Puck

Donald Rumsfeld told us that the people of Iraq would greet the conquering “Coalition” forces with “chocolates and flowers.” In retrospect–and even at the time, to many of us–that sounds completely idiotic. But maybe Rumsfeld was counting on something that, like the best laid plans of chickenhawks and neo-con-men, went didn’t happen. In this context, consider this excerpt from Dr. Lester Grinspoon’s 1975 book, The Speed Culture: ” ‘Chemical warfare’ or ‘drug pacification’ by MDA would probably suppress the fighting instincts of soldiers (or civilians) and make them expansively warm, friendly, and concerned for the welfare of their ‘enemies’.” MDA is an early version of MDMA or, as it’s better known, Ecstasy, the “love drug” and a member of America’s beloved amphetamine family. Grinspoon goes on: “no one (except perhaps for a very small and close-mouthed circle of Defense Department researchers and their employees) seems to know what the effects of massive doses of MDA on large groups of soldiers or civilians might be” (59). Rumsfeld is, of course, a longtime member of the U.S. defense-intelligence community. And the military tested MDA on civilians starting in the 1940s (and continuing into the 1970s–that is, if the experiments have ceased) in a series of projects, the most notorious (or at least the most well known) of which was MK Ultra. MK, you know, is spook-speak for “mind kontrol.”