U.S. Marines Won’t Stop Taking LSD

A Long, Venerable Association:

‘America’s 2nd Marine Division loves to trip balls. The 20,000 Marine strong division is garrisoned at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and many of its members have been caught taking LSD. It’s such a problem that the Marine Corps has begun to randomly test for the drug and publicly announced a crackdown on people taking it…

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.”…’

— Via Vice