Isegoria

When he launched the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, David Smith left a loose end dangling in his past, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) — he’d never actually received his PhD in pharmacology:

He’d completed a two-year research project on amphetamines and their effects on groups of confined mice, but he never finished his dissertation. Although he shrugged off the lapse—he’d already completed medical school, after all, and he’d taken quickly to his new life in the Haight—it surprised many of his closest friends, and in our interviews, he was reluctant to admit it. It wasn’t like him to leave something undone.

[…]

His research started with sixteen albino mice. With the assistance of other researchers, he separated these into two groups of eight in “aggregate” settings—small, closely confined communities intended to simulate crowding. Then he injected the mice with amphetamines. Over the next twenty-four hours, they transformed from docile animals into frantic combatants, fighting one another until they died either from injuries, self-inflicted wounds from overgrooming, or simple exhaustion. The violence was unremitting; Smith described “frenzied attacks of unrelenting rage.” Afterward, all that remained in the blood-spattered cages were scattered, dismembered body parts. Simply by confining the animals in close quarters, he’d increased the toxicity of the amphetamines more than four times.

In another attempt, some of the mice were dosed with other chemicals—mescaline, chlorpromazine, or reserpine—before they received amphetamine injections. The extra drugs sometimes had a sorting effect, segregating the mice that would kill from the mice that wouldn’t. Or they had a soothing effect, all but eliminating the violent tendencies.

Smith told me he’d started his research having foreseen an influx of amphetamine abusers in San Francisco. He didn’t say how he’d predicted that influx, but he was right. In the summer of ’67, as he opened his clinic, amphetamines exploded in popularity in the Haight.

“When the speed scene hit, it was a total shock to everybody,” he told me. “Suddenly, what I’d learned in pharmacology relative to amphetamines was applicable [to people].”

Throughout Love Needs Care, Smith draws parallels between the rodents he’d studied and the speed-addled hippies in the Haight. The mice on speed, he wrote, “become inordinately aggressive and assaultive… [turning] upon one another with unexpected savagery. Their violent behavior is probably intensified by confinement for it is strikingly similar to that observed in amphetamine abusers who consume the drugs in crowded atmospheres.”

In the Haight, Smith watched as people living cheek by jowl took huge doses of speed, inspiring paranoia and hallucinations. Once peaceful and well-adjusted, the “speed freaks” of San Francisco now “lashed out with murderous rage at any real or imagined intrusion,” assaulting, raping, or torturing to relieve the paranoid tension. “Cut off from the straight world, crammed together in inhuman conditions, and controlled by chemicals,” Smith concluded, “they behaved, quite naturally, like rats in a cage.”

[…]

In fact, according to Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, who participated in a portion of Smith’s rat research in 1965, LSD was an integral component of the project. Smith and his colleagues would inject the rats with acid in hopes of making them more suggestible before he gave them amphetamines. Suggestibility was among the most prized effects of LSD from a clinical perspective. And yet Smith kept LSD out of the official documentation of his research. The article he published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs never mentioned acid.

I asked Smith if LSD was part of his protocol. He denied it—then, a moment later, without provocation, he reversed himself.

“Yeah, I stuck LSD in them,” he said.

But he couldn’t explain why. “I was sticking all different kinds of drugs in them,” he added. In his recollection, LSD “produced disorganized behavior, but not violent behavior.” The rats would just wander around in a daze.

If you’ve noticed that I’ve used “rats” and “mice” interchangeably, there’s a reason for that—Smith used them interchangeably, too, even though the two species have vastly different behavioral patterns, especially in groups. In his Journal of Psychedelic Drugs article, he calls them mice; in Love Needs Care and another book he published, they’re rats. Schoenfeld insisted that he’d worked with rats during his part of the research. But Smith was adamant that they were mice, and he couldn’t explain his confusion on the subject.

Like the San Francisco Project and Roger Smith’s Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), some of David Smith’s research, according to his academic papers, was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which, as mentioned earlier, later acknowledged that the CIA used it as a front for LSD research. And though David never mentioned it in his writing, his work owed a clear debt to the landmark research of another NIMH psychologist, John B. Calhoun, who’d studied rat populations since 1946.

Calhoun reported that rats in confined groups—even without drugs—became uncharacteristically aggressive. They’d erupt in rape, murder, cannibalism, and infanticide. A dominant male rat emerged in the “behavioral sink”—Calhoun’s term for his aggregated rat cultures—subjugating other males into a tribe of cowering, enfeebled followers and organizing female rats into a “harem” of sex slaves. The strangest group to emerge was “the probers”: “hypersexualized” male rats that stalked and raped both males and females, and often cannibalized their young. The probers would commit “frenzied” and “berserk” attacks against rat families sleeping in their burrows, leaving the remains of half-eaten victims. Again, no drugs were involved here; the probers emerged simply as a result of their confinement. They deferred only to the dominant male rat, fleeing if he caught sight of them.

Calhoun’s study was a watershed. In the midsixties, amid growing concerns about population density, social scientists, politicians, and journalists cited him to explain the riots in America’s overcrowded ghettos. His term “behavioral sink”—defined as “the outcome of any behavioral process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers… aggravating all forms of pathology that can be found within [the] group”—entered the scientific lexicon almost right away. David Smith used it extensively in his writing and in interviews with me.

[…]

Plus, the more interesting subtleties of Calhoun’s research—the emergence of a dominant male, a harem of subservient females, and an underclass of “probers,” all of which, it had to be said, sounded a lot like the Family—had gone entirely unnoted in Smith’s project. I wondered if amphetamines, with or without LSD, had increased the dominant male’s grip on his followers.

Given how eerily Smith’s research prefigured the creation of the Family—under David’s nose, in the Haight, during the summer of ’67—I wondered if he had deliberately underreported it. I’ve never come close to proving that he did, but I haven’t been able to explain the holes in it, either. Why would he use LSD to induce suggestibility in rats before injecting them with amphetamines and making them berserk?

[…]

The reams of record keeping you’d expect from clinical experimentation simply weren’t there. Stephen Pittel, a forensic psychologist who’d worked with both Smiths at the HAFMC, volunteered a stunning bit of information that Roger and David had neglected to share with me.

“The only thing I remember about ARP was that it got burglarized one night and Roger lost all of his files,” Pittel told me. Their disappearance had been jarring, in part because Roger was “an unusually paranoid guy to begin with.”

[…]

The HAFMC’s original chief psychiatrist, Dr. Ernest Dernburg, remembered the theft of the ARP files, too. As he recalled, they’d gone missing right after the announcement of Manson’s arrest for the Tate–LaBianca murders and that “Roger, understandably, was pretty upset.” Nothing else was taken from the HAFMC, which led the staff to believe that the police or some federal agency might’ve removed the files. These were research papers, he reminded me: “It didn’t make sense for someone to steal these things when they didn’t inherently have any value to the average individual. It seemed to have a more nefarious purpose.”

The Smiths both denied that the theft had ever happened. “You’re dealing with aging memories,” David said. But Dernburg and Pittel—full-time doctors, and credible sources, I thought—stood by their stories. “They were absolutely stolen,” Pittel said. Dernburg, perturbed by David’s insinuation about his faculties, told me more that he remembered. “It was a considerable amount of research—the premier amphetamine research conducted at a street level. It would have been very important to the clinic… and it disappeared. Call David. Ask Roger if he has the files or knows where they are.”

[…]

David Smith had studied these same phenomena, formulating an idea that he called “the psychedelic syndrome,” first articulated in 1967 or early ’68. The gist was that acid, when taken by groups of like-minded people, led to a “chronic LSD state” that reinforced “the interpretation of psychedelic reality.” The more often the same group of “friends” dropped acid, the more they encouraged one another to adopt the worldview they’d discovered together on LSD, thus producing “dramatic psychological changes.”

Usually the psychedelic syndrome was harmless, but regular LSD use could cause “the emergence of a dramatic orientation to mysticism.” And in people with “prepsychotic personalities,” Smith wrote, LSD precipitated “a long-term psychological disorder, usually a depressive reaction or a schizophrenic process.”

Had Smith seen this “syndrome” in the Family? After Manson had been arrested for the murders, David wrote, “Charlie could probably be diagnosed as ambulatory schizophrenic.” He said the same thing when I asked about Manson: “I felt that he was schizo.” It was Roger Smith who’d had the better diagnosis, and the earlier one, David maintained: “Roger said that he knew from day one that Charlie was a psychopath.”

But Roger apparently never thought it was necessary to intervene—to send his parolee back to prison or to get him proper psychiatric care. Instead, he sent him to the Haight and watched him drop acid every day, accruing suggestible young followers as he went. Meanwhile, David was studying the exact psychological conditions that gave rise to the Manson Family while he treated them at his clinic.

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