5
Over the course of 1970, Stark spent long stretches of time in the UK, either at the Oxford and Cambridge Club or at Hilton Hall, an elegant seventeenth-century red-brick mansion in Cambridgeshire that belonged to David Garnett, a respected editor and author of several children’s books. He’d inherited Hilton Hall from his father – also a writer – who bought it in 1924 and opened its doors to the Bloomsbury Group, an avant-garde clique known for its artistic and sexual experimentation. Though not as unconventional as his father, the current owner created a similarly bohemian atmosphere, with carefully selected guests being given the run of the house in exchange for minimal rent. Stark gained entry thanks to an invitation from Steve Abrams, who had recently moved in with a group of friends. Abrams had founded the legalisation of cannabis pressure group SOMA, collaborated with Francis Crick on his research into THC and written a piece for the UK edition of Solomon’s marijuana book. Given that Stark was also keen to crack the THC puzzle, he was hoping to get some answers from Abrams. Any reservations about Stark’s arrival at Hilton Hall were quickly banished once the residents were treated to his ‘largesse’; Abrams recalled how Stark would take them all out to eat at expensive restaurants and happily paid the electricity and phone bills.
Abrams was fascinated and puzzled by Stark, not knowing whether to fear him or admire him. He was impressed by Stark’s scientific expertise, rattled by his habit of talking like a mafia hitman and astounded by the sheer size of his LSD operation. But prolonged exposure to Stark made him increasingly uneasy: although Stark appeared to be ‘fairly official and fairly protected’, he also ‘seemed to be involved in arms trading’ and ‘buying and selling chemicals which … seemed to have nothing to do with making drugs’ and more to do with manufacturing explosives. At the time, however, Abrams and the other residents were more concerned about Solomon’s frequent visits and the disruption they caused. In return for letting Kemp team up with Stark and the Brotherhood, Solomon had received around 250 grams of LSD – with a street value of about £1 million. The problem was, he had no idea what to do with it. Solomon’s previous drug transactions had been minor affairs, catering for himself and those in his social circle, and he’d only just started taking the first tentative steps towards up-scaling his activities when Kemp transferred to Paris.
Even with the best will in the world, Solomon and his buddies would never be able to consume that much LSD themselves, though Solomon seemed determined to try. Acid-fuelled paranoia took hold as he desperately searched for places to safely hide it all. One option was the grounds of Hilton Hall, and Solomon was spotted prowling round the various barns and out-buildings, and lurking near rows of haystacks. These suspicious comings and goings, combined with his wired demeanour and indiscreet behaviour – according to Abrams, ‘Solomon was horribly uncool, and everybody in Cambridge knew what he was doing’ – put Stark in a difficult position and he was forced to act. Stark sat down with Solomon and gave him such a thorough talking to that he almost fled the building, never to return.
This showdown between the two New Yorkers had been on the cards for a while. Ever since their first meeting, the differences in their characters and backgrounds made common ground difficult to find. They might share the same core ideas about LSD and its role in ushering in a new dawn, but their approach couldn’t have been more different. Solomon was a thinker: Stark was a doer. The intellectual gulf between them need not have been an obstacle, except for the fact that both of them liked to be the dominant personality in any room; much of the friction between them was caused by the clash of two formidable male egos.
Ultimately, Stark had the upperhand. All Solomon’s knowledge about acid, his celebrity friends and status as a counter-cultural scholar meant little when he was dealing with Stark and the Brotherhood. Without any experience of international drug trafficking, Solomon was hopelessly out of his depth, while any authority he commanded had been critically undermined when Stark whipped Kemp away from him. From then on, Stark treated Solomon with a mixture of contempt and indifference, culminating in the dressing down at Hilton Hall. Nevertheless, Solomon knew important people and Stark was keen to exploit his address book. It was Solomon who introduced Stark to Abrams, and it was Solomon who could help Stark satisfy an almost obsessive desire to win the confidence of R.D. Laing, the world-famous psychiatrist and advocate of LSD. Solomon had a long-standing interest in the use of acid to treat mental health problems and may well have met Laing when he visited the East Coast in 1964 and 1965. During these trips, Laing partied in New York with Leary and sampled what Millbrook had to offer. Once Solomon was in the UK, he was reunited with Laing through their joint membership of SOMA. According to Laing’s son, Solomon was ‘a close associate’ of his father.
Though there was a degree of confusion, uncertainty and even anxiety about the therapeutic value of LSD, there was general agreement about its ability to mine the subconscious and dredge up deep-seated fears and neuroses, excavating psychic sludge so it could be examined in the clear light of day. During hallucinations, sources of emotional torment and mental anguish were exposed, given character and a visual and aural identity. For the subject, this could be a moment of reckoning, a confrontation with oneself that might open the way to a fresh start. Even if the results were not as dramatic as this, many patients still felt a renewed connection to their environment and sense of their place in the universe. As one leading LSD therapist observed, the subject might realise they are ‘part of all things and all things are part of them’.
In the early 1960s, Solomon began investigating the work being done by acid therapists. His LSD anthology featured two pieces by the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who’d guided Aldous Huxley through his first psychedelic adventures; thought LSD could ‘help us to explore and fathom our own nature’; and was researching its ‘capacity to mimic more or less closely some aspects of grave mental illnesses, particularly of schizophrenia’. In 1964, Solomon reached out to another expert in the field, Duncan Blewett, who was attached to the same Canadian research programme as Osmond and, like the rest of his colleagues, had taken LSD numerous times so he could understand what his patients were going through. According to Blewett, his first trip was ‘the most profound experience’ he’d ever had, giving him ‘direct contact with the infinite’ combined with ‘tremendous infusions of love’ and ‘an awareness of very great beauty all about one’.
Blewett shared Solomon’s belief that information and knowledge about psychedelics should be disseminated as widely as possible. To advance this cause, Blewett co-authored the Handbook for the Therapeutic Use of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25: Individual and Group Procedures (1959), a detailed analysis of how to organise sessions and what results to expect from them. Aside from laying down a theoretical framework, Blewett served up practical advice about making the whole experience as easy as possible for the patient. The treatment room needed to be ‘comfortable and quiet’ and close to a bathroom because having to ‘walk through a ward or indeed to walk any distance’ under the influence of LSD would be ‘a severe strain’. Classical music and walls decorated with paintings would help stimulate the patient. A mirror would promote ‘self-understanding’. For nourishment, Blewett recommended fruit, chocolate ‘and other candy’.
By the time Solomon got in touch with Blewett, he’d shifted his attention towards developing a science of the soul to compensate for the ‘spiritual vacuum’ that lay at the heart of contemporary research. Together, Solomon and Blewett planned to establish an Institute for Studies in Normal Psychology, where you could learn how to use your own latent psychic energy to heal yourself. Meanwhile, Solomon contacted William McGlothlin, a Professor of Psychology who was attached to the Logistics Department at the RAND Corporation, based in Santa Monica, California. Formed in the immediate post-war period as a technological and scientific think-tank for the US airforce, by the mid-1950s RAND had become an all-purpose ideas factory exerting tremendous influence over Cold War planning and decision making in Washington and the Pentagon. In 1962, McGlothlin applied for funding from his bosses at RAND to conduct a survey into the long-term effects of LSD on ‘normals’ – people who had no record of mental illness. Unfortunately, RAND rejected his proposal because it was not the kind of ‘research normally undertaken by the Corporation’.
Forced to turn elsewhere, McGlothlin collaborated with two of his peers on a slim report – Short-Term Effects of LSD on Anxiety, Attitudes and Performance (1963) – based on research done at Wadsworth Central Hospital in LA involving ‘normal subjects’, fifteen of whom had reduced anxiety, a more open mind and unchanged performance levels after completing their acid tests. McGlothlin’s next approach to the RAND board was more successful and they commissioned a major study from him – Hallucinogenic Drugs: A Perspective with Special Reference to Peyote and Cannabis – which he completed in 1964. As Solomon was putting together his anthology about marijuana, he asked McGlothlin if he could use some of this report. McGlothlin gave his consent and Solomon included a section that featured a brief history of the plant, a comparison with LSD and peyote, an overview of cannabis culture across the globe, an examination of its links to criminal behaviour, both real and imagined, and its relatively benign physical and mental effects.
For all the advances made, doctors like Blewett and McGlothlin realised they’d barely begun to understand LSD and there was still a vast amount of work to be done. But in 1966, the law changed and almost all ongoing studies into LSD ground to a terminal halt. Solomon and Blewett’s plan to host a conference as a launch pad for their Institute for Studies in Normal Psychology fell apart. McGlothlin was so outraged by the new federal and state regulations that he issued an eloquent and reasoned challenge to California’s anti-acid legislation. In Toward a Rational View of Hallucinogenic Drugs, McGlothlin argued that the bill was an example of ‘legal repression’ and ‘poor judgement’ based on the nebulous claim that LSD was responsible for ‘the increasing incidence of … psychotic reactions’ and ‘anti-social acts’. Dismissing these charges as over-blown and inaccurate, McGlothlin then pointed out the various harmful consequences of criminalisation: forcing ‘students’ and other regular citizens to break the law, risking arrest, ‘social stigma and other personal harm’; the spread of black-market ‘poor quality’ acid; and the involvement of ‘organised crime as a source of supply’.
Once Solomon arrived in the UK, it was only natural for him to gravitate towards Laing, who had already integrated LSD into his therapeutic practice and world view. Aside from their joint association with SOMA – which led to Laing endorsing the UK edition of Solomon’s marijuana anthology – they were both preoccupied by the clinical, philosophical and metaphysical implications of the acid experience. Less easy to explain is why Stark was so fascinated by Laing. The more abstract, spiritual and cosmic aspects of acid culture appeared to be of little concern to somebody like Stark, who followed the revolutionary programme set out by Robert Heinlein’s anarchist professor in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. But Stark did mention one other influence on his thinking that might have pushed him in the direction of Laing: the writings of Carlos Castaneda, an anthropologist whose travels to the far side of consciousness – what he called ‘states of non-ordinary reality’ – had earned him a large and devoted following. In his book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968), Castaneda described the time he spent in Arizona and Mexico serving as an apprentice to Don Juan, an old Yaqui Indian shaman. At periodic intervals stretched over the course of four years, Don Juan guided Castaneda through a series of rituals involving a range of specially prepared hallucinogenic plants and herbs – peyote, Jimson Weed and magic mushrooms – that transported Castaneda into a parallel dimension that intersected with our own.
Don Juan was initially reluctant to take on Castaneda as a pupil. But after Castaneda had shown some promise, Don Juan began his education by introducing him to his ‘ally’, a spirit protector called Mescalito, who was ‘capable of carrying a man beyond the boundaries of himself’ and would watch over Castaneda in the outer realms. In Castaneda’s visions, Mescalito took the form of a giant peyote plant with ‘sparkling gold and black’ eyes, a head ‘pointed like a strawberry’ and green skin ‘dotted with innumerable warts’. Even with Mescalito looking out for him, Castaneda was often frightened and overwhelmed by what he experienced: during one hallucination, Castaneda felt like he was ‘melting’ as his whole body dissolved into nothingness. When he wiped his face, all the flesh came off; when he reached out for a solid object, he ended up ‘grabbing air’. Desperate to make tangible contact with something, he slammed himself against a wall, but instead of banging against it, he simply sank into it, ‘completely suspended in a soft, spongy substance’. He had become the wall. If that wasn’t bad enough, Castaneda was also prey to malign spirits intent on devouring him. During his final hallucination, a she-devil tried to steal his soul by pretending to be Don Juan.
Castaneda’s psychedelic encounters with evil beings would have been familiar to anyone who’d suffered a ‘bad trip’, as they often featured the unwanted appearance of demons and devils. This deeply unsettling phenomenon affected people as different as Albert Hofmann – the discoverer of LSD – and Howard Marks, the best-selling author and international hashish smuggling tycoon, who made his fortune by tapping into the Brotherhood’s Afghan supply chain. On that historic night in 1943 when Hofmann first grappled with LSD, he arrived home about an hour and a half after taking his dose. Already feeling the effects, he stretched out on the sofa in an effort to stay relaxed. Instead, he was suddenly overcome by terror as ‘familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms’. Worse was to come. Hofmann remembered how he lost all sense of control over his ‘inner being’ and was ‘seized by a dreadful fear of going insane’: it was as if ‘a demon had invaded me’ and ‘taken possession of my body, mind and soul’. Twenty-two years later, Howard Marks was a physics undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford. Marks was already a fan of cannabis and considered it his duty to sample acid. His first trip was pleasant enough, but on his second outing Marks got ‘the horrors’. Instead of ‘a state of instant Zen’, Marks experienced ‘instant psychosis’. Flowers turned into ‘werewolves and bats’ and his hallucinations were teeming with ‘menacing demons’. Haunted by what he’d seen, Marks decided the best way to erase the memory of it was to keep taking LSD. But each attempt to reach nirvana had the same results and left him ‘introverted, morose, suicidal, and probably crazy’.
Did Stark suffer from similar acid nightmares? Did he recognise the terrors Castaneda went through during his ordeal? Or was he only concerned with what Castaneda had gained from his apprenticeship? Was Stark seeking to acquire similar magical powers, such as the ability to fly, a supernatural skill that Castaneda mastered after ingesting a hallucinogenic preparation? When this miraculous moment happened, Castaneda’s knees had ‘felt springy like a vault pole’ and his limbs had grown longer and more elasticated. Once in the air, he saw ‘Don Juan sitting below me, way below me’ as he travelled at ‘extraordinary’ speed across desert plains, free as a bird. His next flying session took the process a step further. Castaneda was transformed into a crow: he ‘had the perception of growing bird’s legs’ and ‘felt a tail coming out the back of my neck and wings out of my cheekbones’. In addition, he saw through crow’s eyes and breathed through a beak.
Shape-shifting, the power of flight and an array of paranormal abilities would have seemed very tempting propositions to a man like Stark who always dreamed on a grand scale. With such superhuman talents, he’d be unstoppable. But how could Stark acquire these powers without access to his very own shaman? Stark wasn’t about to trek off to the Mexican desert when a perfectly acceptable alternative was near at hand, none other than R.D. Laing, who had been awarded shaman-like status by the LSD truth-seekers: they firmly believed that the solutions to humanity’s problems lay waiting to be discovered in the alternate states induced by psychoactive substances and hoped that Laing could point them in the right direction.
Laing’s specialist area was schizophrenia and his approach to it rejected much of what had come before. During his psychiatric training – initially as an army doctor, then on the wards at Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital – he became steadily more uncomfortable about the treatment given to schizophrenics, which consisted of a daily diet of medication and bouts of electric shock therapy. Any dialogue or personal contact with the patients was strictly forbidden. But Laing couldn’t help talking to them and, as he did, he realised that this failure to take their delusions and manias seriously and acknowledge that their truth was no less valid than anyone else’s – and that their phantoms were no less substantial because they did not correspond to any observable reality – was not only counter-productive but also fundamentally cruel. The more Laing engaged with the patients, the further he moved away from the standard line on schizophrenia and began to develop his own theories which came together in The Divided Self (1960), the book that established his academic reputation, gained him a wide readership and set him on the road to fame.
That same year, Laing began to explore LSD’s potential. Reflecting on this decision, Laing said he was intrigued by the fact it ‘seemed to open out very unusual states of consciousness’ and was ‘identified with and extremely comparable to the experience of schizophrenia’. He got some acid from a friend, had a ‘remarkable’ trip, and began using small amounts of LSD with his patients at his London clinic, having secured a supply of it from Czechoslovakia. By the mid-1960s, Laing was convinced that the standard doctor–patient model was utterly redundant and there needed to be a total redefinition of this relationship on the basis that schizophrenia might, under the right conditions, be more of a blessing than a curse. In a sick society, where ‘alienation awaits us’ from the moment we’re born, Laing believed that ‘madness need not be all breakdown’; it could also be a ‘breakthrough’.
It was ideas like these that endeared Laing to the younger generation of psychedelic explorers. Laing’s embrace of schizophrenia as a kind of state of grace may have alienated many of his supporters and damaged his credibility, but it also won him a whole army of hippy fans, Stark included. At the same time, Laing increasingly spoke in a language that would have been instantly recognisable to Stark and anyone else who was familiar with Castaneda. Laing said that psychosis was like being in a different dimension ‘peopled by visions and voices, ghosts, strange shapes and apparitions’ and urged his fellow psychiatrists to throw off their white coats and become shamans. In The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1967) he called for ‘guides, who can educt the person from this world and induct him to the other. To guide him in it: and lead him back again’. In a lecture delivered two years earlier – which was published in The Psychedelic Review with the title ‘Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis’ – Laing deployed almost exactly the same imagery as Don Juan to describe what the shaman called ‘the crack between the two worlds’, which ‘opens and closes like a door in the wind’: Laing wrote that entering ‘the other world’ was like ‘breaking a shell’: or passing through ‘a door’; or slipping ‘through a partition’. However, Laing differed from the shaman in one key respect. To Don Juan, the powers he was invoking were so great that only a select few individuals would ever be able to understand them, let alone control them. Laing, however, was an evangelist on a mission to save humanity and wanted us all to ‘blast through the solid wall’ of reality ‘even at the risk of chaos, madness and death’.
Perhaps Stark was looking for a chance to sit at the feet of his chosen shaman and download any wisdom Laing might have to offer about finding that crack between the worlds and returning through it in one piece. Or perhaps there was something deeper at work. Stark had juggled multiple identities, presented a false front to the world and lied and dissimulated for so long that he may have been in danger of losing his grip. Was he frightened that, after years of consuming LSD and other substances, he might fall victim to schizophrenia?
The relationship between LSD and schizophrenia is complex and many-sided. An acid session might leave the patient with a better grasp of the illusory nature of their condition. Equally well, there was always the risk that it might bring on a schizophrenic episode rather than prevent it. Overall, the evidence seemed to suggest that LSD therapy – conducted in a controlled, conducive environment – did not tip schizophrenics over the edge. The largest survey of acid use among psychiatric patients was assembled from forty-four separate studies, and covered 5,000 people who participated in 25,000 LSD sessions. It found that roughly 1 in 1,000 became suicidal or had a psychotic reaction.
Yet vital questions remained unanswered. Given that LSD was circulating in the general population, could it trigger schizophrenia in somebody with no previous history of mental health problems? Equally well, how safe was acid for somebody who had latent schizophrenic tendencies but wasn’t aware of them? William McGlothlin paid particular attention to these issues. In 1967, after moving from RAND to UCLA, he began a follow-up study on data collected by three LA psychiatrists between 1959 and 1961, concerning 247 men and women who had LSD therapy. McGlothlin and a colleague approached them all and conducted interviews, questionnaires and tests to assess the long-term impact on them. Although only around 20 per cent tried acid again after they’d finished their sessions, 94 per cent were positive about the outcome and felt they’d gained a deeper ‘understanding of self and others’. 63 per cent were less anxious than before. Just seven regretted doing it, of whom ‘three regarded it as a painful memory of a horrible experience’. One patient, with a history of mental illness, had a nervous breakdown four years later, which she blamed on the LSD. The most prevalent complaint concerned acid flashbacks; thirty-six people suffered from them, eight quite seriously.
These results confirmed McGlothlin’s opinion that it was ‘unlikely that LSD can produce more than a temporary anxiety panic in a previously stable and well-integrated person’. He had to concede, however, that it could ‘aggravate existing unstable tendencies’. Was Stark among the small percentage of LSD users who were gambling with their mental health every time they dropped a tab? Though Stark never experienced a psychotic break, his sanity was cause for concern during the investigation that led to his conviction for fraud in 1963, and recently declassified FBI documents have provided a clearer picture of the nature of Stark’s offence and the circumstances surrounding his arrest.
Between May 1961 and January 1962, Stark worked in government departments that gave him access to classified material. Initially based at the Bureau of Ships in Washington, where he was head of Technical Analysis and Operational Research, he was then loaned out to the Defence Department where he worked in Research and Engineering. This placement ended in February 1962 when Stark resigned from the Bureau of Ships. A month later, he was pulled in for questioning by the FBI. Its agents were interested in Stark’s association with an art dealer from Georgetown who they were keeping an eye on because of his suspect political activities, which included attending rallies and meetings related to nuclear disarmament. The agents wanted to know if Stark had ever spotted the man’s name on any FBI documents and had then told him about it. Stark – who’d known the art dealer for a few months and was contemplating going into business with him – flatly denied the accusation and stated that he had ‘never informed anyone he had seen an FBI report or their name on an FBI list’. The agents took him at his word, gave him a stern warning and let him go, not completely convinced that he was innocent and concerned about his ‘mental condition’, which they found ‘questionable’.
Stark was then investigated by the Office of Naval Intelligence after he made a false application for another government position. Stark had changed his name to Clark and included ‘misrepresentations concerning his true age, educational background, and relations to prior employers’. Stark was arrested, pleaded guilty, and in May 1963 a New York judge delivered his verdict: Stark was sentenced to five years and put on probation. Soon after, he violated the terms of this agreement and was hauled before the judge. At this point, Stark exhibited symptoms of mental illness that were serious enough to convince the judge to send him for observation at Bellevue Hospital rather than straight to jail. Once again, Stark ignored the conditions set out by the judge and found himself back in court. The judge took pity on him. He extended Stark’s probation, sent him for treatment at the New York Psychiatric Institute, and allowed him to work as a janitor at Cornell University Medical Center, where he occasionally posed as a medical student. In April 1964, after breaking the rules again, the judge did not hesitate and Stark was dispatched to Lewisburg State Penitentiary, where he completed the rest of his sentence.
In 1966, as his release became imminent, there was no recommendation that Stark undergo further treatment: he was considered safe and well enough to be let back into society. Stark immediately headed to Europe. After that, there was no recurrence of the symptoms that had given the judge pause for thought. But unless it was all just a performance designed to keep him out of jail, Stark did appear to go through some sort of identity crisis at the time of his arrest, alarming enough to suggest that he might be prone to further bouts of instability. For somebody in Stark’s position, this whole episode had the potential to tarnish his image. It’s no surprise that he rarely referred to this period in his life. When asked about it, Stark told people that he’d been engaged in top secret government work at the time, but couldn’t go into details.
Whatever his motives for pursuing Laing, Stark’s persistence paid off and he secured an audience with him. After Stark’s showdown with Solomon at Hilton Hall, that avenue to Laing was closed, so Stark pestered Abrams instead. According to Abrams, Stark ‘was interested in what Laing would do with him and also what he could get out of Laing’. He passed on Stark’s request and Laing agreed to a meeting at his north London home. But rather than take control of proceedings as he normally would, Stark acted like a starry-eyed overexcited fan who meets their idol and is suddenly deprived of their senses. With every passing minute, the opportunity to bond with Laing was slipping through his fingers. Desperate, Stark went for broke and insisted they take a large amount of LSD together. Laing grudgingly obliged and, as he and Stark were hitting the high-point of the trip, Stark launched into an extraordinary monologue about the crisis facing LSD culture and how a lack of leadership was fatally compromising its revolutionary aspirations.
Up to then, Leary had been the focal point of the acid corporation: if Stark was chief executive and the Brotherhood were company directors, then Leary was the visionary founder. But Leary was finished with. Yesterday’s man. And the only person who could replace him was Laing. If Laing agreed to become their guru and guiding light, then everything he and the Brotherhood had accumulated was at Laing’s disposal: assets totalling around $50 million. Stark’s fantastic scenario – in which Laing assumed the characteristics of a medieval mystic, a James Bond villain and a super-intelligent being from outer space – stunned and bewildered Laing. Thrown off course by Laing’s failure to respond to his plan, Stark tried to get some indication that Laing was on board by demanding to know what his orders were.
Something in Laing snapped. He flew into a rage, grabbed Stark and threw him out onto the street. Unable to comprehend what just happened – and still reeling from the acid – Stark sought out Abrams and confessed that Laing had ‘fucked my head’. Soon after, Stark passed out. When he awoke the next day, the whole embarrassing incident was like a nightmare he could barely remember having. He’d had a bad trip, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. His meltdown in front of Laing was a temporary aberration, quickly forgotten and never mentioned again. He quit Hilton Hall, ended his association with Abrams, left the country and spent Christmas and New Year 1970–71 in the US with the Brotherhood, celebrating the success of their Paris operation and planning their next venture. Arrangements made, Stark headed back to Europe, landed in Belgium, hooked up with his former chemist Tord Svenson – the Swede had recently reappeared on the scene after time away travelling – and began looking for a suitable spot where they could safely install some new acid labs.