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My Father Was An Unwilling Test Subject For Project MK-Ultra

PFT and Arian tackled one of the better conspiracies in the game on today's episode of MACRODOSING. I wasn't able to join the recording, due to family oblos, but I told PFT I would blog a personal story that connected with the topic. Which was sneaky brilliant by me, mostly because it makes me look busy, but especially because all I had to do was copy & paste an excerpt from my Project MK-Ultra Blog written two years ago. Thank you, past me. 

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While this program initially leaned on volunteers, mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and sex workers, it eventually did make its way into uncontrolled environments. Which is why I chose this topic today. During the 1960s, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was bustling with new ideas, debates about The Beatles vs. The Stones, and its own, non-government funded Psilocybin Project, which was also testing the effects of hallucinogens on human beings. With Boston and Cambridge being some of the richest property for bright young minds in America due to the mass amounts of college students, it was really a perfect breeding ground for these government and university led experiments. While some of these experiments were done in labs under a watchful eye, plenty were done in bars and coffee shops across the cities.

My father was always brilliant. Too smart for his own good sometimes. He was a teenager during the ‘60s and was a student at Boston Latin. Back when Boston Latin was boys only and you had to wear a jacket and tie every day. He was so curious and advanced he was invited to take classes at MIT and Harvard despite being years away from graduation. While he spent time in Cambridge he would often stop and just enjoy being a fake college kid, and would find himself enthralled in bouts with pinball machines where the lights and whistles were perhaps a little brighter and louder than they were for people who hadn’t been dosed by government distributed LSD. It didn't hit him until years later, when these studies became public knowledge, what had happened to him. It’s always been wild to me that the 1960s were such a “Fuck it, we’ll run it live” time where everyone was just throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck. And it was always special to me to hear about it from someone who really lived that shit. I’m talking went to Woodstock via hitchhiking from Boston type of lived that shit.

February 17 has always been a date I’ve know. As a child of the ‘90s I grew up a massive Michael Jordan fan, and as Bomani Jones once pointed out – Michael Jordan fans love to know even the smallest of details about MJ. February 17 is, of course, Jordan’s birthday, so it’s a date that has always stuck out in my mind. And as I’m sitting here, on February 17, in Charlotte, North Carolina, for All Star Weekend, in Michael Jordan’s city, my mind is stuck on February 17, 2017. I was sitting at the office, waiting to go to some charity event at Madison Square Garden, I looked at my phone to see a missed call from my mother. My mother never calls. My father was gone. I’d never hear another wild story like this from him again.

A few months after he passed I was at a Cher concert in DC. That’s right, a Cher concert. Cher has bangers and is a legend and will be treated as such. While she was belting out “Life After Love,” I noticed I received a text. From my very deceased father. Which, as you may understand, scared the absolute fuck out of me. It was a bunch of pictures from the previous Christmas, the last we’d ever spend together. Between the ghost text and Cher blaring over the speakers, it was probably the closest I’ll ever be to tripping out on government created LSD in the ‘60s. The next day I called my mother and asked if she also got the text. She told me she was on his phone and was trying to send herself the pictures. Rather than explaining to me in real time that it was her on his phone, she decided to fuck with my brain for about 12 hours for really no reason at all. Which taught me a very important life lesson: Fellas, even in death, your girl will still go through your phone. Be careful out there.

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