When the CIA Lost Control: MK-ULTRA & The Grateful Dead

Описание: The Cold War wasn’t just fought overseas – it infiltrated America’s music halls. In the early 1960s, the CIA poured resources into LSD research under Project MK‑ULTRA, hoping to weaponize mind‑altering drugs. By the time the Grateful Dead formed in 1965, the U.S. government was already terrified of a counterculture it couldn’t contain. Agents photographed concerts, tapped phone lines, and treated Deadheads like criminals, not collaborators. Meanwhile, underground chemist Owsley Stanley supplied millions of doses of acid and funded the band’s experimental sound. His conviction, along with dozens of arrests in New Orleans, proved that no shadowy protection existed. This documentary traces how intelligence agencies’ reckless experiments escaped the lab and fueled a movement they later tried to crush. You’ll learn how surveillance files, raids, and prison sentences, not secret support, shaped the band’s legacy; why the MK‑ULTRA program’s collapse matters; and how the Dead turned government panic into art. If you think Tavistock or Laurel Canyon conspiracies are slam‑dunk evidence, this film will challenge those assumptions.

I dont push the affiliate stuff too hard but if you are interested check out a curated reading list on the CIA and LSD.


CHAPTERS / TIMELINE

00:00 — Why people think the Grateful Dead were CIA assets
00:37 — Cold War paranoia, surveillance, and fear of the counterculture
01:55 — MK-ULTRA: the CIA’s real LSD experiments
02:51 — Kesey, Hunter, and the overlap that fuels conspiracy
04:18 — Owsley Stanley and the underground LSD economy
07:15 — FBI wiretaps, concert surveillance, and treating the Dead as a threat
09:25 — New Orleans 1970: arrests, headlines, and consequences
15:07 — Overlap vs. coordination: what the record actually shows

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