Aldous Huxley predicted that drugs would one day become a humane alternative to “flogging” for rulers wishing to control “recalcitrant subjects.” He wrote in a letter to his former student George Orwell in 1949:
But now psycho-analysis is being combined with hypnosis; and hypnosis has been made easy and indefinitely extensible through the use of barbiturates, which induce a hypnoid and suggestible state in even the most recalcitrant subjects.
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infantconditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. [emphasis added]
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~ Aldous Huxley
Decades later, one of the CIA’s own MK-ULTRA researchers, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, while citing Huxley had this to say on the matter:
The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws permitting immediate search, or “no knock” entry, against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations.
But a government could also supply drugs to help control a population. This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), has the governing element employing drugs selectively to manipulate the governed in various ways.
To a large extent the numerous rural and urban communes, which provide a great freedom for private drug use and where hallucinogens are widely used today, are actually subsidized by our society. Their perpetuation is aided by parental or other family remittances, welfare, and unemployment payments, and benign neglect by the police. In fact, it may be more convenient and perhaps even more economical to keep the growing numbers of chronic drug users (especially of the hallucinogens) fairly isolated and also out of the labor market, with its millions of unemployed. To society, the communards with their hallucinogenic drugs are probably less bothersome--and less expensive--if they are living apart, than if they are engaging in alternative modes of expressing their alienation, such as active, organized, vigorous political protest and dissent. […] The hallucinogens presently comprise a moderate but significant portion of the total drug problem in Western society. The foregoing may provide a certain frame of reference against which not only the social but also the clinical problems created by these drugs can be considered.
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~ Louis Jolyon West
The idea of drugs for control seems to be an ancient one. Italian professor Piero Camporesi, writing on Medieval Italy in his book
Bread of Dreams, says:
Adulterated breads had been put into circulation by the
untori of Public Health: criminal attacks orchestrated by the ‘provisionary judges’ who were supposed to oversee the well-balanced provisioning of the public-square.
On the 21st, a Sunday, with Monday approaching, Master … [blank in the manuscript] Forni, Judge of provisions in the square of Modena, was arrested, along with the bakers, for having had forty sacks of bay leaf ground to be put into the wheat flour to make bread for the square, where it caused the poverty to those who brought it to worsen, so that for two days there were many people sick enough to go crazy, and during this time they could not work or help their families.
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Camporesi later continues:
It would be wrong to suppose that one must wait for the arrival of eighteenth-century capitalism, or even of imperialism, in order to see the birth of the problem of the mass spreading of opium derivatives (first of morphine and then, today, of heroin) used to dampen the frenzy of the masses and lead them back – by means of dreams – to the ‘reason’ desired by the groups in power. The opium war against China, the Black Panthers ‘broken’ by drugs, and the ‘ebbing’ of the American and European student movements (supposing that hallucinogenic drugs were involved in the latter, as some believe), are the most commonly used examples – we don’t know with what relevance – to demonstrate how ‘advanced’ capitalism and imperialism have utilized mechanisms which induced collective dreaming and weakened the desire for renewal by means of visionary ‘trips’, in order to impose their will.
The pre-industrial age, too, even if in a more imprecise, rough and ‘natural’ manner, was aware of political strategies allied to medical culture, whether to lessen the pangs of hunger or to limit the turmoil in the streets. Certainly we could laugh at interventions which are so mild as to appear almost surreal, amateurish or improvised; but we must not forget that both in theory and in practice the ‘treatment of the poor man’, cared for with sedatives and hallucinogenic drugs, corresponded to a thought-out medico-political design.
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~ Piero Camporesi
https://tabublog.com/2015/12/26/the...the-tavistock-institute-a-jesuit-corporation/