John Lennon on the LSD-CIA Connection

Thanks to James for turning me on to this 1975 Playboy interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in which Lennon blames/thanks the CIA for LSD.

We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That’s what people forget. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it, Harry? So get out the bottle, boy — and relax. They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. If you look in the Government reports on acid, the ones who jumped out the window or killed themselves because of it, I think even with Art Linkletter’s daughter, it happened to her years later. So, let’s face it, she wasn’t really on acid when she jumped out the window. And I’ve never met anybody who’s had a flashback on acid. I’ve never had a flashback in my life and I took millions of trips in the Sixties.

Not exactly the most conclusive bit of information, but interesting nonetheless. Also interesting is that Lennon supposedly had an alien/UFO encounter that same year. Uri Geller also finds his way into (or may be the source of) that tale.


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This entry was written by Tim Boucher, posted on July 11, 2005 at 11:38 pm.

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4 Comments

  1. albion
    Posted July 12, 2005 at 3:08 am | Permalink

    more great stuff tim! i dunno what happened with that whole art linkletter’s daughter thing (i think no drugs were found in her system) but it was also part of the whole lame ‘celebrity’ aspect (along with elvis & sammy davis jr) of nixon’s phony war on drugs. yet another quote from ed epstein’s agency of fear :

    The president was slightly more successful in recruiting Art Linkletter into his anti-LSD campaign, after the entertainer’s daughter committed suicide in 1969. An Air Force plane was sent to fly Linkletter from California to the governors’ conference in Washington in December, 1969, and after an emotional session with the assembled governors, Linkletter agreed to head a national advisory council on drugs.

    & look who makes a cameo a bit later in the psychodrama:

    Donald Rumsfeld, then ambassador to NATO, had sent Egil Krogh a memorandum [...] mentioning that President Nixon had suggested sending “Art Linkletter … to do a world tour of military bases . . . linked with the drug program because he could talk so effectively about his daughter and the problem.”

    i think linkletter was a bohemian grover. i wonder what the backstory on that one is.

  2. K
    Posted July 12, 2005 at 6:52 am | Permalink

    Speaking of Bohemian Grovers.. Sasha Shulgin, the master (al)chemist, is also a member by his own admission.

    http://www.erowid.org/culture/characte...er/shulgin_alexander_interview1.shtml

  3. james
    Posted July 12, 2005 at 3:03 pm | Permalink

    Anyone ever seen that Harry Shearer movie “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic” (aka “Call O’ The Glen”)? It’s a satire of Bohemian Grove. Never seen it myself, but being a Shearer fan, I think I might dig it.

  4. alistair
    Posted July 13, 2005 at 7:02 am | Permalink

    my opinion, on an intuitive level, since i was a teenager, was and still is that john lennon was a communist, or at least a paid agitator for the left. i have always been suspicious of unwashed millionaires that sleep with thier mother.

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