book on the MIB phenomenon, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) as well as present an expanded version of Bender’s own account, Flying Saucers and the Three Men (1962). In the latter book, Barker reported that Bender had been taken by aliens to a secret UFO base in Antarctica and that the MIBs sought to extract a special element from Earth’s oceans. Many found Bender’s claims unbelievable, but still the reports of encounters with alien MIBs proliferated.
Typically, the MIBs travel in threes, often in a black Lincoln or Cadillac car, display little or no facial expressions, and speak with a mechanical tone. A male MIB who in 1976 visited Dr Herbert Hopkins, a Maine hypnotherapist investigating alien abductions, wore lipstick and was hairless. At the end of the visit, the MIB slurred, “My energy is running low . . . must go now,” and staggered to the door. Hopkins described himself as being in a trance-like state during the visit, as do others visited by MIBs, leading some observers to propose that MIBs are a figment of the imagination. Or that the visited have hysterically exaggerated an encounter with a real (human) government agent. According to UFOlogist William L. Moore, MIBs are, in the US at least, “really government people in disguise” and work for a branch of Air Intelligence known as Air Force Special Activities Center. In Britain MIBs have been traced to the Special Investigation Section of the RAF’s Provost and Security Services, after documents relating to a UFO sighting by a 16–year-old schoolgirl, Anne Henson, surfaced in the Public Records Office in Kew. The documents, prepared by Sergeant S. W. Scott of the Special Investigation Section, detail visits made by officers of that department to Henson in 1962.
Government agents interviewand intimidate UFO witnesses: ALERT LEVEL 9
Further Reading
Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, 1956
Albert K. Bender and Gray Barker, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, 1962
Peter Brookesmith, UFO: The Complete Sightings Catalogue, 1997
Nick Redfern and Andy Roberts, Strange Secrets: Real Government Files on the Unknown, 2003
MK-ULTRA
Long before the Beatles experimented with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, an unlikely group of Americans got turned on to the possibilities of LSD: the CIA. Unlike the Beatles, Timothy Leary and the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, the CIA had no interest in using LSD to open up “the doors of perception”; the Agency wanted a “truth drug” for use in interrogations or, even better, a drug that enabled mind control.
Set up by CIA head Allen Dulles in 1953, the CIA’s mind-control and -alteration project was code-named MK-ULTRA, taking its name from the CIA’s spy work behind Nazi lines in the Second World War. However, there was little noble about the MK-namesake.
Led by Dr Sidney Gottlieb, MK-ULTRA involved some 150 research programmes, many of them using unsuspecting or entrapped human subjects. The notorious “Operation Midnight Climax” recruited San Francisco prostitutes, who laced their unsuspecting clients’ drinks with acid so that CIA operatives could film the ensuing shenanigans from behind a two-way mirror. Some sixties hippies – as Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain record in Acid Dreams (1985) – believe the CIA supplied them with LSD so they would go “tripping” instead of overthrowing the state, a claim given some currency by the exposure of LSD manufacturer Ronald Stark as a CIA operative.
If anything, volunteer guinea-pigs fared worse in MK-ULTRA experiments than unknowing Joe Public; one group of volunteers was subjected to large doses of LSD for 77 consecutive days, causing many of them irreversible brain damage.
Despite an obsession with LSD, the imagination of the CIA was not limited to it. Electronic brain implants, mescaline, alcohol, psilocybin, radiation, implanted electrodes, barbiturates and amphetamines were also subjected to scrutiny as mind-control agents. Some unfortunate volunteers were strapped to a chair and drip-fed amphetamines in one arm, barbiturates in
the other. Dr Gottlieb, who was said to have been the inspiration for the mad scientist in the movie Dr Strangelove, also locked volunteers in sensory deprivation chambers. Later Gottlieb was revealed to have the use of files generated by Nazi medical researchers at Dachau.
Undoubtedly the most grotesque of the MK-ULTRA experiments was that subcontracted to Montreal-based psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron. This involved the “breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient’s behaviour by means of particularly insensitive electroshocks” while LSD was given simultaneously. Cameron called this process “psychic driving” and held that the mind could be repatterned after being erased. Some of Cameron’s subjects received electro-convulsive therapy at 30–40 times the normal rate, this followed by weeks of LSD-induced coma in which they were played an endless loop of noise or speech.
Mind control was the unholy grail of MK-ULTRA, which at one stage consumed 6 per cent of the CIA’s entire budget. The impetus behind the programme, and its forebear Project Artichoke, was the alleged success of the Communist countries in “brainwashing” US prisoners during the Korean War. Returned home, these soldiers exhibited strange behaviour and were unable to recall their movements through Manchuria. The phenomenon gave novelist Richard Condon the inspiration for his twice-filmed novel The Manchurian Candidate (1959), in which an American GI is, through hypnosis, programmed by Chinese and Korean Communists to assassinate a US presidential candidate.
