Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211)

by O'Neill, Tom; Piepenbring, Dan (CON)

  I asked Smith if LSD was part of his protocol. He denied it—then, a moment later, without provocation, he reversed himself.

  “Yeah, I stuck LSD in them,” he said.

  But he couldn’t explain why. “I was sticking all different kinds of drugs in them,” he added. In his recollection, LSD “produced disorganized behavior, but not violent behavior.” The rats would just wander around in a daze.

  If you’ve noticed that I’ve used “rats” and “mice” interchangeably, there’s a reason for that—Smith used them interchangeably, too, even though the two species have vastly different behavioral patterns, especially in groups. In his Journal of Psychedelic Drugs article, he calls them mice; in Love Needs Care and another book he published, they’re rats. Schoenfeld insisted that he’d worked with rats during his part of the research. But Smith was adamant that they were mice, and he couldn’t explain his confusion on the subject.

  Like the San Francisco Project and Roger Smith’s Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), some of David Smith’s research, according to his academic papers, was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which, as mentioned earlier, later acknowledged that the CIA used it as a front for LSD research. And though David never mentioned it in his writing, his work owed a clear debt to the landmark research of another NIMH psychologist, John B. Calhoun, who’d studied rat populations since 1946.

  Calhoun reported that rats in confined groups—even without drugs—became uncharacteristically aggressive. They’d erupt in rape, murder, cannibalism, and infanticide. A dominant male rat emerged in the “behavioral sink”—Calhoun’s term for his aggregated rat cultures—subjugating other males into a tribe of cowering, enfeebled followers and organizing female rats into a “harem” of sex slaves. The strangest group to emerge was “the probers”: “hypersexualized” male rats that stalked and raped both males and females, and often cannibalized their young. The probers would commit “frenzied” and “berserk” attacks against rat families sleeping in their burrows, leaving the remains of half-eaten victims. Again, no drugs were involved here; the probers emerged simply as a result of their confinement. They deferred only to the dominant male rat, fleeing if he caught sight of them.

  Calhoun’s study was a watershed. In the midsixties, amid growing concerns about population density, social scientists, politicians, and journalists cited him to explain the riots in America’s overcrowded ghettos. His term “behavioral sink”—defined as “the outcome of any behavioral process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers… aggravating all forms of pathology that can be found within [the] group”—entered the scientific lexicon almost right away. David Smith used it extensively in his writing and in interviews with me.

  Though Smith never mentioned Calhoun by name, his research was essentially a continuation. He sought to control the pathologies of rats (or was it mice?) in crowded environments by aggravating them with amphetamines. He concluded that amphetamines were more toxic to rats in groups than rats alone. Their crowding essentially exacerbated the effects of the stimulant.

  And this conclusion, like so much in Smith’s research, confused me. I didn’t see how it could be objective and unbiased. According to Calhoun, the rats’ violence wasn’t intensified by confinement, but created by it. So what difference did it make if Smith shot them up with amphetamines? It seemed like the equivalent of studying drunk, inexperienced ice skaters to learn about alcohol intoxication. The novice skaters were going to fall down on the ice anyway, regardless of whether they’d been drinking or not. Plus, the more interesting subtleties of Calhoun’s research—the emergence of a dominant male, a harem of subservient females, and an underclass of “probers,” all of which, it had to be said, sounded a lot like the Family—had gone entirely unnoted in Smith’s project. I wondered if amphetamines, with or without LSD, had increased the dominant male’s grip on his followers.

  Given how eerily Smith’s research prefigured the creation of the Family—under David’s nose, in the Haight, during the summer of ’67—I wondered if he had deliberately underreported it. I’ve never come close to proving that he did, but I haven’t been able to explain the holes in it, either. Why would he use LSD to induce suggestibility in rats before injecting them with amphetamines and making them berserk?

  Past a certain point, Smith had little interest in helping me sort it out.

  “I was just talking about the parallels to what happened with the Manson Family,” I said, “and when I try to describe your research, I just kept getting hung up on—”

  “Well, then why don’t you just forget about the research, then. Just delete the whole thing from your book.”

  “It was important,” I said.

  “You’re spending way too much of your and my time on it. Take what you want and reject the rest.”

  The Psychedelic Syndrome

  When Roger Smith joined forces with the HAFMC to begin the ARP, he was picking up where David left off—but this time, the research involved people. This meant that both Smiths, and Manson, were often in the same place, at the same time, with both Smiths having received funding from a federal institute later revealed to be a CIA front.

  “It was in a certain sense coincidental,” David said of the arrangement. “Roger was the head of the speed project and Charlie came to the Haight and visited Roger. He didn’t come to be part of the speed research project. It was just that Roger happened to be his [parole] officer.”

  Details on the ARP, and on the pharmacological goings-on at the HAFMC more generally, were hard to come by. The reams of record keeping you’d expect from clinical experimentation simply weren’t there. Stephen Pittel, a forensic psychologist who’d worked with both Smiths at the HAFMC, volunteered a stunning bit of information that Roger and David had neglected to share with me.

  “The only thing I remember about ARP was that it got burglarized one night and Roger lost all of his files,” Pittel told me. Their disappearance had been jarring, in part because Roger was “an unusually paranoid guy to begin with.” He was especially skittish about Manson. After the murders, Roger refused to discuss him with anyone. Pittel assumed that Smith didn’t want to be blamed for “directing” Manson to the Haight. “He felt people were saying that he was the one who put the toxins into the environment.”

  The HAFMC’s original chief psychiatrist, Dr. Ernest Dernburg, remembered the theft of the ARP files, too. As he recalled, they’d gone missing right after the announcement of Manson’s arrest for the Tate–LaBianca murders and that “Roger, understandably, was pretty upset.” Nothing else was taken from the HAFMC, which led the staff to believe that the police or some federal agency might’ve removed the files. These were research papers, he reminded me: “It didn’t make sense for someone to steal these things when they didn’t inherently have any value to the average individual. It seemed to have a more nefarious purpose.”

  The Smiths both denied that the theft had ever happened. “You’re dealing with aging memories,” David said. But Dernburg and Pittel—full-time doctors, and credible sources, I thought—stood by their stories. “They were absolutely stolen,” Pittel said. Dernburg, perturbed by David’s insinuation about his faculties, told me more that he remembered. “It was a considerable amount of research—the premier amphetamine research conducted at a street level. It would have been very important to the clinic… and it disappeared. Call David. Ask Roger if he has the files or knows where they are.”

  Both men said they had no idea.

  What have survived are the many issues of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, the HAFMC’s in-house research organ, still active to this day. David Smith founded it in ’67, and at various points both he and Roger served on its editorial board. In the late sixties and early seventies, the journal printed a raft of articles by David and other clinicians about the long-term effects of LSD and amphetamines.

  One of these articles hoped to find out “whether a dramatic drug-induced experience” would have “a l
asting impact on the individual’s personality.” Another observed that feelings of “frustrated anger” led people to want to try LSD: “The soil from which the ‘flower children’ arise,” the author wrote, “is filled more with anger and aggression, thorns and thistles, rather than passion and petunias.” Under “emotional pressure,” acid could induce “images and sensations of anger or hate magnified into nightmarish proportions.”

  David Smith had studied these same phenomena, formulating an idea that he called “the psychedelic syndrome,” first articulated in 1967 or early ’68. The gist was that acid, when taken by groups of like-minded people, led to a “chronic LSD state” that reinforced “the interpretation of psychedelic reality.” The more often the same group of “friends” dropped acid, the more they encouraged one another to adopt the worldview they’d discovered together on LSD, thus producing “dramatic psychological changes.”

  Usually the psychedelic syndrome was harmless, but regular LSD use could cause “the emergence of a dramatic orientation to mysticism.” And in people with “prepsychotic personalities,” Smith wrote, LSD precipitated “a long-term psychological disorder, usually a depressive reaction or a schizophrenic process.”

  Had Smith seen this “syndrome” in the Family? After Manson had been arrested for the murders, David wrote, “Charlie could probably be diagnosed as ambulatory schizophrenic.” He said the same thing when I asked about Manson: “I felt that he was schizo.” It was Roger Smith who’d had the better diagnosis, and the earlier one, David maintained: “Roger said that he knew from day one that Charlie was a psychopath.”

  But Roger apparently never thought it was necessary to intervene—to send his parolee back to prison or to get him proper psychiatric care. Instead, he sent him to the Haight and watched him drop acid every day, accruing suggestible young followers as he went. Meanwhile, David was studying the exact psychological conditions that gave rise to the Manson Family while he treated them at his clinic. Bugliosi had erased all of these facts from his history of the group.

  Roger Smith knew that the stereotype of the addict had a lot of potency in the popular imagination. Casual drug users were regarded as inherently criminal, a tear in the fabric of society. The public’s fear of such people was easily manipulated.

  In 1966, the year before Manson was released from prison, Smith published a criminology paper called “Status Politics and the Image of the Addict,” examining the propaganda that had stigmatized Chinese (or “Oriental,” as he put it) opium smokers in San Francisco in the early twentieth century. Citing police files and strategy manuals, Smith described an organized effort to cast opium addicts—who were by and large peaceful—as “insidious” “deviants” who “posed a threat to society.”

  To this end, some agents “were assigned to pose as drug addicts” and infiltrate the opium scene. Their objective was to “characterize the addict as a dangerous individual likely to rob, rape, or plunder in his crazed state.” And it worked: the once invisible opium users of San Francisco’s Chinese ghettos were, by 1925, depicted in the media as crazed “dope fiends.” The shift in public perception allowed the police to crack down on the Chinese population, deporting or institutionalizing the undesirables. Smith neither valorized nor condemned these efforts, but he noted that they were effective. “The Orientals,” he wrote, “were viewed as a threat to the existing structure of life in this country.” Tainting their image meant that they could be “differentiated and degraded to the satisfaction of society.”

  It’s not hard to see how such research could be applied to Haight-Ashbury hippies in the late sixties. Most Americans frowned on acid, as they frowned on all drugs, but it took Charles Manson to give LSD new and fearsome dimensions. Suddenly it caused violence, and the hippies who used it were perceived as wild-eyed and dangerous where once they’d been harmless, if vacuous, pleasure seekers.

  The HAFMC’s goal—free health care for everyone—was an unimpeachable part of the hippie ethic, and there could be no doubting that David Smith and his volunteer doctors had improved the community. But just because the clinic had “Free” in its name didn’t mean that it had no cost. The place served as a gateway between the hippie world and the straight world, affording doctors a closer look at the hierarchies and nuances of the counterculture. In exchange for their “free” health care, patients were held up to the light and scrutinized by eager researchers, David Smith chief among them.

  Emmett Grogan, the founder of the Diggers, was one of a few observers who saw something amiss behind Smith’s idealism. The Diggers were an anarchist group known for providing food, housing, and medical aid to runaways in the Bay Area. Smith liked them, and he worked with them at a free infirmary based out of their Happening House; it inspired his own clinic.

  But as Grogan wrote in his 1972 memoir Ringolevio, the admiration wasn’t mutual, at least not for long. Smith soon “began his own self-aggrandizement.” He appeared “more concerned with the pharmacology of the situation than with treating the ailing people who came to him for help.” Grogan noticed that he kept detailed records “about drugs and their abuse.” These he used to secure funding for the HAFMC, which he opened only six weeks after he’d joined the Diggers’ operation. Grogan saw through the HAFMC’s mission statement right away: “Just because no one was made to pay a fee when they went there, didn’t make it a ‘free clinic,’” he wrote. “On the contrary, the patients were treated as ‘research subjects’ and the facility was used to support whatever medical innovations were new and appropriate to the agency.”

  Of course, one of these patients was Manson, who became one of David Smith’s “research subjects” as well. He was such a special case that Smith tracked him far beyond the walls of the HAFMC, sending his top researcher all the way down to Los Angeles, where Manson and his ranks of followers had set up shop on the timeworn Western sets of the Spahn Ranch.

  The Group-Marriage Commune

  You might remember the name Alan Rose. It was Rose who dropped everything and went to Mendocino County in ’68 when several of Manson’s followers wound up in jail there. That trip was only a prelude to his deeper involvement with the Family, which saw him embed with the group to study their sexual dynamics—or just to get laid, depending on whom you ask.

  Rose was a friend of Roger Smith—he’d helped set up the ARP—but he was even closer to David Smith, who told me, “Al was like my disciple and I was like his father.” A former rabbinical student, Rose had dropped out of college in Ohio to move to the Haight in ’66, when he was twenty-one. He became the HAFMC’s head administrator and a research assistant, at various times, to both Smiths. Rose and David went on to coauthor three studies of the Haight’s drug culture in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. Like the Smiths, Rose had an intuitive grasp of the population and a clinician’s knowledge of the drugs they were taking, even though he had no formal medical training.

  While reserved and socially awkward by many accounts, Rose enjoyed the Haight, especially its sexual openness. He felt inexperienced in that regard, and he hoped he could change that when Roger introduced him to Manson and the girls, who were coming by the clinic with increasing frequency. Rose was enamored. He decided, along with David, that they’d make for good research subjects. But already there was the question of his impartiality. The legend around the HAFMC was that the girls had “seduced” Rose, probably on Manson’s orders.

  When, in June 1968, Manson hand-selected a number of his group to accompany him to Los Angeles, Rose may have feared that the yearlong party was drawing to a close. He invited the remaining women to move into his Haight-Ashbury home, where he could tend to their needs until Manson summoned them.

  It was then that some of the girls headed to Ukiah for their ill-fated recruitment effort. When they landed in jail, Rose jumped at the chance to rescue them. As David Smith described the episode in Love Needs Care, Rose outdid himself, visiting the girls daily and fetching candy and cigarettes for them. Mary Brunner, the mother of Manson�
��s newborn son, was still lactating. The other girls made a habit of going naked and sucking the milk from her breasts. This rattled the jail staff, but Rose vouched for the girls. Outside the jail, he kept busy by consulting with lawyers on courtroom strategy and preparing his testimony as a character witness. All the while, he was living on money funneled to him by David.

  When the case was resolved, the girls made tracks for the Spahn Ranch, not wanting to keep Manson waiting. By now, it seemed, Rose couldn’t bear to part with them; he elected to go, too. And then he stayed with them. For four months.

  Was this a business trip or a vacation? It’s up for debate just how totally Rose succumbed to the Family’s power. Judging from the published accounts of his time with them, he was more an enabler than a blind devotee. Somewhat opaquely, David wrote that Rose was “both a sympathetic cousin and… a sociologically oriented participant-observer in the strange communal phenomenon.” Roger Smith had used that term “participant-observer,” too, for his ARP—he endorsed looking the other way when one’s subjects broke the law. Did that same laxness apply to Rose at the Spahn Ranch?

  David provided varying and sometimes contradictory accounts of Rose’s role in the Family, and he lost his temper when I tried to set the record straight. The first time we spoke, he admitted that “Al became enraptured with their philosophy and he traveled with them.” Rose dropped acid with the Family, Smith said, “and then six of the girls just fucked his brains out and he saw God… He borrowed some money from me and he didn’t pay it back and it turned out he gave it to Charlie… So it was, like, very weird.” Other sources also remembered Rose having some kind of ecstatic sexual encounter with the Family.

  But at some point, the appeal of the group faded for him, and he left. “He came back,” Smith said. “I can’t really say he got kicked out. He just said he was no longer part of it.”