LSD RESEARCH SHOWS CANINE-HIPPIE PARALLEL

Among the movies released on video this week is The Men Who Stare at
Goats, a dark satire on paranormal research by the U.S. military. The
idea was that a soldier with psychic training could kill an enemy by
fiercely staring at him and willing his heart to stop. To that end, a
secret army research unit experimented by staring at goats that had
been de-bleated "for security reasons."

SPOILER ALERT: Except for the debleating, the goats came away unharmed.

Never officially confirmed or denied, the story seems almost too
absurd for anyone to have made it up. There are precedents, too.
Consider, for example, the men who gave LSD to dogs.

Getting dogs high on LSD was part of a Soviet project back in the
early 1960s at the height of the Cold War. The experiments came to
light last year through The Memory Hole, a website that publishes
declassified government documents.

In this case, the document is an English translation of a Russian
research paper, presumably acquired by the Americans through its
intelligence sources of the day.

LSD still is little understood and was even less so in 1962 when the
paper was written. The drug wasn't even illegal yet. Researchers then
thought it might have intelligence applications, perhaps as a truth
serum for captured spies or as a chemical weapon, clandestinely
introduced through a water utility, say, to sow confusion among an
enemy population.

That the Soviets experimented on dogs is somewhat to their credit.
Around the same time, the CIA also was secretly studying the effects
of LSD, only on people, often without their knowledge. The agency
found the drug to be too unpredictable in its effects to be of any
practical use. I know one or two old hippies who could have told them that.

Dogs given LSD likewise behaved unpredictably. Sometimes they were
restless, sometimes lethargic. Sometimes they barked for no reason,
sometimes they lapsed into a catatonic state.

"Not infrequently the animal would be frozen in one position for a
long period of time with his muzzle pressed against the wall, and whining."

Yup, that would be LSD.

Often the subject dogs ignored or reacted inappropriately to external
stimuli. They showed fear of familiar objects. They appeared to be
lost in familiar surroundings. Again, there were quite a few hippies
who reacted likewise. But that didn't stop them from doing it again
and again, God bless them.

As with hippies, the dogs' ability to perform routine tasks dropped
off sharply when they were blasted on acid. They now were lost in an
obstacle course they had previously learned to negotiate in a few
seconds. Of six dogs tested, four were able to do the course as usual
the next day while one took two days and another five days to
recover. That's still better than some hippies who never did recover.

In a related experiment, dogs were taught to avoid an electrical
shock by jumping over a barrier when warned to do so by a particular
sound or flashing light. Given LSD, they failed to respond to the
warning in time to avoid the ensuing shock. They did react
appropriately, however, when the actual shock was delivered. This is
something to keep in mind if you're ever dealing with someone on LSD.

Based on these fairly dramatic results, the researchers determined
LSD induces in dogs a kind of chemical psychosis. This, according to
the paper, was contrary to earlier Soviet research which, remarkably,
found dogs were unaffected by LSD. Either the earlier research was
seriously flawed or the scientists in charge got ripped off by their dealer.

Authors of the later paper conclude further research would shed more
light on both normal and pathological psychologies. On this, they
were wrong. Subsequent years of experimentation with LSD appears not
to have shed more light on anything, with the possible exception of
Jimi Hendrix's guitar solo in Hey Joe.