Incense & Peppermints

A molecular march for quality through mind-control chemistry, opiates, birth control pills, colors, plastics, fashion and music

An old portrait of a woman’s eyes with one iris wide open thanks to a drop of belladonna flower extract. “Belladonna,” Italian for “beautiful woman” from a time when fashionable ladies used that lethal drug to make themselves more beautiful. To be more interesting. Get a thrill. Why truly did they do that?

Seeing that portrait for the first time during the lockdowns I suddenly for no reason started singing the song “Incense and Peppermints” by the band Strawberry Alarm Clock. It repeated in my head over and over. Initially released on Southern California radio stations in April 1967. In seven months it hit #1 nationally.

The song was the first hit song recorded on the new 10 track magnetic tape machine showcasing the band’s close harmonies taught by a voice coach to “nobodies” assembled by a record producer. An old chorus trick to make untrained singers sound OK is to use enough people to sing above and below pitch to cancel each other out before the days of auto-tuning computers to make any singer sound on key. A coincidence this song’s lyrics got first dibs and a major marketing effort on that brand new tape technology?

As a small kid during San Francisco’s 1967 “Summer of Love” I first heard that song frequently over the next few years on the radio and as a Muzak elevator music version at my hometown ice skating rink where I zipped around with the smallest skates available from the rink’s skate shop.That song was only a very catchy tune to me. I had no idea it was known as one of the first popular “drug” songs.

“… Good sense, innocence, cripplin' mankind

Dead kings, many things I can't define

Occasions, persuasions clutter your mind

Incense and peppermints, the color of time

Who cares what games we choose?

Little to win, but nothin' to lose”

(Lyrics by John Carter and Tim Gilbert)

Study all the lyrics. It’s a clarion call to hip young people to drop out of established adult society’s mores, hedonistically indulge in smokey rooms full of incense and other substances. Tune out of any cares and responsibilities in that fog to become lost in a timeless self-indulgence. Sway to a beat with a literally hypnotic frequency that will make 40% or more of human brains turn into zombies. The same beat as most of Taylor Swift’s hit songs the first week of May 2024 where she has 14 in the top 100 for Billboard.

The first time I watched Incense & Peppermints on YouTube during the Pandemic lockdowns in Summer 2020, I was surprised to recall the melody and most of the words despite not hearing it in decades. Music memories run deep in most people’s brains. Many dementia victims no longer talking can sing words from songs of their youth. Rhythm and rhymes burrow into our brain’s deep core memories.

The band sits on the song’s record sleeve in their Indian silk and cotton jacquard jackets and shirts on multi-color poofs. Paisley fabrics. A wicker peacock chair. Throw pillows and exotic wall hangings. My parents could have bought all of that stuff in proto-Silicon Valley’s Cost Plus store at Mayfield Mall in Mountain View, California the Summer of 1967.

But they did not. Not quite. Instead, my Mom and I drove there along Central Expressway one day around Summer 1967 from our house in Sunnyvale passing open fields where a few cattle and horses still grazed. Small truck farms for vegetables. Fruit and nut orchards and a lot of working greenhouses mostly full of flowers. A few greenhouses were made of glass but the majority had opaque white plastic rounded roofs, some vacant with the plastic loose and flapping in the breeze awaiting redevelopment in the first wave of single story concrete tilt-up Silicon Valley factories and labs in Sunnyvale and Mountain View. The land along the north side of Central Expressway in Sunnyvale is now mostly owned by Irvine Company of Orange County, California which got its land development start when the US expropriated the Irvine family’s best lima bean fields for a new military airport as WW2 started. It has been in recent years tearing down the one story tilt-ups replacing them with 4+ story glass box offices for people who stare at computer screens all day.

Rows and rows of greenhouses and orchards flashed by me like rows of corn driving through Iowa. I absolutely loved to watch them make patterns as we drove often along that road as I looked for the changes with each season., especially the changing colors from green to gold on the East Bay Hills I could glimpse on the horizon.

My Mom was on a mission to find a new carpet for our family dining room. She knew Cost Plus would have colorful cheap rugs. We looked at each rug in stock and could not find one she liked. She started looking at the woven grass matting. She had a measuring tape and I helped her unfold for consideration a few sections of a grass mat stitched together from squares.

We also looked at all the other stuff in Cost Plus. Wicker peacock chairs. All sorts of cheap textiles, ceramics, incense holders, incense, and soaps. Endless tall and rough edged plywood shelves stuffed with bric-a-brac from India, Japan, Taiwan, and Mexico. I thought the Indian dresses looked very pretty but my Mom showed me how the ones I liked were made of extremely thin cotton muslin with very weak seams. “Not a good buy.” “Not good quality.” “Yes, they look very pretty but they will fall apart in about 3-5 wearings.”

That was my earliest lesson to be skeptical of any new “popular” fashions from clothes to anything else. Always use your brain to investigate things for yourself. She constantly told me, “Just because ‘everyone’ bought ‘it’ (or is doing ‘it’) does not make ‘it’ right or any good.” She never bought me one toy advertised on TV. Instead she gave me a real fox fur and skin puppet, with glass eyes and a real fox fur tail. I could hold it in my arms and make anyone think it was alive. Another childhood favorite toy was made from the curly hair and skin of a real lamb.

Once I asked her if I could have an Easy Bake toy oven a friend had. It was a flimsy metal contraption using a light bulb to cook thin cakes from prepackaged “just add water!” dry mixes. She taught me instead how to make petite four cakes from scratch complete with how to cook royal icing with a candy thermometer. Then she taught me how to pipe on delicate roses with leaves. I needed a step stool to read that thermometer.

[Real lamb curly haired toy, polyester Snoopy, real fox fur puppet, and wool plush bear filled with sawdust]

She especially hated any cheaply made toys or those made mostly of plastics. She made an exception for a Snoopy plush polyester doll and a hard plastic astronaut Snoopy doll because my whole family liked his cartoon strip and we got a kick watching Apollo 10 with its Moon lander named for Snoopy.

She’d grown up with a polymer chemist father who let her play with brand new polymers like bungee cords from his Dupont lab in the 1930’s. He taught her as a toddler to know EXACTLY what each kind of those new synthetic plastic things were to avoid those he considered toxic to humans or not sufficiently tested long-term for safety. When Teflon-coated pans hit the market he refused to allow one in his home.

Off went Mom and I with only the folded grass matting in the back of the car. I helped her center it just so in the dining room. It went well with the mossy green painted French Provençal wooden dining table with its matching upholstered chairs and curtains. A mossy green on white Toile de Jouy heavy cotton fabric with late 1700s French outdoor scenes. Mom found the dining set at at very low price at an estate sale in Hillsborough, a much older and wealthier neighborhood than our neighborhood in proto-Silicon Valley. She bought the fabric at a store in San Francisco. I recall her sewing the curtains and hammering on new chair cushion coverings with tiny black nails. And, her sewing me a small child’s dress from the toile remnants.

That grass mat had a very strong smell. It took many years for the smell to fade. If I pull up my memory of that smell the Incense & Peppermints tune runs in my brain with the smells of Cost Plus sandalwood incense and fingering its floaty Indian muslin dresses, and French toile, too, because I’d experienced those smells, sounds, sights and feels for the first time all together. A weird combination of southern France mashed up with what I pigeon-holed as “hippy” smells and clothes fashions.

Later, I bought one of the pretty Cost Plus Indian dress with money I earned myself. A thin cotton muslin dress for a high school party. It did indeed start popping seams and getting small rips by the fourth time I wore it. About five years ago, I bought a fake silk (rayon) Indian quilt at Cost Plus’ competitor, Pier One Imports. Within 3 weeks of use it started to shed its metal threads in tiny pieces. Two strikes and you are “out” Cost Plus/Pier One for delicate and cheap textiles.

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The Cost Plus store was the closest I got as a kid to the hippy culture of people who dressed like Indian Mughal princes or princesses with shiny and often floaty clothes made with metal threads, love beads around their necks, sitting on wicker peacock chairs or comfy-poofy cushions as smoke from incense and other combustibles created a groovy mood as seen on the “Incense & Peppermints” record sleeve and music video. Well, other than as a young teen attending a hippy commune wedding in the mid-1970’s near the western flat end of Moody Road in Los Altos Hills.

I nearly choked there from the thick incense intended to mask the smell of marijuana to try to fool the midwestern parents of the bride & groom who were hoping for generous cash wedding gifts. I was invited with my parents as guests of the bride who was a brief employee of my Mom. Lots of small children running around wildly, all with their hair uncombed. All commune residents’ cash wages were given to their guru. That commune is still going strong and took over the Catholic church building on El Camino Real in Palo Alto by the 1980’s.

As an adult I often prefer wearing the bright and fun colors of that Summer of Love. An explosive time of psychedelic wildly colored and groovy patterned new fabrics at my Mom and her mother’s favorite fabric store, Britex in San Francisco. All those exuberant neon and swirly Pucci fabrics from Italy. My Mom and the store’s sales staff taught me how to distinguish from the cheaper knockoffs the real Pucci yardage, usually remnants from the past year’s couture fashions. Real Japanese thick and hard-wearing cotton indigos with their knotted shibori and wax resist patterns. Learned why they are expensive due to so much expert hand labor. I knew well the Japanese-American saleslady who bought them for the store. Real Harris Tweeds from Scotland. Fine Italian suiting woolens. Real Japanese and Thai silks. The best lace fabrics and thick duchesse silks kept in a locked back room. I learned each one by feel. Learned how to clean each fabric at home and which needed dry cleaning. How to use my Grandma’s sleeve ironing board and how to use her WW2-era Coke bottle with a cork and metal water sprinkling cap to iron fabrics and which iron temperatures to use on each fabric. They taught me to buy quality to last for a long time. Never to overpay for any cheap knockoffs.

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In junior high school I plowed through all the historical costume books in my nearby public library. The thin Cost Plus Indian dresses made for the export market for quick profits as the musical psychedelic age started have a curious history. Originally, those super finely woven cotton muslins were an ultra luxury item highly prized by Indian royalty and others who did little to no physical work. Like long fingernails in some cultures, those fine and super delicate fashions are an overt signal of not being a peasant. Never “lowering” themselves to do any manual work other than perhaps ladies’ work of decorative embroidery with silk and precious metal threads or gentlemen’s sports of fly fishing or hunting with costly guns. Wear a hat! Don’t risk a suntan or freckles to look like a field worker! Always move around slowly, dignified, and carefully. Always cosseted by servants or slaves. Never risking a tear in their expensive clothes or worrying if a tear happened. Buy another!

Not until fast trains and airlines made winter downhill skiing holidays and winter beach trips a social status thing by the mid-1920’s did having a tan become a status symbol. But, in my family given we come from the misty British Islands and burn in the sunlight, I was raised to be very careful to avoid being burned. Two childhood sunburns turned me off from any idea of “sunbathing” to fit in with “cool” kids. Same as slathering on any greasy sunscreen lotion. Sad to report, one of my high school classmates who slathered on coconut oil for deep tanning during lunchtime got skin cancer on a leg by age 40. And, an uncle who spent his teens as a beach life guard and then decades of outdoor tennis ended up with constant outbreaks of skin cancer. One only needs an average of about 10-15 minutes of sun exposure for healthy levels of Vitamin D with my skin type in the latitude where I live.

[The chemist Lavoisiers before his head was chopped off in 1794 during the Reign of Terror in France. She wears a dress of super thin cotton muslin. layers. The duo did lab research and publishing together. Discovered and named oxygen among many other discoveries.]

The British East India Company shipped that light weight Indian cotton fabric to Europe and made a killing selling it to wealthy women especially in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s when dressing up like Ancient Greek ladies in flimsy floaty dresses was all the rage. Some daring ladies, like Emperor Napoleon’s wife Josephine, would wear only a few layers showing a lot of their anatomies’ details in living color. That was arguably the most socially shocking Western fashion until women started showing their ankles around the end of WW1 as the Jazz Age took off and a few decades later when bikinis came along in 1949 appearing 4 days after their namesake occurred: the first peacetime nuclear test at Bikini Atoll. A beach fashion cashing in on a very well publicized nuclear test.

Thinking of novel fashions, the European Gothic era had many French and Italian women drinking an infusion or extract of deadly nightshade (“belladonna,” Italian for “beautiful woman”) or putting it directly onto their eyes to dilate their eyeballs’ pupils was beyond nutty to me. It could be deadly poisonous if overdosed. Imagine having to stick to the shadows to avoid your retinas being blasted by any light! Another fashion to make rich ladies physically very vulnerable and dependent on servants.

Perhaps, the ancient practice of squashing babies’ heads to be long and flat around the world was worse. Or the bone breaking for female Chinese children to create the high status “lotus” feet was the most painful and disabling fashion? Point: I’m not easily shocked with any new clothes, body fashions, or recreational drugs. Hippy clothes being daring or shocking? Another new use of drugs for recreation or fashion? Full body tattoos and 100’s of piercings? Please. Get in line with our ancestors’ “interesting” practices.

Thicker Indian cotton muslin was sold to less well off women, often wood block printed as a cheap alternative to embroidery. Indian paisley designs with delicate flowers and other Indian motifs such as on the Taj Mahal. It’s fun to track the sumptuary laws in Europe, especially in France, as the Indian and then Egyptian cottons flooded that market and became so popular its government imposed laws to favor its home printed cottons such as Toile de Jouy. Same as England once the Industrial Revolution arrived imposing new tariffs to protect its burgeoning Midlands cotton mills which exported fabric to the world from Liverpool's seaport on the Mersey River using cheap raw cotton from India, Egypt and the Old South of the USA. I look at an old family quilt from the the late-1800s and see many fabrics with swirling Indian paisley patterns, faded vegetable dyes, and some early dyes made from iron and other metal solutions so badly oxydized now the fabric has melted over decades wherever those dyes were used.

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That quilt led me to William Henry Perkins who made in 1856 the first ever synthetic aniline dye for fabric. He was trying to create a synthetic version of a natural extract from the bark of Cinchona trees of South America. The Incas of Peru long used it as a malaria treatment as well as for leg cramps. They found it reduced fevers and chills by chewing the bark. By 1633 the bark was being used in Europe and by 1820 a white powdery potent extract was made by French pharmacist Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and chemist Joseph-Bienaimé Caventou.

Perkins in 1856 working as a very young man in a poorly equipped English attic laboratory knew the British Army had been spending a tremendous amount of money giving its military personnel in India and its other tropical colonies a daily dose of purified natural quinine, that French white crystalline alkaloid powder which tasted so bitter. In the mid-1800’s, the British and Dutch governments trying to rule swaths of southeast Asia with their armies and navies constantly falling sick with tropical diseases were desperately trying to find the cinchona species with the highest quinine amounts and planting them all over India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Java.

In 1825, a British Army officer in India discovered if he put his required quinine dose into water and added gin it did not taste too bad. His first ever “Gin & Tonic” started the cocktail hour ritual at British Army officers’ clubs around the world thanks to that useful white powder. Why do G&T’s taste so good to many people? Tonic made with quinine is bitter and sour. Gin made with juniper berries is tart. All together is a harmonious flavor for many palates. A popular bottled nonalcoholic beverage made by Schweppes since 1957 called Bitter Lemon uses lemon juice, pith and peel to mask its quinine flavor.

Alternatively, the Fever Tree company sells in almost all my local grocery stores nonalcoholic bottled water with “natural quinine” perhaps from the South American Cinchona tree or the Fever Tree (Vachellia xanthophloea) of Africa, a type of acacia. Its bark has long been used there as a prophylactic and treatment for malaria as well as for "diabetes, fatigue, indigestion, skin disorders, febrile, fevers, gingivitis, high cholesterol, emetic, mouth sores, pharyngitis, and tuberculosis symptoms.” That Acacia’s bark is unusual because it does photosynthesis which most tree bark does not do, instead using trees’ leaves or needles. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844021025287

I’ve found no medical studies showing natural quinine or whatever comes from the African Fever Trees produces over time any “drug resistant malaria” bacteria like so many lab made antibiotics are said to do. Has anyone done a study to find correlations for when each lab-made synthesized antibiotic drugs don’t work so well and the date their patents expire? Differing efficacy and side-effect rates between the unpatented, natural and pure products versus the patented lab-made tweaked ones with ever new chemical formulas for each active molecule and new side-effects for some or all people?

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A few blocks from my current home used to be an acacia orchard grown to sell its beautiful bright yellow ball flowers and feathery leaves to winter flower markets from California to Boston. I think it may have been planted by a gentleman farmer, a retired CEO from a big Detroit car company who came to California before WW2. A few of those trees remain off Magdalena Road in Los Altos Hills. Why did all my local schools ignore that species’ medicinal properties? I just knew it in my youth as a decorative tree.

Who exactly benefits most by not teaching USA schoolchildren about the long known medical uses of such beneficial plants? For example, not until I was an adult did I learn it’s common in Mexico for people to eat nopales (prickly pear cactus) as a vegetable side dish or in powered form in capsules to reduce diabetics’ blood sugar. My Mom, a diabetic on insulin, once did blood tests before and after eating a side dish portion of cooked nopales and the result was exactly the same as if she’d taken insulin. Another slimy green vegetable, okra, has similar effects, IIRC. Do your own research!

I was also an adult when I learned one of the first successful US manufacturers of birth control pills, Syntex, first used a Mexican root vegetable as the active ingredient. I’ve spent most of my life driving almost daily right past the old Syntex administration, marketing and lab headquarters across the street from the Palo Alto Veterans Administration hospital. The company’s street sign changed in 2008 to that of a Swiss pharmaceutical privately held company, Roche. It bought out Syntex in 1994 after it had too many years of living “high on the hog” with its birth control profits never able to develop in house or buy enough new lucrative patented drugs after its birth control patent finally expired. Next, the software company VMWare occupied Syntex/Roche’s offices and labs, and now it’s for lease again. A lot of vacancies on that Stanford University Trust’s business park since the 2020 lockdowns started.

Syntex’s lead scientist Carl Djerassi in my lifetime was mostly known locally for his artists' retreat on Skyline Boulevard overlooking the Pacific Ocean, built on a cattle ranch he bought in the early 1960s. His company was originally founded in 1944 in Mexico City as Laboratories Syntex S.A. to market steroids from two kinds of Mexican yams: cabeza de negro and barbasco. A new Mexican trade emerged post-WW2 to grow and sell barbasco yams thanks to the chemical work of that company’s first founders Russell Marker, Emeric Somlo, and Federico Lehmann. Bitter feuds and blaming slow Mexican bureaucrats, their company moved its incorporation to Panama and its administration, marketing and labs to its operating headquarters in Palo Alto by 1959 to the Stanford Trust’s brand new research business park. Its factories were in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas.

Djerassi and other scientists from Syntex synthesized the steroid cortizone from diosgenin, the useful phytosteroid from the Mexican yams. They next used diosgenin to synthesize the human sex hormone progesterone and finally norethendrine, a patentable and powerful birth control molecule to add to their patented other processes. That lab-tweaked molecule is not broken down in livers as fast as nature’s progesterone.

Oops! Some of first birth control pills rushed to market in the late 1950s and early 1960s - and in ever greater amounts once the USA legalized the birth control pill in 1964 for any women not just married ones - many of those pills had over 10x the needed dose and as a result or a “mere coincidence” many women developed cancers in sexual organs a couple decades later. Every female relative of mine who regularly took those pills in the early to mid-1960’s got cancers or in one case severe endometriosis.

Funny, no need for warning labels on the Mexican yams in grocery stores for women who *want* to become pregnant. I’ve no idea how many yams are needed to make each birth control pill. Probably none with new & improved lab-made molecules needing one novel chemical tweak away from nature to get a lucrative patent.

During the pandemic lockdowns I learned which two herbs Western European and the Americas healers and midwives have used most often for centuries to induce a miscarriage when a fetus died or to expel a stuck placenta after a birth. Both herbs are easy to grow where I live. I’ve seen them growing wild. Why a need for patented birth control pills if one can forage for a plant used safely for centuries by midwives? In Europe before the Pill it used to be considered morally acceptable by most to abort a fetus if done before “quickening” when a baby’s movements could be felt.

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Syntex starting with growing yams had a much cheaper way to manufacture birth control pills than one if its lead competitors, Merck. Its company process started from bile acids. Lots of slaughtered animals were needed for that Merck process just like the cow and steer pancreases used in the early 1920’s by the Eli Lilly company which got the USA’s legal monopoly to make insulin by the patented Banting & Best process developed by testing on countless dogs and slaughtering countless mammals to use their pancreases to make insulin. Those Canadian scientists put their patent immediately into the public domain to “benefit mankind” but drug companies around the world made a lot of money manufacturing and selling it.

A US insulin monopoly for Lilly begun in 1923 ran for many decades. A back room deal smoothed along by then US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes (later a US Supreme Court Justice) whose daughter Elizabeth was the only American in the first group of human test subjects for the Canadians’ insulin. For a long time after her father left the US State Department she continued to get her Canadian insulin direct from Banting & Best’s Toronto, Canada lab via diplomatic mail. Wall Street investors rushed to invest in the Lilly company to own more of its shares.

Elizabeth developed sudden onset juvenile diabetes in 1918 right when the US government was pushing out to the US civilian population surplus novel inoculations and serums given to its WW1 soldiers and sailors, many known now to cause the side effect of ADE (autoimmune enhanced dependency) which crashes immune systems and thus can trigger many diseases such as sudden onset diabetes. Elizabeth survived to 1922 by a hair’s breathe after enduring a brutal starvation diet to stay alive. When Banting and Best announced their success in 1922 treating one 14 year old teenager diabetic near death she was alone with a private nurse at a remote beach house in the Bermuda waiting to die. I’m not surprised her father fought so hard to save the life of his brave daughter. “Some animals are more equal than others,” wrote Orwell.

Once she completed her first rounds of insulin as a human test subject she hid to her death the fact she was a diabetic and on insulin even from her own children. She considered herself “cured.” She is known today mostly for helping to establish the US Supreme Court’s historical organization under her married name.

Despite now over 100 years of very well-funded scientists trying to prevent or cure diabetes, insulin is still the institutionally favored treatment “protocol” with global rates of diabetes quadrupling between 1980 and 2014. Today, most diabetics inject a patented genetic product made by slicing the human gene for insulin out of DNA and stitching it into bacterial DNA to produce insulin in great quantities. US insulin market in North America for 2024 is projected to be nearly $11.6B annually. Five companies dominate the US insulin business: Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, Lilly, Pfizer, and Biocon.

Such a lucrative business! And growing!!! The first ever genetic slice & dice pharmaceutical product was lab-made insulin created in 1978 by Genentech company of California. Founded in 1976, went public on the stock market in 1980, and mass marketed its invention through Lilly in 1982 as “humulin.” Private Swiss pharmaceutical corporation Roche bought a 60% controlling share in 1990. How much in 2024 does Roche spend annually to find out how truly to cure diabetes to reduce its annual profits with its cash cow selling prescription vials to diabetics? Or to learn what triggers cause it and disarm those triggers? Tick tock since Banting & Best revived a diabetic dog from a high blood sugar coma in 1921.

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In 1932, Johan Andersag and his colleagues at the Bayer company in Germany created the first synthetic derivative of natural quinine: chloroquine. I.G. Farben company patented it in 1937 disclosing the process of adding this to that and heating at 180 degrees Celsius for seven hours. For many years, the Germans ignored it thinking it was too toxic for human use until they needed something to treat malaria for its army sent to steamy areas cut off from South American and Asian quinine supplies. The US Army seized German supplies of chloroquine on a WW2 North African battlefield and by 1947 had proven it was useful not only for treating malaria but also preventing it.

For travel to Burma nearly 40 years ago, I took a series of ten of those extremely bitter tasting malaria prophylactic synthetic pills. Chloroquine interacts with the human immune system in many positive ways such as the well known use of another derivative, hydroxychloroquine given regularly to many lupus patients and prophylactically for other diseases. But for some people, like me, chloroquine likely triggered a lifetime case of the auto-immune disease psoriasis, a known common side effect of that synthetic quinine derivative for which the doctor who proscribed the pills through his “travel” nurse at a clinic did not inform me, nor did that nurse. It took me many years to figure out how to manage those skin rash outbreaks after learning all the allopathic proscribed steroidal potions just made the condition worse in the long term. If I could turn back the clock I’d never have taken those pills and guzzled instead Schwepps Bitter Lemon mocktails which many of my British traveling companions did.

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In 2022, I learned a stovetop recipe from a video online how to make hydroxychloroquine using a covered pot, water, pine needles from my back yard and lots of leftover citrus rinds I collected for a few weeks and kept frozen in my freezer, dried frijole pinto beans from my pantry rehydrated overnight, and some fresh citrus juice and rinds, too. The whole “process” trick in the public domain is stew everything up with water for about an hour or so at a low simmer and never open the lid until the whole thing is cooled down because the active ingredient once created goes gaseous and must cool off, distilling down back into the liquid which can then be sieved of solids and kept in a fridge useful for about 5-6 days. Drink a small portion as a “tonic” every day if worried about colds or flu. I made it once. Not a bad taste.

Alternatively, I prefer to get more Vitamin D from sunlight daily, consume more fresh citrus juice and dried fruits for Vitamin C, and eat a few Brazil nuts or walnuts as great sources of zinc to boost one’s immune system. Eat more garlic or ginger. Homemade Chinese or Jewish ‘“grandmother” chicken soup also works remarkably well to cure colds and flu.

Learned in 2022 that fresh dandelions chelate heavy metals out of livers. Just 2-3 salads each spring do that trick. I now forage each spring for young dandelions. And, eat more fresh cilantro which does the same but not as quickly. How many times have I eaten tacos with fresh cilantro, beans, nopales, onions, and a squeeze of fresh Mexican limes? Thrown a handful of cilantro in a soup made from leftover chicken bones? “Peasant” diets are almost always cheap and super healthy. Add an occasional G&T cocktail, Fever Tree tonic, or Schweppes Bitter Lemon and whoot! I’ve not had a bad cold or flu of any kind since November 2019. Luck or diet?

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Back to Perkins. In 1856 he knew many people living in tropical areas endemic with malaria drank a lot of G&T’s with the very expensive cinchona bark extract powder. He figured if he could make quinine in his lab he could be rich and famous which is why he was experimenting with coal tar because it has the chemical building blocks of the natural quinine family of molecules. Little did he know those also are the chemical building blocks to the entire families of synthetic aniline dyes, plastics, and many mind-altering drugs.

Take dead plants. A lot of them. Such as from the mass extinction of nearly all plant life at the end of the Devonian Period about 350 million years ago as the 60 million year long Carboniferous geologic period ended. Bury them under thick sediment deposits, every layer piling on more pressure which heats up the carbon-based dead plant goo, cooks it, and you get coal, tar, and oil made of rings and chains of carbon molecules. Do the same heat & pressure routine in a garden compost pile with your yard clippings and vegetable peelings to make natural gas. Add water and some pressure to make peat which my Irish forebears used to burn to cook food and heat their homes.

“Carboniferous” means “coal-bearing” and those are the rock layers where we find all around the planet some of the biggest coal, oil, tar and gas deposits. But just from your kitchen and yard waste you can make at home those same useful carbon atom chains and rings. In a simple lab or home kitchen you can break down and rearrange those molecular components to synthesize chemicals similar to natural plant alkaloids such as quinine as I’ve done on my stovetop to make hydroxychloroquine.

You could also brew beer and distill alcohol at home to make the alcohol molecule with a line of two carbon atoms itching to combust. Ever wonder why home distilling was outlawed in the USA just when alcohol powered cars were becoming more popular? As well as electric cars. Fuel your car with vodka made from potato peelings! Plug your car into the new electric power lines. Now we’ve at least got corn-based ethanol.

Powerful natural plant alkaloid molecules include nicotine (made from two carbon rings each made of 6 carbon atoms), morphine (three carbon rings), steroids (four carbon rings), and strychnine (four carbon rings). Capsaicin (one carbon ring) from chili peppers can burn your lips and mouth if you don’t counteract it with enough salt. It reduces inflammation inside your body and thus can be used as a pain reliever. Do you see a pattern? How powerful and useful but sometimes dangerous these plant extracts can be?

Morphine is a natural alkaloid extract derived from the sticky gooey white excretion called “latex” produced when an opium poppy seed pod is cut with a knife. Latex is also what comes out of a rubber tree if you slash its bark. And, the chicle tree in Mexico which gave its indigenous name "tzictli" to Chicle, Incorporated’s chewing gum which was first made from chicle latex. Latex seals a plant's wounds allowing the plant to survive and thus fight off attacks from pests. Another opium poppy natural alkaloid from its latex is codeine. It is less addictive than morphine and very useful as a pain killer. You can get the same chemical effect for codeine by mixing Advil and Tylenol.

Slash those opium poppies' seed heads with a knife, let the latex seep out, go back later and rub off the latex with your dusty hands or a dirty knife, roll the gunk into grimy balls, pack into bricks, and bingo: raw opium.

British and New England Yankee clipper sailing ship merchants made fortunes running raw opium around the world such as Warren Delano, a grandfather of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Others made fortunes taking raw opium blocks to labs to make a cleaner and much more powerful product. By 1804, chemists isolated and crystallized the most highly addictive opium alkaloid and thus began the very lucrative sales of morphine.

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More than 4,000 years ago, the Incas in Peru were chewing coca leaves to speed up their breathing as they climbed into the high Andes Mountains and also used it for religious ceremonies to have visual and auditory hallucinations, practices stopped by the invading Spanish in the 1500’s. But, they allowed the Peruvians to chew the coca leaves while working as silver miners and to make them easier to control and work harder.

In 1859 German chemist, Albert Niemann, extracted cocaine as the active alkaloid of coca leaves. About 1884, Sigmund Freud experimented by taking cocaine himself and decided it was great as a cure for depression and sexual impotence. On May 8, 1886, Dr. John Pemberton put cocaine into a drink at his Atlanta pharmacy as a pick-me-up tonic/refreshment. The Coca-Cola company was born thanks to that highly additive coca leaves’ alkaloid.

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Albert Hofmann, a chemist with Sandoz Pharmaceutical, synthesized LSD in 1938 at his Basel, Switzerland lab. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. He was tying to create a blood stimulant. Not until he accidentally got some LSD into his mouth in 1943 did he realize a dose as small as 25 micrograms, the weight of a few grains of salt, sent his brain into intense hallucinations. Sandoz quickly mailed samples of his patented product all around the world hoping to find a lucrative use for the new discovery. WW2 was raging.

Many governments and others did experiments to see if it could be weaponized. A heinous 1951 possible test in the southern French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit had an entire town dosed with something causing mass insanity. It was officially attributed to moldy bread (ergot fungus on which the Lavosiers worked) but may have been an aerosolized LSD test by the MK-Ultra program run by the US and UK and/or its French government equivalent. From 250 people affected, 50 were sent to mental asylums and 7 died.

Check out the US Congressional hearings in the 1970’s on MK-Ultra and other secret CIA mind-control experiments exposed after one too many horror shows of harmed unwitting human lab rats. Read the hearing transcripts and weep. The Americans and Canadians experimented on children without their parents’ full informed consent. Dosed them with heroin and LSD to turn them into Manchurian Candidate assassins and Lolita honey traps. They also experimented on patients institutionalized in mental asylums and veterans’ hospitals. Humans tortured as lab rats as seen in the movies “Clockwork Orange” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

WW2 German scientists picked up by Operation Paperclip, especially those who did experiments with truth serums and electroshock as a torture weapon in concentration camps, popped up all over the US, British Commonwealth, and USSR doing mind-control experiments from 1946 to the 1970’s and beyond in stunning numbers. The USA signed a WW2 occupation agreement/qua “peace treaty” with Japan in 1951 while the Korean War raged only after the USA got hold of the lab books and scientists who’d experimented with weaponized powdered anthrax at Imperial Japan’s Mukden Camp for POWs in northern China. Biochem Warfare, another new tech weapon in the “Cold” War. The USA’s National Archives still keeps in 2024 those Mukden lab books secret. Or maybe the Soviets got those lab books after they declared war on Japan *after* the USA dropped its first nuclear bomb on Japan and they raced into Japanese-occupied China?

LSD works by interacting with the receptors on brains’ neural cell membranes which normally interact with our naturally produced serotonin and dopamine hormones which work as neurotransmitters to allow brain cells to communicate with each other. All acting like keys in doorways, LSD chemically is very similar to those hormones and also to psilocybin found in magic mushrooms and mescaline from several cacti species.

LSD essentially parks itself in the brain cell membrane receptors for hormones like dopamine which opens neural cells’ signal transmitter pathways. Thus, LSD by “parking” essentially forces open for an unnaturally long time many doors simultaneously inducing chaotic access of memories and thoughts by short circuiting the normal memory and thought processing pathways. LSD opens so many doorways simultaneously that the brain will access current sensory inputs and past memories of visuals, sounds, tastes, and feels, and likely also for some people trigger what seems like or perhaps is extrasensory perception (ESP) for future events or “remote” viewing of present day happenings.

Perhaps LSD also opens a doorway to the “fifth” element, the “ether” connecting one’s corporal body with the “astral plain” or “spirit world” as many ancient human civilizations believed and some people living today, too. Perhaps, thinking full “woo-woo” going to a place, thing, or state of mind like the Star Wars sagas’ Jedi use of The Force as the character Yoda says surrounds us and binds us all together. Science fiction writers often do predict the future!

Natural plant alkaloids codeine, cocaine, and morphine work in the same way as LSD by interacting with serotonin and dopamine neural cell membrane receptors but produce more of a pain-free opiate mental slow drift instead of psychedelic LSD trips.

Starting in the mid-1950’s, Humphrey Osmond, a British psychiatrist working in Saskatchewan, Canada, tried to cure about 2,000 alcoholics with an LSD and mescaline experiment. He coined the word “psychedelic” to describe the effects including the wild colors seen by those testing the drugs. He worked closely for a while with the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson. Harvard student Timothy Leary tried to join Bill’s work with Osmond but was rebuffed after his Boston drug experiments triggered a public scandal when he experimented with mind-altering drugs on minors who had very bad reactions.

The connection between LSD and the AA founder started at the Trabuco College in Southern California at a conference in May 1953 where Osmond provided mescaline to Aldous Huxley, the author of “Brave New World,” a 1932 bestseller about a utopia where all humans are controlled by the pleasure drug “Soma” and all babies are made in test tubes. Huxley by the 1950’s was living in Los Angeles and Palo Alto. Osmond oversaw at the author’s Palo Alto home his experimenting in 1953 with 4/10th of a gram of mescaline as a willing lab rat. Huxley and others seriously wanted to use LSD and the recreational drug culture to try to create a new world of peace and love for everyone by using mind altering drugs. The masses to be controlled by government drug pushers and mind-control scientists. His brother Julian Huxley was a leader in the eugenics movement and the first director of UNESCO.

The result of Aldous Huxley’s willing human lab rat experience was his “The Doors of Perception” book published the next year. He wrote:

“The mystical experience is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life.”

Huxley died of a deliberate LSD overdose in his hillside home right below the “HOLLYWOOD” sign looming over Los Angeles. A dose given to him at his request facing a lethal cancer by his last token wife after he’d led a mostly sad and unhappy life as a closet homosexual. No wonder he thought a utopia of no sex, endless “Soma” mind dulling drugs, and test tube babies was a great idea.

Leary ran with the idea of a peace & love recreational drug culture and started traveling around California in the 1960’s trumpeting the fun of “expanding your consciousness” with LSD while coining the slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Drop “acid” and take a “trip.” It was the cool thing to do. He made a fortune selling drugs such as LSD and hashish from his base in Laguna Beach, a old artists colony where lived another LSD promoter, Aldous Huxley’s longtime friend Gerald Heard. Many famous people like actor Cary Grant started talking LSD for the rest of their lives. Time, Life and Fortune magazines’ owner Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Booth Luce, a playwright, managing editor of Vanity Fair magazine, US Congress member, and US ambassador to Italy, joined in. Many said they saw God himself and the future on their drug-fueled trips.

Check out the 1980 book “The Aquarian Conspiracy” detailing Huxley’s connections to Stanford’s Center for Advanced Studies in Behavior Sciences (CASBS), SRI, and the Palo Alto and Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospitals described in Ken “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” Kesey, and Huxley’s promotion of Indian religious practices in Southern California starting in the early 1940’s. Lots of theories running around about CIA mind-control and youth social experiments especially in California. Huxley and Gerald Heard who founded Trabuco, arguably were the two first Californian New Age evangelists/hippies. For more on CASBS 1950’s research for CIA mind control work see also: ajvalleyheartsdelight.substack.com/p/a-walk-with-a-cook-county-ballot

***

About the scandalous Boston experiment…

Walter Pahnke, a Harvard graduate student in theology set up in 1962 his “Good Friday Experiment” at Boston University under the supervision of Leary with his Harvard magic mushrooms project. Psilocybin was given to see if the mind-bending drug could deepen a person’s religious experiences. It was a shoddy experiment poorly designed and managed. At least one student given the psychedelic drug had to be restrained and injected with Thorazine after he’d run away from the chapel test site determined to tell the world he’d been picked to announce the return of the Messiah. Many others had acute anxiety during the experiment which Pahnke did not initially report in his lab write-up. Some of the students were legal minors unable to give legal full informed consent without signatures of their parents or guardians. Plenty of criminal liability for violations under the Nuremberg Code treaty enshrined today in US statutes starting with the legal requirement of full informed consent for all human lab rats unless one has an easy to get sign-off from an institutional research review board to be allowed to keep human lab rats in the dark.

In May 1963, Osmond up in Canada wrote to a colleague he was concerned about Tim Leary. Hard to maintain contact with him. Leary had failed to find an adequate advisor for psychopharmacology and was experimenting with LSD and other powerful chemicals as if they were harmless toys. “They aren’t,” he wrote.

Time magazine reported in March 1966 the US had an LSD epidemic. June 1966, California and Nevada outlawed it. All of the USA outlawed it on October 6, 1966. Like alcohol Prohibition in the US a hundred years ago, making something a taboo and thus titillating to highly impressionable youth and others is not always a good idea. The Sandoz company as patent holder terminated all publicly authorized LSD research experiments in April 1966. But, the secret government mind-control programs continued such as MK-Ultra/Monarch at SRI and the Palo Alto and Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospitals, people secretly cooked up LSD in labs, and public tests resumed around 1992.

***

In 1953, the Belgian Dr. Paul Janssen started his own company, Janssen Pharmaceutica to find new pharmaceutical products. Six years later while trying to find a more powerful synthetic derivative for morphine, he created something 100 times more powerful and called it “Fentanyl”. He cashed in when his company merged with Johnson & Johnson in April 1962. The same Janssen company holds a key patent for J&J’s Covid serum taken off the market in May 2023 after too many bad side-effects. So very convenient for its covid serum competitors like Moderna and Pfizer to lose a competitor with their lipid nanoparticle patent(s) shared with US government employees, contractors, and grant winners. For more J&J/Janssen covid jab details in a 5/1/24 Substack post:

How did we get 22 J&J (Janssen) DEATHS in the last VAERS update?

J&J’s serum was without, as its competitors had, a lipid nanoparticle. Pfizer and Moderna’s lipid nanoparticles are designed with an mRNA segment inside a fatty (lipid) package to be able to slip inside every cell in the body, even normally well protected cells like brain and placenta cells. Their RNA segment then transinfects the host cells’ DNA to pump out endless copies of the covid spike protein as a misfolded and very dangerous prion molecule thanks to that RNA with its lab spliced-in gene sequences for cancer and sterilization.

J&J with no lipid nanoparticle particle instead injected billions [sic] of spike protein molecules into each human arm with each dose. Each protein a prion molecule “created” in a lab using the December 2019 half page gene sequence provided by the USA-funded Wuhan lab. What could possibly go wrong with shoddy lab work or drug peddling by reckless drug pushers who profit financially by “vaccine” (cough, bioweapon) research and sales with USA “vaccine” legal liability shields for manufacturers, proscribing doctors, and nurse injectors strengthened by the 2020 PREP Act to prevent product defect and FDA approved drug pushing “protovcols” from lawsuits by injured consumers.

Janssen’s Fentanyl was originally used as an anesthetic for a long time only in operating rooms or in very slow doses from transdermal patches for those with extreme pain such as end-stage cancer. It is so lucrative today it has entered the narco-criminal market and now is responsible for an increasing number of deaths in the USA because it is a cheap way to make cocaine, heroin, and plaster powders appear more powerful in a taste test.

Many drug addicts turn to that extremely powerful synthetic drug with lethal consequences after their brain cell membrane receptors for other opiates have been literally fried such as happened, at least the public story goes, to the singers Prince and Michael Jackson. Take too many opiates too often and your brain can’t get “high” despite ever increasing doses, until finally the brain is unable to signal a heart to keep beating or a diaphragm to keep pumping air into the lungs.

Last weekend on a road trip through the Salinas River Valley, I saw for the first time Fentanyl doses of the kind passed out weekly on Wednesdays to drug addicts at nearby California State University/Monterey Bay. I’d struck up a conversation with a man sitting under a tree at a fast food parking lot along the interstate. He showed me a clear plastic bag with 2-3 packets labeled Fentanyl complete with a small glass pipe to smoke it. Each packet was laced with something to make addicts’ stomachs upset. He said it takes about 1-2 months for addicts to tapper off their opiate drug use. Then a bit later, many want to start all over again self-medicating, tuning out.

Human brain cells are not like the cells in our fingernails. We are born with pretty much all the brain cells we will have is one current theory. Another theory says neural cells can regenerate over a long time or with the right conditions as they do for some animals. Damage one brain cell and it is not easily replaced like our fingernails which keep growing as long as the nail bed under the skin is OK. Thus, frying your brain cells with an opiate like Fentanyl is not wise. Nor is injecting a lipid nanoparticle capable of entering a brain cell with an inserted novel mRNA technology never used on humans until 2020 because all past lab test animals died or became sterile after a couple of generations. Well… I’ve been saying for 4 years now, “You can’t fix stupid” ever since mainstream news trumpeted and Mockingbird-parroted loudly the new mRNA lipid nanoparticle and spike protein (cough, a prion like what is thought to cause Mad Cow, Guillane-Barr, etc.) whiz-bang “It’s new! Safe and effective!!” high pressure consumer products’ marketing spin mantras.

The mRNA serums are still the only prophylactics approved by WHO for corona viruses. Why? All use costly patented processes still not finished with long term safety studies. “Caveat emptor!” warned the Ancient Romans.

***

While Perkins did not ever figure out how to make a synthetic quinine derivative in his laboratory, when he spilled an unexplained coal tar new goo he’d made, he realized he had created a colorfast purple dye which turned out to be the first ever synthetic dye. He named it “mauveine” or “mauve” for short. Aniline synthetic dyes like mauve and fushia, and synthetic quinine are all part of same coal tar and plant alkaloid carbon-based family of “organic” chemistry working with rings and chains composed of carbon atoms.

[Fuchsia display at the Chemistry Museum in Basel, Switzerland]

Before Perkin’s discovery, dyes for fabrics and papers were often extremely expensive to produce. Artists ground up the lapis lazuli gemstones for a rich blue paint. Want blue? Dye fabric by fermenting indigo plants in a very long and extremely smelly process.

Red colors from madder plants faded easily. The Chinese made bright red lacquer from extremely expensive liquid mercury. One of the best reds to dye fabric came from crushed tiny cochineal bugs living on prickly pear cactus plants from Mexico. Packets of 1,000’s their dead bodies were worth more by weight than silver.

Non-fugitive bright yellows and greens were nearly impossible to create. Most colors were muted and dull. A person of 2024 going back to 1856 would have thought nearly everyone’s clothes looked like they’d been dipped in mud. No neon bright colors from aniline dyes anywhere.

[Herr Merck, whose German family company was selling morphine by 1827 and next introduced Europe to cocaine.]

Before Perkins, a strong and deep purple color was extremely expensive to produce from grinding up the murex snails from the eastern Mediterranean or other hard to find flora and fauna sources. That’s why in Ancient Rome and many European countries only senators, royalty or high priests were allowed by law to wear purple. At the Crystal Palace in London built to celebrate the world’s cultural and technological achievements, Queen Victoria wore one of the first silk dresses ever made from Perkin’s patented “mauve” dye. Rule Britannia’s new synthetic chemical industry!

Can we imagine a world today without chemicals made in labs? Mr. Bayer and master dyer Mr. Westcott founded their company in 1862 after the discovery of a synthetic fuchsia-colored dye. Another Bayer company early product was acetylsalicylic acid to mimic an extract from willow bark. Today we know that as “Aspirin.” Many take a baby pill of it every day to “thin their blood” to reduce blood clot risk after strokes and heart attacks. If I want to use “aspirin” for temporary pain, I prefer to use a salve made of willow bark from a small shop in Minnesota called LakotaMade.

During the lockdowns I became addicted for a few days to bovine hoof trimmer videos. Always loved when they brought out great handfuls of salicylic acid white power to put on infected and bloody abcesses to ease the animals’ hoof pain and thus speed healing. A cheap, unpatented natural product with no to few side effects. Also enjoyed watching the hoof trimmers use cheap colored sprays on digital dermatitis and serious bleeding such as orangish iodine and blue/green copper solutions.

Bayer was the first company to sell a lab purified version of opium which it trademarked by 1899 as “Heroin.” It was initially sold mostly in a cough syrup. In 1903, the company began selling the first synthetic opiate sleeping aide, the first barbiturate.

In the mid-1920’s when Germans were paying for bread with wheelbarrows of obscenely inflated cash thanks to WWI reparations to the Allies, Bayer and several other German chemical companies merged to create I.G. Farben. It’s most well known synthetic chemical product was Zyklon B. Bayer and other scientists did brutal eugenics experiments during WW2 such as using Zyklon B to murder civilians and also tested new synthetic anesthetics and malaria drugs on concentration camp inmates. The Nazis in Germany and the Japanese Imperial Army at its Mukden POW camp in China also messed around with new synthetic chemicals to aerosolize anthrax as a “better” bioweapon.

The Germans dosed their troops Blitzkrieg-ing into Poland with amphetamine upper pills. The US Army Air Corps bosses did the same for its long range bomber aircrews over Germany. So did the US Navy in the South Pacific for its long range aircrews. What did the military brass care about their troops getting strung out on such pills? Including “downer” barbiturates to make their troops strung out on “uppers” to be able to sleep. “There’s a war on!,” the best excuse in wartime to justify more maimings and deaths even of your sides’ soldiers.

For a high school summer course in a college trying to pull an all-nighter to get a paper done I took a dose from a 7-11 store of a big liquid caffeine hit from a little yellow and red bottle. The one and only time l’ve ever done such a stupid human trick with an upper. All it did was make me jittery, my mind worked slower, got an upset stomach, a headache, and blew my sleep circadian rhythm for several days. Totally mucked up my Rapid Eye Movement nightly dream state cycle. Take that daily for months blowing one’s ability to dream nightly and I suspect most might turn into psychotic and jittery ragers.

Late in WW2, the US Army set up its first smokejumper program, the all-Negro “Triple Nickels” in Pendleton, Oregon being very worried the Japanese war balloons coming here via the trans-Pacific Ocean jet stream had bioweapons aboard. The US government had before December 7, 1941 broken Japanese Imperial government codes. Many of the Axis countries’ bioweapon scientists from Japan and Germany were given asylum in the USA after WW2. Put parachutes on “expendable” soldiers n a racially segregated military! The WW2 Japanese bioweapon research is still classified. A Satanic nadir for the chemical academy and industry. Or are the 1950-60's mind-control synthetic drug experiments on unwitting children the worst? Or today’s Covid “vaccine” bioweapons?

[Chemistry Museum in Basel, Switzerland. A fruit and herb garden above the fountain. Formerly the home of the printer Froben who dared to print Eramus’ books as the Protestant Reformation was kicking off.]

***

Perkin’s mauve dye also led directly to the development of plastics and other polymer synthetic materials. All made from carbon rings and chains. Some good. Some very bad, especially for the environment with early shoddy manufacturing processes thanks to chemists not knowing or manufacturing companies’ unwillingness to face the full effects of long term use.

Polymer rayon cloth and nylon threads to replace silk clothes and ladies’ hose. Polyester to replace cotton, linen and woolens. Synthetic rubber to replace natural latex rubber. Plastics to make Tupperware to replace metal and ceramic kitchen equipment. Naugahyde to replace leather.

At a very early age, I was taught by my Mom and her mother how to tell what any fabric was made of by feel. How long each kind of fabric lasts and how each should be washed. Why some fabrics are so much cheaper than others. Spinning a fabric thread from a vat of petroleum in a manufacturing plant is much cheaper and faster than growing the fibers in plants or from animal fur, hair or skins. How many who advocate to reduce use of carbon “fossil fuels” realize their polyester shirt, synthetic rubber running shoes’ soles, naugahyde bike seat, computer keyboard, and car’s driving wheel were all created from a vat of gooey oil or coal tar? Or that they can create “fossil fuels” from their garden and kitchen waste?

Teflon coatings. Nomex for fire resistant pilots’ flight suits. I stick to cotton undergarments for tactical flying having seen with my own eyes what polymer fabrics do to human skin in fires. It bonds with it to destroys it.

Kevlar for bullet proof vests. PFAs and other “forever” chemicals created in chemistry labs and all thanks to William Henry Perkins working alone, about 18 years old in his home attic lab trying to create a cheaper malaria treatment.

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There has been a lot of synergy between chemicals, youthful pop music, and clothes’ fashion. Without chemistry there are no vinyl records, magnetic tapes, CDs, nor most amplifier components or silicon computer chips to play recorded music.

Listening to the 1967 “Incense & Peppermints” song during the 2020-22 lockdowns I wondered why and how did the style in the West for “exotic” Indian textiles and psychedelic chemicals occur in California virtually overnight just in time for the Summer of Love. Huxley and Heard had recruited a Hindu guru to Trabuco College before 1950 while by the early 1950’s Huxley, Stanford University, Leary, et al were running wild with LSD experiments. What were the key tipping points to get all that into popular youth culture by 1967? Each step it seems on a ten year timeline.

Perhaps for the mass market an important step was the Beatles’ movie “Help!” which hit the USA market in August 1965? George Harrison first heard a sitar being played in the “Help!” scene at an Indian restaurant. The movie was dripping with Indian textiles. The lead villain, a modern day Thuggee cultist, and his chief adversary wore them. In late 1965, Harrison got his hands on a sitar and added its sounds to the first western pop song to use that instrument: “Norwegian Wood.” He started appearing in photos playing the sitar barefoot and sometimes dressed in Indian styles. An innocent expert guitarist looking for some new musical sounds? Or something more?

After his band’s last public concert, August 1966 in San Francisco, wearing their Saville Row tightly tailored matching English suits, clean shaven with mop-top haircuts they stopped touring. Flush with cash and treated like gods by most everyone they encountered, they started searching for more meaning in their lives. Using ever more mind altering drugs hoping to juice their creative songwriting work.

Harrison, his wife, and 2 friends flew to California in August 1967 renting a house on Blue Jay Way in the Hollywood Hills where he wrote that Birdland neighborhood street’s eponymous song for the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” movie and album. During a quick side trip he wandered around San Francisco’s hippy-central Haight Ashbury neighborhood. I suspect he was sorry to have missed being at the Monterey International Pop festival in June 16-18, 1967.

***

What an epic that was! “Be happy, be free, wear flowers, bring bells,” advertisements enticed ticket buyers to the three-day party by Monterey Bay close to San Francisco. The list of confirmed bands ebbed and flowed as the promoter started to push all to perform for “charity.” The promoter/lead producer was Lou Adler, the agent of The Mamas & The Papas. They’d just won on March 2, 1967 a Grammy for their song “Monday, Monday,” a feat rumors say was due to Adler bribing the vote counters. Some theories argue the Monterey Festival was a CIA psy-op to trigger a new youth spaced-out drug culture to blunt youth protests against the Vietnam War and/or make Aldous Huxley’s dreams of “soma” mind-deadening drugs usher in a New World Order with a utopia for the masses as drugged out, tuned-out sheep who do as they are told like zombies.

The official story goes Adler came up with the festival idea a mere seven weeks before the event. During the negotiations he set up a nonprofit, the Monterey International Pop Festival Foundation. He planned to film the event and show it in movie theaters for more profits similar to the wildly successful fall 1964 T.A.M.I. show which featured everyone from Chuck Barry and James Brown to the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. But, Adler’s Monterey move deal got tied up in litigation soon after his main Monterey act, the Beach Boys at the height of their popularity with their monster hit “Good Vibrations” pulled out last minute and didn’t perform at Monterey. They’d earlier demanded their song set be removed from the second run of T.A.M.I.’s for-profit movie/video distribution for many decades thanks to shoddy 1964 performance contract drafting. They didn’t like the moving target of contracts Adler presented to his invited Monterey Festival bands.

His Festival’s board on governors included the Beatles’ Paul McCartney, Beach Boy Brian Wilson, Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, Donovan and his client John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas. Only Phillips band perforned at Monterey.

Adler had specific ideas of what music he wanted to film in Monterey. He thought - or wanted for some reason - the next big youth music money to come out of the burgeoning San Francisco hippy/psychedelic scene. For example, he booked to attract ticket buyers for the opening act a band then on the top of the charts, The Association, but did not bother to film them because they were still wearing the business suits he thought were out of fashion. He also was not their agent nor associated with their record label, and thus unable to get a big cut of their future revenue stream.

The Rolling Stones’ founder Brian Jones arrived as a spectator wearing a ruffled orange shirt and tight-beyond-belief bright red pants. Donovan thanks to a drug bust could not get a US visa. Why the Beach Boys did not perform despite being confirmed until nearly the last minute is an endless source of speculation from contract disputes to a band member Carl Wilson being preoccupied with court dates for having tried to evade the draft. The Beatles had stopped touring the year before. I’ve little doubt the London School of Economics-trained Jagger smelled a rat in the shifting contract details.

Jones did not perform at Monterey publicly. He was soon to be kicked out of his band for drug abuse. He died barely 2 years later, aged 27 in July 1969 as an early member of the “27 Club” a victim of LSD, heroin, and cocaine severe addictions. Drowned at his English home where A.A. Milne had written “Winnie the Pooh” to try to get over his WW1 shell shock. Perhaps Jones’ death was related to his markedly enlarged liver and heart damage due to substance abuse. One hit of cocaine can fatally scar a human heart.

***

I suppose I should not have written “early” drug abuse victim for Mr. Jones. Many pop musicians had been getting addicted to that “fine” Bayer company product heroin and other modern opiates, frequently dying of them especially since the 1950’s. Frankie "Why Do Fools Fall In Love” Lyman, age 25, overdosed with heroin in 1968 after many years of addiction. Dion started using it at age 14 and after an overdose involving LSD finally quit in 1968 at age 28 after hearing about his friend Frankie's tragic death. I like his 2018 quote in The New York Daily News after Demi Lovato’s nearly lethal opiate overdose:

“My advice is that you don’t dictate the terms of your own recovery. If you start dictating the terms of your own recovery, that's what got you sick in the first place. You have to become teachable and listen to someone. You have to be honest with yourself and open minded because what you’ve been doing isn’t working.”

***

Opiates and downers swallowed daily with uppers uppers ruined Elvis Presley’s life and nearly Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s, too, with his drug abuse for decades. The latter would have joined the 27 club but for the many efforts by his family and band to get him off the drugs.

“Congratulations” to some of the 27 Club Darwin Award opiate addiction winners! The Doors’ Jim Morrison. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Ron McKernan of The Grateful Dead. Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. And, the 32 Club with a wide variety of substance problems. Mama Cass Elliot (heart trouble from crash dieting), Karen Carpenter (anorexia), Florence Ballard of the Supremes (alcohol), Keith Moon of The Who, Keith Godchaux of The Grateful Dead. I grew up hearing about all those people in the news dying so young and thinking what a shame. And, what profoundly unhappy people they were to think they could ever truly feel better long term by abusing drugs, alcohol, and/or food as so many of them fried their brain cell membrane receptors with drugs.

The second most common co-morbidity trigger in some reports for the 2019 Pandemic “bat” flu deaths is anxiety and depression after the first of morbid obesity and diabetes. I wonder how many have died “of covid” who took regularly a natural or synthetic opiate especially in nursing and retirement homes where it is a dirty secret many patients there are wildly overmedicated with opiates to make them easier to manage for the benefit of medical staff while most of those opiates also suppress the immune and endocrine systems. Tuned out. Lights out. Two weeks on morphine and kept flat on the back and most humans die because that plant alkaloid deadens the appetite and dampens the swallowing function, too, increasing the risks of aspirated pneumonia from normal mouth secretions of saliva not properly coughed up or automatically swallowed. All from a simple chemical excreted by plants meant to ward off pests and their synthetic derivatives.

***

I distinctly recall as a small kid watching the evening TV news with my Dad from August 1969 when the Manson family murders happened to their trials in the Summer and Fall of 1970. That trial is when I first saw zombie-eyed cult members and my Dad explained to me how many recreational legal and illegal drugs cause that zombie behavior. He also told me how his father with a fatal end stage cancer with horrendous pain had his own medical doctor get him street heroin when the “proscribed” dose his doctor was legally allowed to give was not enough to ease his pain to be able to be awake to tell his family goodbye.

We also watched together the evening TV news about the Zodiac murders in 1968-9 around the San Francisco Bay Area and Northern California, and later the The Zebra murders in the San Francisco area 1973-4. The murder of Leslie Marie Perlov, whose body was found in the hills above Stanford University in February 1973. A murder finally solved in 2018 as was the beyond brutal murder in Stanford’s Memorial Church of Arlis Perry by the church’s nightwatchman. So many Manson copycat killings. Or maybe too many Mk-Ultra local human lab rat rejects on the loose? Grew up being told by my parents Stanford was NOT a safe place to go at night. I did not set foot on that campus alone after dark until I was over age 30.

***

Now the surviving rockers from the 1960’s proudly state their number of “years sober” such the Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood in the Rolling Stone magazine. Staying off those feel-good drugs or better yet never starting is very slowly becoming a trend. I laughed listening to a recent interview with Keith Richards saying his kids never started because they’d seen what those drugs did in his life.

If only…

The Doors band’s Jim Morrison’s father was a US Navy Fleet Admiral onboard his flagship aircraft carrier Bonhomme Richard in August 1964 off the shores of Vietnam when the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” supposedly happened. What if he had put his admiral stars on the table to say he would not go along with the Gulf of Tonkin lie the US Navy and LBJ used to escalate the Vietnam War to show LBJ’s political opponents he was a “tough guy” hard on Communism. And, what the heck, splash some more taxpayer cash onto the military/industrial complex to escalate that war.

What was the Admiral’s son thinking as he was avoiding the draft at UCLA in 1966 writing poetry, getting pudgy, and becoming angrier every day at his parents as he fell into the drug scene of Laurel Canyon in the late 1960’s? He signed his first recording contract stating his parents were dead when they were not. At least his extreme drug and alcohol abuse slimmed him down to fit into his tight leather pants and Jay Sebring-coifed lion’s mane of curly hair for his Lizard King persona and eternal fame before he, it is said despite no autopsy and a quick burial by his girlfriend, overdosed on heroin in Paris. Poor Jay, murdered along with his good friend Sharon Tate by Manson’s followers.

I always get a kick out of the fact that after the USA left Vietnam, the Red Chinese Army marched in February 1979 to try to snatch a new vassal state as it did to Tibet in 1951 but the Vietnamese kicked them out. So much for the Domino Theory which put the US military in Vietnam. Don’t mess with a determined people with a strong culture and mountains to hide in as the Afghanis showed the Persians, Mughals, U.K., U.S.S.R., and the U.S.A. The Hapsburg Empire learned that from the Swiss in the 1300’s and later also from the French and Italians near the Alps in 1859 at the Battle of Solferino which left so many dying bodies on the field a witness to their suffering founded the International Red Cross.

LBJ just did not understand history and thanks in part to him escalating the Vietnam War, we got angst-filled The Doors’ music from a band named after a William Blake line of poetry, later used by Aldous Huxley as his “Doors of Perception” book title. “Break on through to the other side…” wrote Jim Morrison.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite.“ - William Blake

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More triggers for psychedelic culture…

In Monterey 1967, Jimi Hendrix used lighter fluid for the first time on his Fender guitar, flames rose, then he smashed it on stage and threw the remnants to the audience. Pete Townsend of The Who watched, got ideas, and then smashed his own guitar for the first time, too. Dion was horrified seeing any musician smash a guitar as he said in an interview decades later recalling how he and Buddy Holly had so cherished their new electric guitars they had on their fateful Midwest music package tour in Winter 1959. The last thing Buddy said to him was to watch out for his guitar traveling on the tour bus as he flew off in a small plane at night in icing conditions with The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.

Hendrix’ invite to Monterey had been championed by Paul McCartney, the Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, and the Rolling Stones manager who had all seen his great success in the U.K. market. Later that summer, Hendrix opened for The Monkees on tour after some of them had seen him play in Monterey and earlier in London. He lasted only 8 gigs with The Monkees because he and they did not share much of the same fan base.

In Fall 2021, the last surviving Monkees’ Mickey Dolenz and Mike Nesmith were singing their Farewell Tour for which all attendees had to show covid jab cards. Nesmith travelled with a painful heart condition smoking marijuana almost continuously for the horrid pain, dead by the end of the year. They had seen Hendrix in London, loved his music and pushed the hardest to have him tour with them in Summer 1967 to help his career get going in the USA.

In early 1967, the Beatles had thrown a party for The Monkees at a London private club. Dolenz right after the party wrote about them as the “Kings of EMI siting stately on the floor” in his song “Randy Scouse Git” which he did not know were pejorative words to describe Liverpudlians. It rose to #2 in the U.K. soon after it was released at the end of May 1967. Its title in the U.K. had to be “Alternative Title” since the U.S. title was too crude there. In the style-setting Monkees band, he wore a wildly patterned tablecloth as a poncho for the video of that song, Davy Jones in a Mughal jacket, Peter Tork in love beads, and Nesmith, the eldest and a USAF veteran, a Texan in cowboy boots with big sideburns. All with long hair.

Peter Tork of The Monkees introduced his old Greenwich Village friend Steven Stills as he took to the 1967 Monterey stage with his band Buffalo Springfield. Steven’s teeth were not good enough to make it in the Fall 1965 auditioning rounds for The Monkees TV show thus he’d encouraged his friend, Peter-with-good-teeth, to audition. Buffalo Springfield’s most popular song “For What It’s Worth” (“Something’s Happening Here”) was his Springfield band’s first big hit which reached the Top Ten after it came out in January 1967. Summer 1967, Buffalo Springfield opened for the Beach Boys on their tour. Another slightly unusual pairing like Hendrix and The Monkees.

Other early first major USA pop performances in Monterey were The Who, Otis Redding, and Booker T. & the MG’s. Also appearing were Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Ravi Shankar, and the list goes on and on.

The Mamas & the Papas performed their “California Dreaming” with its catchy Ventures’ “Run Don’t Walk” lead guitar melody accompaniment rearranged at its recording session to fit on the spot by P.F. Sloan which he helped to produce. Sloan’s “Eve of Destruction” is one of the most famous ever anti-war protest songs. It caused a US Constitutional Amendment on the voting age ]. The song came out Summer 1965 hitting #1. Everyone assumed Sloan wrote that about the Vietnam War, but check out at 1:01-6:00 in an interview (link below) with him where he said the war he was worried about while writing “Eve of Destruction” was one in about 40 years with “Red” China. He wrote down that hit song and a few others in one frenzied night when his mind was “opened” without drugs by what he called a “divine” voice. ESP?

In that interview he has some choice words to say about the mafiaesque music industry of the 1960’s. He worked as a teen guitarist and songwriter for Lou Adler while Adler was an executive of Screen Gems which was also the music company for The Monkees television show which helped mightily to make long-haired “hippies” popular in the mass media.

I recall watching The Monkees television show as a child. I liked their catchy music but not the frantic fast jump cut editing. During the pandemic lockdowns I enjoyed reading some of the books written by Monkee Mike Nesmith, and learning how he pioneered country-rock music and music videos winning a US Patent for one of his inventions.

At Monterey, the Mamas & Papas were decked out like Mughal royalty and closed the three day show originally set up by their agent, Lou Adler trying to sign up new artists from San Francisco while also promoting his new cash cow, Mamas & Papas. Did that band actually sing or just mime their songs at Monterey given all their songs were heavily overdubbed to stack their voices to sound good. That band’s leader, John Phillips, co-wrote to promote the event “If You’re Going To San Francisco” with the line “be sure to wear flowers in your hair.” Philips was the son of a WW1 US Marine officer and had dropped out of the US Naval Academy about the time the Korean War ended. Another tragic death from opiate abuse and wrecked marriages.

Should Philips get some credit for the street scenes of San Francisco today with out of control tent encampments and ever more empty storefronts downtown? His catchy 1967 flowers-in-hair song went around the world super fast putting San Francisco on the map for anyone who wanted to “drop out.” Perhaps blame instead Oscar Wilde for saying, “It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world.”

The Monterey event did thanks in part to Hendrix’s and Pete Townsend’s guitar-smashing blast to the stratosphere psychedelic music, “exotic” fashions, longer and messier hair of the new youthful rebel counterculture. And, good heavens, what a cottage industry on the musical and legal details of that event which had artist fees in litigation for at least 2 years. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Beach Boys refused to perform in part when Adler started making demands they perform for charity and also give up more royalty rights from the event’s film.

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The music biz in those days was truly a mafiaesque process with enormous amounts of cash floating around from live concerts’ cash boxes. A “payola” game to get radio stations to play new songs. Few successful musical artists were able to profit much especially long term or be encouraged to do anything other than what their record labels thought were guaranteed sales following a proven formula. Artistic risk taking such as Hendrix and many others displayed at Monterey was rarely encouraged in the record labels’ corporate offices. Their business model was ride the young and legally very naive artists a year or so at most for quick profits, then kick them to the curb. So what if they are wigged out on drugs to keep them mobile during grueling tours to promote their latest songs? Easier to control! Fungible pieces of meat. The real money was for the record companies, sheet music publishers, studio musicians used for the recordings, and professional songwriters like John Carter who wrote “Incense and Peppermints.” Hire photogenic nobodies off the street to sing the tunes and appear on record sleeves who will work essentially for free.

***

In late August 1967, the Beatles all met their first Indian guru at a northern Welsh seaside resort at the same time their long time agent, Brian Epstein, was recovering from a drug overdose after losing way too much money at private clubs’ gambling tables and other problems. He was very lonely, a tragic closeted homosexual with few good friends, and feeling hopeless because the newspapers were full of pictures of his “boys” in Wales with their new guru. So, he overdosed on Cabrital, a prescription drug cocktail including carbromal, a synthetic sedative and hypnotic created by Bayer in 1909 plus a chaser of alcohol. He’d been invited to the guru meeting in Wales but had declined.

Epstein had given in haste by accident as the Beatles were flying off to their first USA tour in early 1964 a “forever” merchandise contract to a new private club friend of a friend giving the lucky duck 90% of that revenue stream. That man set up Seltaeb company (“Beatles” spelled backwards) and quickly retired to the Bahamas. Earlier, Epstein had given away a huge percentage of the bands’ songwriting copyrights in another very bad contract to another new short term friend who set up a new music publishing company. Not until the 1976 US copyright law amendments were enacted to protect young and naive songwriters becoming effective after about 2010 could any band's songwriters realistically hope to get back any of their earlier US musical copyrights. What a twisted and exploitative mess.

So, Epstein by summer 1967 had been exposed as a grossly incompetent music business manager. He’d been before he met his “boys” a family furniture & record shop salesman and a music lover with no legal or music business background but he Svengalli’ed the ragged-jeans and leather-jacketed Elvis-pompadoured imitators and hard rockers into highly marketable “nice” teen pop idols. He simply could not ride the wave of the Beatles’ phenomenon beyond 1967 as the pop musical culture changed. He had ever worsening substance abuse problems, a personal life in shambles, a band increasingly unhappy with his poor fiscal due care, and thus was unable to renew his Beatles’ management contract expiring 1 October 1967 despite helping them sign a new and improved recording contract the year he died.

Perhaps one of the best things Epstein did before he died was arranging for the Harrisons to rent in early August 1967 on extremely short notice the Blue Jay Way house of Ludwig Gerber, the manager and lawyer for jazz singer Peggy Lee. Without that timely California trip where Harrison saw Ravi Shankar play at the Hollywood Bowl and visited San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, too, would the Beatles have gone so fast down a musical and chemical psychedelic path, reinventing themselves to stay on the top of the charts for several more years?

***

“Incense and Peppermints” was topping the charts in October and November 1967 as the Beatles finished their Magical Mystery Tour movie and album dressed in a few exotic Indian textiles and jewelry. The Fab Four flew in February and March 1968 to India to learn from their new guru at his ashram all about transcendental mediation with their wives, friends, and some fellow top musicians from the UK (Donovan) and California (Beach Boy Mike Love).

The ex-mop tops were by then trying to reduce their addictions to some of the most dangerous recreational drugs. The trip ended early after unpleasant sexual shenanigans by the guru to some of the women in their party. The band and their traveling companions came home covered head to toe in Indian textiles and jewelry which have not gone fully out of fashion in California ever since. I see kids in recent years going to the big SoCal music festival in Coachella dressed in those floaty Indian muslins with paisley patterns and raggedly blue jeans trying to look as if they just stepped away from the Monterey Pop festival in June 1967 which kicked off the Summer of Love. A few wave around drug paraphernalia trying to be cool with their small glass pipes which make me think of opium dens in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast and Chinatown of the 1850’s where clipper ship crews would “Shanghai” people passed out from opium to serve as forced sailor laborers.

***

I heard Ravi Shankar play sitar once in Chicago while I was in college. He sat crosslegged on a poof at the auditorium of the University of Chicago law school next door to my dorm long before President Obama was teaching there. Shankar seemed to exemplify adult maturity and timeless musical virtuosity. Barefoot, wearing white pants, and a fancy tunic looking like he could fit right in with the band who sang Incense & Peppermints or the Beatles in their Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine cartoon era. I recall thinking, wow!!, his music was a lot more complicated than the Western pop music with sitar I’d grown up with.

That all reminds me of the craze for everything Japanese kicked off in Europe and the USA thanks to Gilbert & Sullivan’s hit of 1885 “The Mikado.” That jump-started the Aesthetic Movement in fashion, art, interior design, and architecture. That in turn led to the Arts & Crafts Movement and Jugendstil, Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, etc. I’ve been longing for some fun new clothing or musical crazes to emerge after the bat flu lockdown. What goes “down” must go “up” eventually.

We are getting close now to a planet-wide mass reaction from the bioweapon patented jabs which crash many immune systems and cause white fibrous clots, heart attacks, strokes, turbo cancers, miscarriages, sterilizations, etc. More carnage counts now than the death counts of WWI combat and the Spanish Flu combined after which many survivors went wild with new clothes styles and music in the Roaring Twenties’ Jazz Age. Since Spring 2020, I seem to see around Silicon Valley only people wearing baggy loose beach or workout clothes. Comfy, faded, and blah. Lots of black, grey, brown, and faded denim indigo in offices, shops, and banks. If I see one more dingy and ratty t-shirt with an illegible and muted design I might scream. Black or pale blue face masks? Ugh! As if everyone is going to or coming from a funeral at the poor house or visiting a hospital burn unit. Or a day at a muddy beach. “Help!” “All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey.”

I’ve spent too much time in hospitals to know when things get grim bring out the fresh colorful flowers to try to cheer people up. Get people to laugh. Try Plan A, B, C, - however many it takes to improve your own life and others when feeling low. Play some music that makes you happy to flood your body with the natural feel-good hormone dopamine from real joy or belly laughs. I first saw online the comedian “Fluffy” in Summer 2020 and sought out fun 1960’s music after the lockdowns made me stir crazy and depressed. Get in the Sun for a good dose of Vitamin D which is needed to produce another feel-good hormone: serotonin. Get those 2 hormones pumping and your brain cells hum happily. Hug someone or shake their hand flesh-to-flesh, or pat a pet to get a hit of the oxytocin “love” hormone which deadens pain. Pass me the chocolate with its flavonoid molecules for another great “happy” chemical effect!

[Yellow dots are carbon atoms. Glad to post a link for whomever has the copyright for this design.]

I wish I’d kept my 1968 Beatles’ Yellow Submarine metal lunchbox (trademarked Seltaeb) with its psychedelic aniline dye colors. I’d fill it with emergency chocolate that would not melt too fast in a hot car such as Hersey’s Tropical Bar made for WW2’s Pacific Theater. Bakers’ Square dark chocolate will do. I’d like to swish along on a walk with those today. Crossing my fingers the post “bat” flu world produces new light-hearted music and fashions as has occurred after past sad times. A more reflective, gentler, kinder and healthier era with a lot fewer addictive and dangerous mind-altering drugs.