Jonestown Massacre: Cultic CIA Mind Control Experiment? The Views of John Judge and Congressman Leo Ryan Aide Joseph Holsinger
Contents
This page is a subsection of ISGP's article Cult of National Security Trolls: Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM. As that article details, shows like Coast to Coast AM promote virtually nothing but very organized and systematic disinformation.
Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton appears to fit right into that description. For the rest ISGP has no real strong take on Jonestown, apart from the fact that there are questions to be asked.
Coast to Coast AM: August 20, 2000.
Layton and Blakey family ties: Rothschilds, Solvay, UCLA, Jim Jones
Deborah Layton, the most prominent of the few survivors of Jonestown, wrote the 1998 book Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple. Bizarrely, her family was intimately ties to the cult's founder and operations:
- December 4, 1978, New York Times, 'Family Tragedy: Hitler's Germany to Jones's Cult': "The daughter of Hugo and Anita Philips, Lisa Philips Layton was born in Germany in 1915 into a family that had engaged in banking for at least 200 years. Her childhood playmates included cousins and friends from some of the best‐known families of Germany's Jewish aristocracy, such as the Berensons and Rothschilds. An uncle, Dr. James Franck, won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1935. ...
[Lisa's] father, a wealthy banker in Hamburg, and her mother would be marched off at gunpoint to a train bound for a concentration camp. But Lisa escaped [to New York]... In the summer of 1978, Lisa Philips Layton died of cancer in Jonestown, Guyana...
Mr. Jones's cult included, at one time or another, six members of the Layton family. [The Layton family] was unique in its deep involvment with Mr. Jones...
Mrs. Layton's daughter, Deborah [Layton], joined the cult five years ago. Her marriage was ruptured by Mr. Jopes even before it could be consummated. Last May, while serving Mr. Jones as a trusted aide, she escaped from Jonestown and tried in vain to alert the world that he was preparing for a mass suicide in order to establish a place for himself in history.
Lisa Layton's youngest son, Larry [Layton], is now under arrest in Guyana, accused of murdering Representative Leo J. Ryan and four other persons in the attack that eventually led Mr. Jones to order the mass deaths.
Mrs. Layton saw Mr. Jones strip Larry of two wives. One, Karen Layton, died in the carnage at Jonestown. The other, Carolyn [Layton], became one of Mr. Jones's mistresses and also his principal fnancial adviser; it is not known whether she is alive. ...
In the mid — and late 1960's, when Berkeley became the scene of frequently tumultuous antiwar demonstrations and other protests, [brother and sister] Larry and Deborah Layton joined many of the demonstrations and began experimenting with drugs. Larry, after graduating from Berkeley High School, enrolled at the University of California...
In 1968, Carolyn Layton became the first member of the family to be enticed by Mr. Jones's diatribes against the rich, the Vietnam War, social injustice and racism. ... After Larry and Carolyn Layton joined the cult, Larry stopped writing to his parents and would not accept phone calls from them. ...
When Deborah came home from school in England in 1971, she brought a boyfriend, George Philip Blakey, a fellow Quaker and the son of a well‐to‐do farming family in Northumberland. ... before long even Mr. Blakey's mother had flown from England to join the People's Temple for a short while.
In 1972, Mr. Jones married Deborah Layton and Philip Blakey. But he ordered them separated before they had consummated the marriage, and Mr. Blakey eventually left California to join the party establishing the cult's Guyana settlement. Mr. Blakey survived the killings and suicides at Jonestown; he was on a boat owned by the commune at the time of the deaths.
Lisa Layton was the next member of the family to join the cult." - Not much is known (for certain) about the family background of George Philip Blakey. Apart from alternative media claims that he was involved in CIA operations, his family is said to have been shareholders in the Belgian Solvay chemical concern. This would be interesting as information discussed in ISGP's Beyond the Dutroux Affair article indicates that Solvay used to be part of an elite child abuse and ritual abuse nexus with deep CIA ties. See the CIA section for source of the Solvay claim.
Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale ties to Jim Jones
- David Conn, 'Jonestown: The Cult That Never Went Away': "It's important here to detail the role played by Rosalynn Carter, wife of President Jimmy Carter. She became enthralled with Jim Jones when she visited San Francisco with then-vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale during the 1976 campaign. She spoke from Jones's pulpit, and also had a private dinner with him at a posh San Francisco restaurant. They continued to correspond by letter after that. Rosalynn was obviously captivated with Jones. So it is logical to assume that she praised Jones in her subsequent conversations with her husband after he became president."
- Although less hawkish than these individuals, Jimmy Carter was a protege of David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski (accused of covering up Jonestown). After his presidency, he became a major superclass member who managed to take money from Black Dragon Society yakuza man/terrorist Ryoichi Sasakawa and BCCI founder (and 1001 Club member) Aga Hasan Abedi for his sustainable development projects.
- 1982, Tim Reiterman, 'Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People': "John Birch Society leader Walter Heady. The friendship of Heady and Jones was based largely upon personality. Heady's raspy declarations and iron-clad conviction--regardless of his right-wing beliefs--impressed Jones; here was an enemy with whom he could hit it off as a human being. Heady visited the Jones household, and Jones ordered a church newsletter article about Heady and his wife. Jones even invited Heady to make presentations and show Bircher films at the Redwood Valley and San Francisco churches under the justification of "knowing your enemy.""
Jonestown a CIA mind control experiment?
- Mark Lane was a lawyer to Jim Jones and his cult. He was evacuated along with the CIA's Richard Dwyer just before the mass suicides began. Mark Lane was a very key JFK assassination researcher/manipulator of the early years and a major critic of the Warren Commission. He also served as lawyer to the pro-Nazi conspiracy disinformation outfit the Liberty Lobby.
- May 12, 2016, New York Times, 'Mark Lane, Early Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theorist, Dies at 89': "Mr. Lane moved to Charlottesville in the 1970s and practiced law there. In the late '70s he represented Jim Jones, leader of the California-based People's Temple cult. Mr. Lane was in Jonestown, Guyana, where Jones and his followers had moved, on Nov. 18, 1978, the day that Representative Leo Ryan was killed and more than 900 other people died of cyanide poisoning. Mr. Lane survived by fleeing into the jungle. He wrote about Jones and the deaths in "The Strongest Poison" (1979).
In the mid-1980s Mr. Lane successfully defended the far-right Liberty Lobby and its publication, The Spotlight, in a defamation case brought by E. Howard Hunt, the C.I.A. agent and Watergate co-conspirator. ...
"I've earned all of the friends I have in the world — Bertrand Russell, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dick Gregory, just as an example of them," Mr. Lane says in the film."
- May 12, 2016, New York Times, 'Mark Lane, Early Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theorist, Dies at 89': "Mr. Lane moved to Charlottesville in the 1970s and practiced law there. In the late '70s he represented Jim Jones, leader of the California-based People's Temple cult. Mr. Lane was in Jonestown, Guyana, where Jones and his followers had moved, on Nov. 18, 1978, the day that Representative Leo Ryan was killed and more than 900 other people died of cyanide poisoning. Mr. Lane survived by fleeing into the jungle. He wrote about Jones and the deaths in "The Strongest Poison" (1979).
- 1985, John Judge, 'The Black Hole of Guyana The Untold Story of the Jonestown Massacre': "Consider the curious ties of the family members of the top lieutenants to Jim Jones. The Layton family is one example. Dr. Laurence Layton was Chief of Chemical and Biological Warfare Research at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, for many years, and later worked as Director of Missile and Satellite Development at the Navy Propellant Division, Indian Head, Maryland. [208] His wife, Lisa, had come from a rich German family. Her father, Hugo, had represented I.G. Farben as a stockbroker. [209] Her stories about hiding her Jewish past from her children for most of her life, and her parents' escape from a train heading for a Nazi concentration camp seem shallow, as do Dr. Layton's Quaker religious beliefs. The same family sent money to Jonestown regularly. [210] Their daughter, Debbie, met and married George Philip Blakey in an exclusive private school in England. Blakey's parents have extensive stock holdings in Solvay drugs, a division of the Nazi cartel I.G. Farben. [211; note: Solvay tie not mentioned in source] He also contributed financially. [212]"
- Summer 1999, Jim Hougan for Lobster magazine, no. 39, 'The Secret Life of Jim Jones: A Parapolitical Fugue': "Perhaps the most mysterious and dubious connection that Jim Jones had was his childhood friend, Dan Mitrione. The two met back in Richmond, Indiana, when Jones was a young boy preaching on street corners in a black neighborhood, and Mitrione was a Richmond Police Officer. Although Mitrione was a few years older, he took Jones under his wing. Mitrione later became Chief of the Richmond PD, and some say that he was the only reason that Jones did not get arrested and run out of town. Mitrione was later was recruited into the CIA, under State Department cover, in May of 1960, and was trained in counter-insurgency and torture techniques. Coincidentally, Mitrione had traveled to Brazil as an OPS adviser at the U.S. Consulate not long before Jones had arrived. A CIA file (201) was opened on Jim Jones at about that time. Although Jones later denied having any contact with Mitrione in Brazil, he did admit that he sought him out and actually met with Mitrione's family while there.
Manuel Hevia Conculluela worked for the CIA in Uruguay's police program. In 1970, his duties brought him in contact with Dan Mitrione in Montevideo. In his book, Passporte 11333: Eight Years With the CIA, which chronicles his CIA exploitations, Manuel wrote of the many pointers Mitrione gave him on how to torture and interrogate subjects. ...
Mysteriously, Jones' 201-file was purged by the CIA immediately after Mitrione was kidnapped and murdered in Montevideo, Uruguay. Whether or not Jim Jones was an apprentice of Dan Mitrione is not known, but there is a strong possibility based on the circumstances and their history." - Evidence of Revision documentary, Part 5, 1:12:00, Jonestown cult section: "[Joseph Holsinger, legislative aide to the murdered Leo Ryan:] Soon I came back from Washington, because of my testimony I started getting documentation from a Berkeley psychologist called The Penal Colony, here, and from the Alliance for the Preservation for Religious Liberty in Washington, which indicated other things. One of which was that George Philip Blakey was a top Jones aide and he was the man who arranged the purchase or the piece of the land in Guyana, provided the money and arrangements there in 1974. He was also tracked as being a CIA operative in Angola in 1975 with UNITA. He's also the same guy - who was a top aide who arranged all this purchasing and the finances – is also the husband of Deborah Layton Blakey who fled Jonestown and made those charges. He's a brother-in-law of Larry Layton, who was acquitted yesterday. ...
[John Judge, a curious individual himself:] Many of them survived because they cooperated with the plan and were meant to survive. That's the case with the basketball team and other people. They eventually got to Georgetown [Guyana] and eventually came to the United States. Some of them were out on a ship. The ones that were on the boat with Blakey went to Trinidad. Then they went to Panama and emptied a $5 million bank account in Credit Suisse and then they went to Grenada. They set up shop in Grenada, I believe in the mental hospital there with Doctor [Peter] Bourne and his father [Dr. Geoffrey Bourne] who worked in MKULTRA research with primates. Bourne set up all the methadone programs in the United States for the Rockefellers. I think they were experimenting on the mental patients because that's the only building bombed in the invasion of Grenada." - Evidence of Revision documentary, Part 5, 1:12:00, May 23, 1980 presentation of Joseph Holsinger, legislative aide to the murdered Leo Ryan: "As I had appeared on a public television several months ago with a group of black professionals, mostly psychologists and doctors. They advised me to appear today to provide information that they thought might be able to help with this forum today, with their research. I appeared in Washington in February before the International Relations Committee and made some statements and some charges and [provided] some documentation which resulted in the Foreign Relations – Foreign Affairs Committee, or International Relations Committee, as we call it today. They voted to ask the House Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate my charges and they are currently investigating those charges…
The charges basically point to CIA contact with … government there and with the People's Temple. … They used the People's Temple almost as enforcers to help support an unpopular government there, to keep control of the government of Guyana. There had been an article in the San Mateo Times in December of 79 which indicated that the deputy chief of mission there, Richard Dwyer, was, in fact, the CIA station chief. He was the one who went to Jonestown with Leo [Ryan]'s party and he claimed to be slightly wounded, but there's a tape made at the time of the murders and suicides there with Jones yelling, "Get Dwyer out of here! Get Dwyer out of here!" … There are great questions just who shot Jim Jones and why, whether Jones was shot to shut him up. The question also is as to how all these people died and just when they died, which is all documented here.
But soon I came back from Washington, because of my testimony I started getting documentation from a Berkeley psychologist called The Penal Colony, here, and from the Alliance for the Preservation for Religious Liberty in Washington, which indicated other things. One of which was that George Philip Blakey was a top Jones aide and he was the man who arranged the purchase or the piece of the land in Guyana, provided the money and arrangements there in 1974. He was also tracked as being a CIA operative in Angola in 1975 with UNITA. He's also the same guy - who was a top aide who arranged all this purchasing and the finances – is also the husband of Deborah Layton Blakey who fled Jonestown and made those charges. He's a brother-in-law of Larry Layton, who was acquitted yesterday. And it's interesting to note that the [Pezinsko??] Times Tribune says yesterday: "The jury has cleared … The jury agreed with the defense contention that Layton was brainwashed and drugged at the time of shootings and could not be held criminally responsible."
But the jest of what I'm getting to is this: I received a lot of documentation, which I will provide you with here today, that indicates the strong possibility that Jonestown and the People's Temple was in reality a mass mind control experiment conducted by the CIA as a follow-up to something called MKULTRA, which they conducted from the early 50s through 1974. They used to use the VA hospital, the state hospitals. They used the federal penitentiary for their experiments. …
I do now [think that Jim Jones was actively involved with the CIA]. … Yes, I have part of our documentation here is a report, which is attached here. The chief medical examiner in Guyana is a doctor named C. Leslie Mootoo. He reported, and this is attached here. His opinion is that more than 700 of those bodies found at Jonestown were not suicide victims but were murdered. They base this on the injection marks on the upper arms [in the back], page 4 of my statement here. Yes, and by gunfire. There were a lot more people killed by gunfire than they have ever admitted so far. We have heard reports that there were about 50 men with guns ringing around there, so people couldn't get out. Very few of them did get out. So according to the chief medical officer in Guyana, most of the people down there were murdered, not suicide.
Yes, I am suggesting to you that a lot of things don't make sense here. I'm suggesting that the long delay in anyone getting in, of the press getting in there, or very little getting in there for several days, was caused by a deliberate attempt to manufacture the story which has now been accepted and sold successfully to the American people: that, in effect, this was a large group of disillusioned or rather disoriented black people who went down to Guyana and turned their backs on this country and committed suicide and we might as well get rid of them. …
When you see the documentation here, you'll begin to wonder yourselves why there were first reports of 350 people died or 400 people died and for several days that was reported. Then they started finding more bodies, when the first reports were that 500 had fled into the jungle. The people that examined the bodies the first time and counted them, counted by name and [inaudible]: men, women and children, turned them over. Then a few days they claim to have found two or three stacks of bodies underneath those. You know, it boggles the mind, the stories that were passed out. But they apparently have gotten away with, I think, one the biggest fabrications of recent years. …
The cadre was all white and yet we think of Jonestown as a bunch of black people who committed suicide without mentioning that white cadre. And that doesn't quite add up. I think there were racist overtones to the whole thing. …
It's my impression at this time that they were conducting some sort of mind control experiment. For example, they had a very modern hospital down there which they bragged about. So modern, that that population, they had medical checkups for everyone every day. There's no need for that unless you are conducting experiments where you are having control groups and they're giving them their vitamins every day. And it's my guess that they were just using them as guinea pigs to see what they could do under isolated circumstances. They take them off to some jungle place faraway from everybody. They get them there somehow and then they are able to see how these various drugs work on different groups." - 2006, Evidence of Revision documentary, Part 5, 1:18:40, John Judge: "Well, Doctor Mootoo, the pathologist at the site in Jonestown said that 70 to 80 percent of the bodies had a fresh needle mark in the back of the left shoulder blade, at a point they could not have reached themselves. And that the bodies showed evidence of having been forced to take the shots. And the official coroner's verdict from Matthew's Riggs by the Guyanese judge and jury who looked into the situation, was that all the people had been murdered. Not one had been a suicide. Mootoo found evidence of gunshot wounds and strangulation on many of the other bodies. I studied about 150 pictures on which I could see gunshot wounds. There's no way that cyanide pathology explains the condition of those bodies, all face down and you could see drag marks.
And the body count went up, because the area was surrounded by 350 Guyanese troops, about 200 British Blackwatch troops, which were their equivalent of the Green Berets, on maneuvers at Matthew's Ridge in those days, and American Green Berets which came in with the body clean-up teams that spent the period of the five days murdering people, rounding them up in the jungle. The original reports were 408 dead and then 700 flee into the woods. And the military said first, "The Guyanese can't count," second that "it was bodies on top of bodies," though how you start with 408 and end up with 915 and say that the 400 covered the 500 makes no sense. They said bodies in little piles. They even said at the end, after they'd been there for six days, that they forgot to go around to the back of the pavilion and there were 500 bodies back there. And this was the final and official explanation, but these people were being killed.
I don't know where all the survivors are. Many of them survived because they cooperated with the plan and were meant to survive. That's the case with the basketball team and other people. They eventually got to Georgetown [Guyana] and eventually came to the United States. Some of them were out on a ship. The ones that were on the boat with Blakey went to Trinidad. Then they went to Panama and emptied a $5 million bank account in Credit Suisse and then they went to Grenada.
They set up shop in Grenada, I believe in the mental hospital there with Doctor [Peter] Bourne and his father [Dr. Geoffrey Bourne] who worked in MKULTRA research with primates. Bourne set up all the methadone programs in the United States for the Rockefellers. I think they were experimenting on the mental patients because that's the only building bombed in the invasion of Grenada. There's 180 people, inmates, in the psychiatric institution murdered, dumped into a mass grave and then the U.S. was gonna send $400 million to rebuild the hospital. I mean, you know, they were gonna make it a better unit to experiment on people after they got the right government in. …
There were guns and drugs being smuggled out [of Sierra Leone] and there were relations of mercenaries. Some of these killers that were taken in and out of Angola, where the CIA backed UNITA forces, by Blakey - they ran mercenaries and they did run guns and drugs.
But the operation was primarily an extension of MKULTRA. People were taken off the streets here in San Francisco, out of the welfare rolls, from the elderly homes, and from the psychiatric institutions, prisons. Children were given as wards to the court, turned over into their control. They put them in busses, they took them to Miami. And I talked to an air traffic controller and when they landed in Guyana, all of the blacks were bound and gagged coming off of the plane. People 5 miles away didn't even know there were blacks at Jonestown. All they had ever seen at the People's Temple was the white crew that was running it, going in and out of the cities. They were buying Guyanese babies from women wherever they could. They were given a blanket for a baby, or whatever, and taking them back in there.
There was massive experimentation. There were enough drugs on site to drug the population of Georgetown, Guyana of over 120,000, for more than a year [and this] for a population of 1,200 people in this camp. Dr. Schacht, whom I believe survived – he's not on the first death list; he's added to the second – I believe he's related to Hjalmar Schacht, the Reich's minister of finance who developed the phrase "Arbeit macht frei", "Work makes you free", at the Auschwitz camp. They came to Houston. That's where the Schacht family ended up, the big bankers for Hitler. And this guy is from Houston and he's not a doctor. He was described as doing suturing on wounds without anesthesia and all kinds of sadistic things.
They had medical tags. You can even see in Time magazine medical tags on the people, but an order came down from Zbigniew Brzezinski, through [Alexander] Haig, through Robert Pastor, on site [to Lt. Col. Gordon Sumner] to strip bodies of all identification and tags. Then the bodies are left in the sun to rot, so that no fingerprints, no identification can be done from the tags and no autopsy can be done, fluids or otherwise, by the time they get taken back to the United States so you can never find out what killed them or how many drugs they had in the body. They had one footlocker there with 11,000 doses of Thorazine. And the drugs that are described, are the exact drugs that were used for over 30 years in MKULTRA in the different control scenarios." - The earlier-mentioned Dr. Peter Bourne family information (they actually seem rather moderate and progressive "liberal CIA" types):
- Evidence of Revision documentary, Part 5, 1:07:50, some of the last words of Jim Jones that were taped, right when he announced to his flock that they were all going to commut suicide: "Take Dwyer on down the East House. Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him. Dwyer! I'm not talking about Ujiah! I said Dwyer!"
- July 21, 1988, New York Times, 'Dr. Geoffrey Bourne, Anatomist; Primate Expert a Prolific Writer': "Dr. Geoffrey H. Bourne, an anatomist and expert on primates, died... He popularized his experiences with apes and other primates in numerous books... He appeared on the ''Johnny Carson Show'' on television, describing how he taught chimpanzees to communicate by typing on a computer. ... He was 78 years old and maintained homes in Atlanta and on the island of Grenada. At his death Dr. Bourne was vice chancellor and professor of nutrition at St. George's University School of Medicine in Grenada. He had served as director of the Yerkes Regional Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta from 1962 to 1978. ...
He retired in 1978 and then took the position at the 1,500-student medical school in Grenada. He was there in 1983 when a coup by a revolutionary council brought an invasion by United States military forces. President Reagan cited the rescue of the students, most of them Americans, as a reason for the invasion. ...
Dr. Bourne was born in Perth, Australia... He had also taught histology at the University of London and physiology at Oxford University, from which he received a doctorate in 1943. In World War II he was a nutritional adviser to the British forces in Burma and held the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, the American Gerontology Society and the Zoological Society of London. He was a founder and president of the Zoological Society of Atlanta. He is survived by ... two sons, Dr. Peter Bourne of Washington, who was an adviser to President Carter on drugs..." - Undated, PBS Frontline, 'Interview: Peter Bourne': "I had been hired by President Carter [a Trilateral Commission favorite], who was then the governor of Georgia, to set up a statewide drug treatment program. ...
One of my longtime friends and college classmates, Robert DuPont [BA Emory University 1958; MD in psychology Harvard 1963; involved in carrying out the first methadone test treatments in 1969, which eventually helped cut the crime rate in half; White House drug czar under Nixon and Ford 1973-1977], was already running the drug treatment program in Washington, D.C. Governor Carter said that he wanted me to set that up in all the major cities in Georgia. So I agreed. A group of half-dozen of us was running programs, mainly methadone maintenance programs, in major cities around the country. ... We had already made the decision that he would run. We had a small group, just four or five people, working with Carter in 1972, actually beginning before McGovern's defeat. We were preparing a plan for the four-year strategy for Carter to run for president. When Bud Krogh came and invited me to come to Washington, I talked to Carter about whether or not I should take the job. He said, "You take it, and as soon as they are ready to formally announce that I'm running for president, you can leave there and set up the Washington campaign office in the presidential race," which is in fact what I did. ... When Carter came in, I was appointed to that position.
So I was essentially the first drug czar with a total responsibility for foreign police, law enforcement, treatment. We also involved the CIA, the Coast Guard, Treasury, and anybody else in the federal government--all coordinated together in one policymaking group, and under one office. ...
The policy that we enunciated was that this was a public health problem, that each drug needed to be dealt with separately because of the different strategy of approach was required for each drug. Heroin was the major public health problem. ...
We did not view marijuana as a significant health problem... marijuana smoking, in fact if one wants to be honest, is a source of pleasure and amusement to countless millions of people in America... Where a drug posed a serious health threat, there was an intensive focus to provide a treatment program. ... The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, NORML, had had a steep decline in its membership after Carter came in office, and talked about decriminalization as a more rational approach towards marijuana smoking. ...
I guess it was the [1977] annual meeting of NORML or something--where Keith Stroup invited me to come and speak about the administration's policy, which I did. And I could see when I was speaking that there were people in the back of the hall smoking joints. I did tell Keith at that point that that just created a big problem for me, because I couldn't be there. I couldn't be in charge of drug policy and have people visibly breaking the law in my presence.
There was another annual meeting which may be the one you are referring to, which I either couldn't go to or didn't want to go to because of the previous event. And he said, "I understand that, but tonight we're having a party at the home of William Paley," who was the son of the owner of CBS television. And he said, "Please come by, because people are very upset that you didn't come and speak at our former sessions, and it would be nice if you came to my party." So I went to that party, where again, people were using drugs. And I didn't stay there terribly long and I left. That was the last I heard of that party until many months later. ...
Then Keith [Stroup] said [during the media frenzy about me having prescribed a dozen regular sedatives for someone], "Six months ago, he was at this party given by William Paley, and there was coke being used there, and I'm sure he was one of the people who used coke," which again was not true. But there was no doubt coke was being used at that party. ...
I think [the tide on marijuana decriminalization changing in 1978] probably had to do with the ebbing support for President Carter. He was in serious trouble because of the economy [and] Conservative hard-liners... were attacking him from the right, saying to increase defense spending. ...
I only came to realize later the extent to which bureaucratic wars in Washington often transcend the pursuit of policy, and that one of the objectives in DEA always was to increase the budget and its influence in Washington. One way of doing that was to always say that the drug problem is getting worse... If you're winning the war against heroin, and the person in the White House says we have reduced overdose deaths to the lowest levels in the last 30 years, everybody in DEA says, "They're going to cut our budget. They're going to reduce our agents. Some of us are going to be laid off." ...
I still believe that [cocaine is not dangerous]. Cocaine itself, powdered cocaine, poses a fairly minimal health risk. It's been widely used for thousands of years. ... It's an exciting euphoria-producing recreational drug. Most people who get into difficulty with it do so because they have preexisting emotional problems, and they use the cocaine as a way of trying to self-medicate those problems, and become increasingly dependent on it. I'm not saying there aren't people who don't get into serious difficulty with cocaine. But there are people who kill themselves skiing because they run into trees. That is the nature of the risk that you take on if you enjoy that experience. ... In 1978, seven people in the US died from the effects of cocaine. Two of them were people who were smuggling. ... If you compare it to 400,000 dying every year in the US from the effects of cigarettes, it's absurd to look at cocaine as a health problem. ... Ten percent of the US is alcoholic--has a problem that seriously impairs their functioning due to the use of alcohol. ...
There was a dramatic change when the Reagan administration came in, because they essentially abandoned completely the public health approach to the problem of drug abuse. They equated on moral grounds the use of any of these drugs as being equal to each other... You had a sort of insane policy of "Just Say No," which is like telling someone who's depressed, "Have a Nice Day." And essentially it's an abdication of any responsibility for dealing with the problem, and an effort really just to exploit it politically. And that's what happened. Build more prisons, arrest more people. .. You hadin certain respects the use of cocaine, crack cocaine, and the laws against it, as a way of sort of ethnically cleansing young African-American men from the inner cities of America. ...
When Reagan first came in, I would call the National Institute on Drug Abuse every month to get the overdose figures. And from the moment Reagan came in, the number of people dying from drugs went up week by week by week, because they were abandoning all the treatment programs... Eventually they refused to give me overdose death figures anymore. ... The [only] objective was, can you appeal to suburban voters who have this rational or irrational fear about their children smoking marijuana? And that is what you want to appeal to."