U.S. Marines Won't Stop Taking LSD
U.S. Marines Won’t Stop Taking LSD
The Pentagon has conducted almost 4,000 drug tests for acid since this summer.
by Matthew Gault
December 4, 2020, 8:51am
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdk39/us-marines-wont-stop-taking-lsd
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According to a press release, the Marines have performed almost 4,000 LSD tests since the summer. LSD testing is so infrequent that the Marines had to partner with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner lab in Dover, Delaware to mass produce tests. “We are committed to identifying violators of our ethos,” Donovan said. “The vast majority of Marines within the 2d Marine Division routinely uphold our core values, and they deserve to know that the Marines to their left and right are doing the same.”
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It may seem odd, but LSD has a long and storied history of use by America’s armed forces. At a military base in Wyoming, Airmen in charge of launching America’s nuclear arsenal loved to eat acid between shifts. Monitoring the nuclear arsenal is a boring job and, to pass the time, airmen in charge of the nukes would get high. "I absolutely just loved altering my mind,” one airman said in 2018 when the ring of LSD buddies was busted.
The LSD-Marine connection goes deeper. In February 2019 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, a journal published by the Marine Corps Association, Major Emre Albayrak of the U.S. Marine Corps published a paper advocating that intelligence officers microdose LSD to help them with their job.
“Our own units, such as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, seek cognitive advan-tages via unorthodox methods such as mind gyms and sensory deprivation tanks,” Albayrak said. “The cognitive advantage they seek is ‘flow”—or ‘ekstasis’ from the Greek, which Plato describes as ‘an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.’ This phenomena is described as a non-ordinary state of consciousness in which individuals tend to have heightened focus, pattern recognition, and reaction time. Flow can be observed in a seasoned close-quarters battle team clearing a complex structure.”
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https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/07/02/navy-seeing-huge-spike-lsd-use-ncis-says.html
NCIS Warns Navy After LSD Investigations Surge 70%
Military.com | By Hope Hodge Seck
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"From 2003 to 2006, the Department of Defense forensic drug laboratories detected only four instances of positive urinalysis for LSD out of a sample of over two million samples," NCIS officials said in their release. "As a result, the Navy discontinued testing for LSD in late 2006 by directive of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counternarcotics."
There have been recent indicators that LSD is making a resurgence in popularity among troops, despite the military's zero-tolerance drug policy. In 2018, The Associated Press reported that U.S. Air Force investigators had uncovered a drug ring at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming, where LSD was among the substances of choice for airmen whose job included guarding nuclear missiles.
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Of the 190 investigations initiated since 2018, "many" remain active, Houston told Military.com. He said that the investigations were global, not concentrated in a particular region or installation, but declined to comment further "out of respect for the investigative process."
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"International, federal, state, and local law enforcement are working collectively, using a variety of techniques to infiltrate marketplaces, identify users, and combat the illicit drug threat," NCIS officials said. "NCIS, in conjunction with law enforcement partners, continues to use investigative tools--including source networks and tipsters--to identify and prosecute DON personnel attempting to buy LSD or other illicit substances on the dark web."
-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.
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