Dr. Jolly West or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the CIA

Content warning: This piece references substance abuse and addiction.

I’m contorting myself into a pretzel shape as I roll around on the linoleum floor. My head and feet continue to bump into the toilet bowl while I try to untuck my shoulder from behind my thigh. It looks like my face is being birthed from my ass. The weight of my body crushes my lungs. With one mighty heave, I am born into this new world.

“F—!” I yell while panting. “What the hell did they put in that joint?”

Who? My roommates? The CIA? Are the two any different? I get up from the floor, hyperventilating, and take a good, long look in the mirror. Who the hell is staring back at me? Years of ingesting 200 milligrams of edibles daily should have prepared me for this, but after a sabbatical from THC in all forms, I have been left psychedelically impotent.

While I was in utero on the floor, a grand phantasm revealed itself: I was being examined by Louis “Jolly” West on a beach I frequented as a child. Jolly kept trying to prescribe me LSD and prostitutes.

“Doctor’s orders, I swear!” he beseeched me, a large prostitute adorned in solely tassels and fishnets standing in front of me. I reluctantly declined.

Echoes of Operation Midnight Climax reverberate through time to reach my drug-addled mind. In the 1950s, unsuspecting John Does were ushered into a safe house on Telegraph Hill, where they were unwittingly dosed with acid by prostitutes while operatives ogled them through a two-way mirror. A Berkeley engineering student even helped set up this safe house.

And targets of this grand experiment? They were noncombatants. Just locally born, red-blooded Americans guilty of nothing more than lust. Can you blame the poor saps? They were witless subjects of Operation Midnight Climax, which was, itself, a part of Project MKUltra, the CIA’s sprawling program of behavioral experiments involving LSD, interrogation and mind control. Beyond this government-funded crashpad, CIA money quietly trickled into hospitals and universities across the country, financing research on LSD and behavioral control.

Jolly himself, a notable asset to the CIA during the MKUltra era, conducted experiments out of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. In the heart of the hippie movement, when the “counterculture” treated drugs as instruments of liberation, Jolly was using them for far more nefarious purposes: He was probing the limits of behavioral control. One notable alumnus of the Haight-Ashbury clinic was the one and only Charles Manson.

There is — frustratingly — no evidence to suggest Manson ever personally met Jolly. The two, however, were part of the exact same milieu, at the exact same time. In 1967, while Jolly was enlisting addicts into his cabaret of debauchery, Manson and multiple family members were frequenting this same clinic. Strangely enough, Manson would use a similar tactic to recruit members to his illustrious family: copious amounts of LSD. Where did he get this knowledge, and where did he get this ungodly supply of LSD?

“Oh s—! He’s grinding his ax!” I hear from outside. Then, the sound of a maniacal laugh. I close my eyes, and visions of the beach return to me. Jolly is waving to me. I don’t want to go back!

As I open my eyes again, my reflection is staring at me. It speaks: “Chasing ghosts. Stuck in a past you never lived in. MKUltra ended in the ’70s. You’re here, in this bathroom, only because you chose to be.”

Fair enough. Yes, the experiments technically ended in 1973. Conveniently, most records were destroyed upon MKUltra’s dissolution. That is until 1977, when a few boxes containing MKUltra documents were found hiding with financial documents that had fortunately escaped the teeth of the shredders.

After what I just smoked, is it ever really over? How can I be expected to trust a government when human consciousness had once been made into a political project? I nuked my mind on daily heroic doses quite a while ago, so, please, someone tell me. What population is easier to control than one that is pacified and apathetic?

I was never more complacent as when I was “medicating” constantly. Days were spent on my couch, staring up at the ceiling, perennially unready for any meaningful engagement in life. This was prior to 2018, when cannabis came to me under the respectable cover of a recommendation. What a lark! What doctor’s note ever allows you to acquire as much of a drug as your heart desires? On bad days I would buy 1000 mg brownies, and finish them by the next.

So much for ever coming back to reality.

Now it seems we are saturated with its use on a daily basis. We’re bombarded with talk of weed being a panacea of sorts. And even if we aren’t actively partaking, we’re watching a stranger on the street slumped over as the demon K2 lets their spirit free. So why should I believe that a government that experimented with drug-induced mind control is now a neutral observer? LSD has the ability to radically alter reality, though it is difficult to predict where the mind will go. Cannabis can likewise create dissociative states. In my case, it had certainly made me docile.

I’m not arguing for the criminalization of cannabis. Of course not! I’m an addict, after all. Why would I want to make it harder to get? But let’s not pretend that there aren’t serious side effects. Beyond the lethargy, once you take too much, you go past the threshold of sanity. I’ve seen people turn “higher states” of consciousness into full-on psychosis. Small streams of THC make you affable; too much and, for some, their minds snap. I’m standing on that threshold. No doubt some strange schizoaffective disorder harbors within me, waiting for the day to finally introduce itself.

An ax comes barreling through the door. Wood splinters hit me in the face as I fall backward into the tub. Paranoia turns to paralysis as I watch the ax break through. Slowly, a scraggly haired fellow reveals himself to me. A crazed smile crosses his face as he peers in.

“Here’s Charlie!” he shrieks.

I’m helpless. All I can do is close my eyes.

When I open them again, I am back on the beach.