Ketamine and the Bourgeoisie
Son of wealthy banker gets hooked on migraine drug
On left, a vial of ketamine. On right, the Lilly family, ca. late 1920s. Furthest left, with face obscured by title, is Richard Lilly; to the right, seated on a horse, is Richard Lilly, Jr.; furthest right, holding a dog, is a young John Lilly. See photo credits below.
The following is an excerpt from p. 188-191 of Chapter 4, “Mystical Medicine, Wicked Weapon: A Both/And Approach to Ketamine” from my new book, Drugism (2022):
Most well-known drugs were popularized by military use then became fashionable among the upper class before ultimately catching on with the masses. We already saw this with sugar, which, after its embrace by the Ottoman military, was a luxury of Europe’s elite before it became affordable and accessible to the general population. We also saw it with DMT: after the CIA explored its potential as a chemical weapon, one of the first people to use it outside of CIA-affiliated circles was William Burroughs, himself a scion of great wealth. Tea, coffee, and chocolate were all similarly luxuries of the rich before they became cheap, everyday commodities.[i]
Ketamine is no different. [Earlier in the chapter] we learned that soon after its development ketamine became widely used as an anesthetic in the Vietnam War. As the war came to an end, the drug was embraced by the children of wealthy tycoons, such as John Lilly and Marcia Moore. As we will see, the ways in which these children of the elite used and advocated ketamine have become fundamental in shaping the drug’s cultural reputation in the following decades.
John Lilly came from a wealthy and well-connected family.
Had Salvador Roquet visited the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center a few years earlier, he would have encountered John Lilly, who, like Roquet, was an early ketamine advocate.[ii] Lilly came from a wealthy and well-connected family. His father, Richard Lilly, was a successful businessman in St. Paul, Minnesota, known for his tenure as the president of the First National Bank of St. Paul.[iii] Before that, he was a vice president at Merchants National Bank, where he worked with people like Charles Noyes, who was a partner in the St. Paul-based pharmaceutical company Noyes Brothers and Cutter.[iv]
Richard Lilly’s immense success in the business world meant that the young John Lilly grew up in privileged circumstances. A picture from his childhood shows John, along with his two brothers and his father Richard on their family farm, surrounded by dogs and horses.[v] He attended prep school in St. Paul as a teenager.
However, a couple of disturbing events in his youth impacted Lilly in a way that likely pushed him toward the metaphysical. One of his brothers, Richard, Jr., died after an accident in which he rode a horse unattended. Richard, Jr. was seventeen. John was thirteen. Later, while Lilly was enrolled at CalTech, his father had a car accident in which his car plunged off a bridge. He survived but was badly injured. The death of his brother and near-death of his father doubtlessly affected the young Lilly, who throughout his life was fascinated by consciousness and near-death experiences.
A couple of disturbing events in his youth impacted Lilly in a way that likely pushed him toward the metaphysical.
Lilly went on to medical school, first at Dartmouth for two years before moving on the University of Pennsylvania, where he got his MD degree in 1942. After his graduation, he joined the faculty and taught at the university until 1956. By then, the University of Pennsylvania, like Wayne State University, had become the site of CIA-sponsored research.[vi]
Much of the country was swept up in Cold War paranoia at the time. The agency’s infamous mind-control program, MK-ULTRA, had launched just three years prior in 1953. That same year, Lilly became a section chief for the National Institute on Mental Health. As we learned in the previous chapter, NIMH provided bureaucratic cover for the CIA’s MK-ULTRA research in this same period.[vii] Naturally, the CIA noticed and took interest in Lilly’s work.
Lilly was approached more than once by the agency.[viii] He performed several briefings about his research for the intelligence community. For example, in 1959 he gave a presentation at the Pentagon about the use of electrostimulation to control animal behavior. In a paper on the same topic Lilly wrote about the potential use of dolphins as, in his own language, “covert ‘military’ agents.”[ix] He would later become well-known for his love of dolphins, but very few people are aware of his endorsement of the use of dolphins for military purposes.
John Lilly was approached more than once by the CIA.
Lilly wrote a similar paper addressed to a mysterious “intelligence committee D.” In it, he suggested a technique to control people’s thoughts using sophisticated electrical equipment. The technique, if done correctly, would allow “master-slave controls directly of one brain over another,” according to Lilly.[x] The applications such a technique might hold for military purposes were “obvious,” wrote Lilly in the final lines of the undated paper.
Collaboration with the military was nothing new to Lilly. During World War II he did experiments on “the physiology of high-altitude flying” for the military.[xi] Later, some of his research on the pleasure and pain circuitry of mammalian brains was used by the military in an attempt to weaponize live animals.[xii] By the time Lilly met with Pentagon officials to discuss electrical behavior control, it had been well over a decade since his first project with the military.
Collaboration with the military was nothing new to Lilly.
In the early sixties, Lilly was introduced to LSD and other drugs by some of his NIMH colleagues.[xiii] He developed a taste for tripping on acid while in an isolation tank, a type of water floatation device invented by Lilly that has since become the basis for various therapy techniques.[xiv] Most of Lilly’s work with LSD was done before it became subject to legal restriction.
After LSD’s prohibition, however, Lilly discovered a different drug that he developed an even deeper love for. On a visit to the Esalen Institute in California, Lilly sought help from a doctor for a series of recurring migraines he was suffering at the time. The doctor administered ketamine to Lilly, who then perceived entities who encouraged him to do more of the drug.[xv] Lilly took the entities’ advice. A doctor himself, it was easy for him to obtain more.
Multiple former colleagues recall that Lilly’s standard greeting was, “Got any K?”
For the rest of his life, Lilly’s work and reputation were closely affiliated with the drug. Multiple former colleagues of his recall that his standard greeting was, “Got any K?” He was known by friends to excuse himself from parties, sit in his van, and shoot ketamine.[xvi] He experimented with the drug with such intensity that it nearly killed him more than once.[xvii] Two of his peers died shortly after a notably intense extended experiment with ketamine organized and hosted by Lilly.
Despite such dangerous and tragic results, Lilly praised the drug. He probably did more than any other individual person to popularize it. He wrote several books about his experiences with ketamine and spoke of it often in interviews. Although Lilly cautioned that ketamine could be an object of habituation, his work generally functions more as an advertisement than a warning.[xviii]
John Lilly was for ketamine what Terence McKenna was for DMT: its biggest advocate. Among the many people whose use of ketamine was influenced by Lilly was Marcia Moore who, like Lilly, was another child of a wealthy tycoon.
[Note: In the coming weeks we will explore the mysterious case of Marcia Moore, the wealthy daughter of the Sheraton Hotel cofounder, whose life—and death—were deeply impacted by ketamine.]
John Lilly was for ketamine what Terence McKenna was for DMT: its biggest advocate.
Endnotes
[i] Courtwright, Forces of Habit, 98.
[ii] See “John C. Lilly Biographical Data” at https://www.johnclilly.com/biogx.html.
[iii] Kelly, “The Crazy Real-Life…”; Kunz, “Richard C. Lilly,” 4.
[iv] Noyes himself came from a powerful family. He was descended from Reverend James Noyes, who cofounded Yale University. The Noyes family has an extensive history at Yale, and at least one of them, Edward MacArthur Noyes, was in the school’s secretive Skull & Bones fraternity. See “Charles Phelps Noyes,” 107; Noyes, “Family Affair”; and Samuelson, “Yale’s Skull & Bones…”
[v] See Kunz, cover page.
[vi] Kinzer, 131.
[vii] Ibid., 95.
[viii] Williams, “On ‘modified human…,” 91.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Ibid., 92
[xi] McLellan, “Dr. John Lilly…”
[xii] Kelly, The Little Book…, 47.
[xiii] Revkin, “John C. Lilly…”
[xiv] Houghton, “John Lilly.”
[xv] Jansen, 58.
[xvi] Wolfson and Hartelius, eds., 77-78; Brown, The New Science…, 115.
[xvii] Jansen, 58.
[xviii] Ibid.
Sources
Brown, David Jay. The New Science of Psychedelics: At the Nexus of Culture, Consciousness, and Spirituality. Park Street Press, Rochester, VT. 2013.
“Charles Phelps Noyes.” Minnesota Historical Society. Online. http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/4/v04i3-4p106-123.pdf
Courtwright, David. Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 2001.Houghton,
Jansen, Karl. Ketamine: Dreams and Realities. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, Sarasota, FL. 2004.
Kelly, Debra. “The Crazy Real-Life Story of the Man Who Wanted to Talk to Dolphins.” Grunge, Jan 6, 2021.
Kelly, Kit. The Little Book of Ketamine. Ronin Publishing, Inc., Berkeley, CA. 1999.
Kunz, Virginia Brainard. “Richard C. Lilly: The Man Who Led Two Lives.” Ramsey County History, Fall 1998. https://publishing.rchs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/RCHS_Fall1998_Kunz.pdf
McLellan, Dennis. “Dr. John Lilly, 86; Pioneered Study of Dolphin Intellect.” Los Angeles Times, Oct 4, 2001.
Noyes, Mrs. Edward M. “Family Affair.” Yale Alumni Magazine, December 1999. http://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/99_12/letters. html
Revkin, Andrew C. “John C. Lilly Dies at 86.” The New York Times, Oct 7, 2001.
Samuelson, Eric. “Yale’s Skull & Bones Society Members.” Biblioteca Pleyades.
Williams, Charlie. “On ‘modified human agents’: John Lilly and the paranoid style in American neuroscience.” History of the Human Sciences, 32(5):84-107. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0952695119872094
Wolfson, Phil and Glenn Hartelius, eds. The Ketamine Papers: Science, Therapy, and Transformation. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, Santa Cruz, CA. 2016.
Photo credits
Photo of ketamine vial by Teresa Crawford, from STAT at https://www.statnews.com/2019/04/11/research-ketamine-antidepressant-effect/
Photo of Lilly family from Ramsey County History at https://publishing.rchs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/RCHS_Fall1998_Kunz.pdf
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