Roger Smith, the academic who became Charles Manson’s parole officer, may have had ulterior motives, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), when he told Manson to move to Haight-Ashbury:
As part of his criminology research, he’d been tapped to lead a study on amphetamines and their role in the violent behavior of Haight-Ashbury hippies. The National Institute of Mental Health funded this study, as they had the San Francisco Project. In 1976, a FOIA request forced NIMH to acknowledge that it had allowed itself to be used by the CIA as a funding front in the sixties.
Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became psychotically violent on amphetamines—and to see if this violence could be controlled. The goals of the Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), as he dubbed it, were to “illuminate three major areas” of the “speed scene” in the Haight: the “individual” experience, the “collective or group experience,” and the “way in which violence is generated within the speed marketplace.” Smith studied hippie collectives by observing them in their daily routines, and he enjoined his researchers to participate, too. He later recalled that when he was appointed to lead the study, “[ I] took off my gray-flannel suit and my wing-tip shoes and grew a moustache. Soon the kids on Haight Street were calling me the Friendly Fed and asking me to help them with the law.”
There’s no indication that his technique proved useful—because there’s not much indication that the ARP ever happened at all. Smith never published his research. Two papers about the ARP were scheduled to appear in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, but they never materialized. The closest thing to a record of the ARP is Smith’s unpublished dissertation, submitted to Berkeley a month before the Manson murders. Even this, however, contains no actual “participation-observation” data—it is mainly secondhand anecdotes and statistical analysis.
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To ensure success, Smith argued, researchers had to protect their subjects from criminal prosecution, concealing their activities from the police and granting them anonymity in all reports. The ARP, then, had something resembling police immunity baked into its very mission.
Smith ran the ARP out of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC), which had just opened the previous summer. Soon, he was spending so much time there that he made a proposition to his only parole client: instead of meeting with Manson in downtown San Francisco, where Smith had an office, why not just meet at the clinic? It was more convenient for both of them, and anyway, by that time Manson and “his girls” had started to contract sexually transmitted diseases; the clinic could treat those for free.
Soon Manson became a mainstay at the HAFMC. Between visiting Smith and receiving medical care, there were some weeks when he appeared at the clinic every day. He became a familiar presence to a number of the doctors there, including several who, like Smith, had received federal funds to research drug use among hippies.
Smith got the ARP off the ground at the same time he was supervising Manson for the San Francisco Project. It was during this overlap that the record of Manson’s parole supervision was either spotty, nonexistent, or later expunged. This funny, scruffy little visitor to the clinic, always with his retinue of girls, was taking a ton of drugs and forming the Family. By the time he and his followers turned up in that ditch by the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in April 1968, the girls had traded the flowers in their hair for steel knives, sheathed in leather and strapped to their thighs beneath long flowing dresses.