JOHN WILCOCK: (LSD History) Michael Hollingshead Turns on the World

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Thanks for sharing. Hadn’t heard of Michael Hollingshead prior. Great interview of Robert Anton Wilson by Hollingshead from 1980:

http://www.rawilsonfans.com/articles/HTinterview.htm

Wilson: I really do think that secrecy is the main cause of most of the problems of the modern world. Any society with a secret police (such as Soviet Russia or Nazi Ger­many or even the United States today) is playing russian roulette with itself. Secrecy breeds paranoia. It creates prob­lems more than it solves problems. Even the people who employ the secret police eventually get paranoid of the monster they helped to create. Nixon was paranoid about his own secret police. Stalin execut­ed three chiefs of the Soviet secret police in a row. You see, the secret police always have the capacity to get more power than any other branch of government. They can blackmail everybody. Even if they don’t do it, those employing them always worry that they might.

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There’s also a chapter on Hollingshead in Psychedelia Britannica, supposedly more accurate than his autobiography.

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And now it’s in front of me… Antoni Melechi claims that the ‘bone marrow experiment’ story is bogus, and that Hollingshead obtained ‘several hundred trips worth’ from John Beresford, ‘an English doctor who had begun to use LSD in chromosomal research’.

Peter Stafford’s ‘Psychedelics Encyclopaedia’ suggests that it was Beresford who paid $285 for the ‘H-0047’ gram, part of which he gave to Hollingshead.

Melechi also suggests that researchers in the UK held Hollingshead personally responsible for the criminalisation of LSD, following a hashish possession trial during which Hollingshead represented himself while tripping.

And most intriguingly, he states ‘Michael Hollingshead died in the early 1980s […] he may either have overdosed in London, been killed by drug dealers in Bolivia or suffered a burst ulcer at the Rio Carnival’.

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Over at Entropy Magazine you can learn about the music that accompanied history’s FIRST DELIBERATE LSD TRIP, and the first BUMMER. Fortunately for everyone involved, it was tepid schmaltz!

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Oh, turns-on the world.

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Yeah, i expected more resentment and hermitism too.

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