After it became evident that LSD was no longer a viable threat to military interest, its perceived danger still loomed but from a different perspective. The concern did not arise from the potential health and safety risks posed to the citizens. Years of government study had already debunked these claims. Rather, the threat now came in a much less predictable form, from the quintessential characteristic of the entheogens: their unparalleled efficiency in dissolving imposed boundaries. Much to the CIA’s chagrin, they discovered that not only ego-structure or the barriers between daily awareness and the transpersonal realms break down, but socially imposed ideology which happen to include the very ideals that are essential to creating public allegiance also begin to collapse. Nothing is more vital to the success of any government organization than the uncritical acquiescence of its citizens. This characteristic dissolution of socially constructed ideals is evident in a quote from a CIA member who was part of the MKULTRA project. When asked about LSD’s ability to effectively “re-educate” an individual’s political loyalties to fit the ideals of the United States government, he answered:

I think everybody understood that if you had a good trip, you had a kind of above-it-all look into reality. What we subsequently found was that when you came down, you remembered the experience, but you didn't switch identities. You really didn't have that kind of feeling. You weren't as suspicious of people. You listened to them, but you also saw through them more easily and clearly.¹⁰

The CIA and military found that LSD could not be used for mind control. In fact, it did the opposite. LSD caused users to radically question the imposed rules, norms, and ideals of their internal and external worlds with an intensity not known to modern history. Tacit acceptance of racial and gender discrimination, wasteful materialism, environmental destruction, and the concept of shooting projectiles at foreign people to impose our ideals on them were heavily jeopardized by the psychedelic experiences. Having a populace able to see more “easily and clearly” through present-day agendas was detrimental to the age-old imperative of a government trying to maintain consent of its policies through public ignorance.

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