Blowing America's Mind

Two well-known Princeton alumni reveal the true story of how they got caught up in and nearly done in by the CIA's LSD-laced deep hypnosis research while they were Princeton students. The story is reminiscent in some respects of A Beautiful Mind in regard to the Princeton setting and the focus on psychological crises where reality intersects hallucination; however, in Blowing America's Mind, the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind-manipulation combines deep hypnosis and psychedelics to deliberately...
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Two well-known Princeton alumni reveal the true story of how they got caught up in and nearly done in by the CIA's LSD-laced deep hypnosis research while they were Princeton students. The story is reminiscent in some respects of A Beautiful Mind in regard to the Princeton setting and the focus on psychological crises where reality intersects hallucination; however, in Blowing America's Mind, the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind-manipulation combines deep hypnosis and psychedelics to deliberately induce a range of mental states, from blissful nirvana to frightening psychosis. Princeton and the now-defunct New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute (NJNPI) were just two of 86 American institutions (including universities and hospitals) engaged in almost 150 top secret mind-control research projects funded by the CIA. The authors worked at NJNPI in deep hypnosis research while attending the waning days of Princeton as an all-male university before Princeton went coed. Blowing America's Mind is also an intense love story reawakening the rebellious wild spirit of those early days of the Psychedelic Revolution. Jonathan and Jeffrey (the authors) naively volunteer to be subjects in what on the surface seems to be a beneficial psychological study and soon discover the side effects. The accounts from these two very contrasting personalities (Selby is from a cattle ranch, Davids the son of a history professor) spin tightly around each other. Interspersed with news revelations about MK-ULTRA from the late 1970's and beyond, and photos of the Institute and of the authors at Princeton and later. As the epilogue reveals, both of the book's main characters survived the ordeal. John Selby became a noted author of psychology, self-help and philosophy books, and Paul Jeffrey Davids became an accomplished film director (among whose many films is "Timothy Leary's Dead", an authorized biography of the Harvard psychology professor and LSD 'guru' filmed the last year of Leary's life.) Those who have read and value books such as A Beautiful Mind, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Lisa and David, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Magus and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden will find these authors to be kindred spirit.