A freewheeling conversation with James Oroc, Rak Razam and Leo Bondani in Venice Beach, 2016 in which they discuss the 5-MeO-DMT experience, the differences between lower and full release doses, practitioners and their styles and the potential of forming a guild of ethical practitioners to raise the standards of 5-MeO work.
According to Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, authors of Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond, there was over a decade of legal and illegal testing of LSD by the CIA on it’s own men, from 1953-1966, when they dosed unsuspecting doctors and servicemen to see if the chemical would make an efficient brainwashing mechanism.
Considered by many as one of the legends of the Sixties counterculture, “Bear” Owsley Stanley III denies his heroic status. Bear was a minor participant in the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and supplied the acid for their events. He was the first underground cook to produce high-purity LSD in 1965 when it was legal, including the famous White Lightning and Monterey Purple, and by giving much of it away for free he helped catalyse the hippie movement
The psychedelic experience in the West is very valid, but it’s been a stepping stone and a learning curve of our culture, which is still a very young culture in terms of both spirituality and understanding the energetics of what we’re embedded in. We’ve had a few thousand years of what’s become Western culture over time, which has distanced itself from nature and has denied, over the course of many centuries, ever-increasing sorts of denials of spirit.