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Thanks to Responsible LSD Use, Nobel Prize Winning Geneticist Discovered Secret of Life
August 8, 2004
Copyright 2004 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
Mail on Sunday (London)

We know this story was published last year, but we just found it. We agree with RU Serious when he said this should be front page news.

FRANCIS CRICK, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.

The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.

Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.

Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws.

It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy-the world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse inWales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.

Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.

It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social circle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing 'acid' in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, armarthenshire,
in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds 2.5million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD 'tabs'.

The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's close friend, Garrod Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrested. Harker told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making.

They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and the drugs charity Release.

'They have a philosophy,' Harker told me at the time. 'They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.

'Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD.

'It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration.' Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge.

He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise.

When I had finished, he said: 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'

. . . Read more!


posted by JJW 12:26 AM

 

Former Seattle Police Chief Says War on Drugs Must End
(Drug War Chronicle, 8/12/05)
Drug War Chronicle: What are you calling for in terms of drug policy? . . . Chief Norm Stamper: I believe it is time for a radical overhaul of the nation's drug laws. It's time to get out of the business of drug enforcement as we know it. The drug war has been an abysmal failure, causing more damage than it has prevented. In the book's chapter on drug policy, I wrote that I favored "decriminalization," but if we go to another printing, it's one of two or three things I will revise. What I really meant was legalization and regulation. I don't think the government should get completely out of the business -- it should set standards for purity and regulate the business the same way it regulates alcohol and tobacco. Some people say you can't legalize heroin or meth or PCP, and in the book I took the position that PCP should stay illegal. But upon reflection, even though there are real problems with using some of these drugs, I think everything an adult wants to ingest, inhale, or inject should in fact be available to him or her. Adults who decide to drive around under the influence of drugs or batter a spouse or furnish substances to children or commit any other criminal acts should be held accountable, but the current crime of drug use should just not exist. . . . There are a minority of chiefs and sheriffs who favor decriminalization or legalization, but you are not likely to get too many incumbents speaking freely about this sort of view on a problem they've been confronting for decades. Last week, I spoke with a chief who said he agreed with me in my drug chapter and I said "Can I quote you?" and he said "No," so I won't. It's a sad commentary that we can't at least have that conversation. It would bring to the table some of the people who are almost as affected by this as drug users and their families, and that's law enforcement. Society decides to use the criminal justice model to address what is essentially a public health issue, and that's as shortsighted as anything I can imagine. . . . But when we are investing billions and billions of dollars year in and year out to wage war against this class of people among us, our moral and financial investment has backfired. It hasn't paid off, but it's very hard for people like politicians and law enforcement, who are invested in the drug war. Those on the supply reduction side are not about to fold up their tents and go home. . . . It's a cash cow. I know from personal experience that asset forfeiture produces substantial sums of money for local police. There are few chiefs who would fraudulently use that money, but it creates a hell of an incentive for any character-challenged beat cop or chief to misuse those funds. The real question is what would happen if police were taken out of the drug enforcement picture. I think we'd see a substantial reduction in property crime, for one thing. We would be able to provide drugs to those who want them instead of having them rip off your car stereo. What we are doing is just folly. We need to be spending money on prevention, education, and treatment for those who want it, but we don't get it because we're spending too much on law enforcement. Those invested in the drug war continue to use their own propaganda to advance the cause of drug enforcement. . . . Chronicle: You spoke of chiefs worrying about endangering their careers if they speak out for drug reform. How so? . . . Stamper: If he's a sheriff, he might not get reelected. If he's a chief, he's sitting on top of a sizeable narcotics budget, and that money could evaporate. You don't get too many chiefs saying please take this pot of money away from me. It depends on the political makeup of the community. I spoke out some in conservative San Diego, but then I moved to progressive Seattle to be chief, where I could say things like this. But if I were chief in, say, Orange County, California, I might be committing political suicide by advocating for significant drug reform. . . . There are chiefs whose private view is that the drug war is silly or stupid, but they still make public statements pushing drug enforcement aggressively. They handle their integrity conflict by reducing the amount of resources they commit to narcotics even while they're talking tough. They're basically assigning it a lower enforcement priority. . . . As for the trashing, as a reformed cop, I can tell you in my rookie year I used to really enjoy kicking in a door and rifling through drawers in search of a seed. It was insane, a reflection of some very twisted priorities and a badge-heavy hunger for power. I think it is part of an adventuring mentality. Look, if you're in search of notes from a terrorist plot, rip the shit out of everything, but there is no justification for tearing up somebody's home or business on a drug raid. The lack of civility that too often accompanies these raids is very counterproductive. It does nothing but further the mistrust, suspicion, and objections so many citizens have to police practices.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 1:57 PM