Psychedelic Pioneers Peggy Hitchcock and Susi Ramstein

Peggy Hitchcock in Dying to Know

The new documentary Dying to Know, now on Netflix, interviews Margaret "Peggy" Mellon Hitchcock, heiress to the Gulf Oil fortune, about her involvement with LSD.

Hitchcock heard that Professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were looking for research subjects while at Harvard, and she volunteered to try the then-legal experimental drug. "It really confirmed a lot of things that I had hoped were true, that I had sort of glimpsed at various times in my life, that there was a larger reality than what my everyday, humdrum experiences were," she says.

Along with her brothers Billy and Tommy, Peggy made their Millbrook estate in upper New York available to Leary and Alpert (aka Ram Dass) after Alpert was kicked out of Harvard for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate student.

"As an intimate friend to both Leary and Alpert, Peggy was instrumental in establishing a communal living and research community in Millbrook, NY once Leary and Alpert left Harvard. Peggy convinced her brothers to allow the two professors to live and conduct their unfettered and continued research into the effect of psychedelic substances on the personalities of willing participants," reads her bio on the movie's website.

It's especially interesting because Peggy is the great grandniece of former US Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and her mother Margaret's first husband may be at the source of the persistent and unverified rumor that a niece of Mellon's married Harry Anslinger, the first US drug czar.

Anslinger was married to the former Martha Denniston (1886-1961). There are no Dennistons in the Mellon family tree, but Harry Alexander Laughlin (1838-1922), son of James Laughlin of Jones & Laughlin Steel Co., married an Alice B. Denniston on 9/10/1860. (A later relative was James Laughlin IV, publisher of New Directions who was influenced by Gertrude Stein.)

Peggy's mother Margaret Mellon (1901–1998) was married to an Alexander Laughlin Jr. on 6/21/1924. Attending the wedding were both sitting Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon and Miss Alice Denniston Laughlin, "wearing a frock of gold crepe and a hat of brown straw," along with her grandmother Mrs. James B. Laughlin (the former Alice B. Denniston), "in white crepe with satin thread embroidery and a hat of orchid straw," according to the Pittsburgh Daily Post. So Anslinger apparently married into Pittsburgh society, if not directly into the Mellon family.*

Margaret was widowed and subsequently married polo player Tommy Hitchcock (the model for racist SOB Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby) on 12/15/1928, and Andrew Mellon was at that wedding too. Whether or not Margaret was a model for Daisy Buchanan, thought to be based on Fitzgerald's wife Zelda or Ginerva King, is unknown. 

It must have been quite the family scandal when the Hitchcock kids sided against the drug war. And possibly the involvement of one of their relatives motivated them to right the sins of their ancestor. 

Narrated by Robert Redford, Dying to Know is produced and directed by Gay Dillingham, and also interviews researcher Joan Halifax, who along with Stan Grof pioneered psychedelic therapy for terminal cancer patients in 1967.

Andrew Weil is interviewed in the film saying of those studies, "A guided psychedelic experience in a dying person often enabled that person to drastically cut doses of opiates for pain relief, which kept consciousness clear, and often greatly facilitated communication with family and friends and made the dying process easier."

This is the second psychedelic documentary produced by a woman of late: Connie Littlefield wrote and co-directed The Sunshine Makers about LSD chemists Nicholas Sand and Tim Scully, also viewable on Netflix.

And it turns out that Albert Hofmann wasn't alone on the bicycle ride that marked the first LSD trip on April 19, 1943: he was accompanied by his lab assistant, 21-year-old Susi Ramstein, who on June 12 of that year became the first woman to take LSD, taking a tram ride home and finding the conductor's appearance quite comical. According to Erowid.org, "She initially took a 100 mics—a higher dose than either Albert's co-worker Ernst Rothlin or his supervisor Arthur Stoll had tried—and she had a good experience. And although everyone working with Albert took acid at least once, Susi tried it two more times in order to help out with establishing some standards for the medical use of LSD."

"Now that April 19, 'Bicycle Day' has become a well-known and joyously celebrated holiday for psychonauts, let us also remember and celebrate June 12, the date when the courage, heart, and brains of this young woman entered the annals of psychedelic history," writes the website Chacruna.net

Hats off to these female psychedelic pioneers, and the women who document their contributions.

*Researcher and activist Doug McVay has another connection: Thomas Mellon, Andrew's father, married Sarah Jane Negley (b. 1817) in 1843. Union Trust was established by Thomas's son Andrew W. Mellon in 1889. Samuel Philip Gerst was an assistant treasurer at Union Trust, worked there 43 years. Gerst's sister Sarah Margaret (b. 1874) married Edward C. Negley. Martha Kind Denniston Leet Anslinger's mother was Florence Gerst (b. 1861).

Nellie Bly and Marijuana in Mexico

Stories have been circulating of late on social media about Nellie Bly, the intrepid reporter who went around the world in only 72 days, and also posed as a mental patient to report on conditions in women's asylums at a time when most female journalists were writing society columns or arts reviews.

Around 1885, at the age of 21, Bly traveled from her hometown of Pittsburgh to Mexico as a foreign correspondent. Her dispatches were gathered in a book, Six Months in Mexico, in which she describes courtship, wedding ceremonies, the popularity of tobacco smoking, the legend of the maguey plant (from which pulque and mezcal were made), and the habits of the soldiers, including an early description of their marijuana use:

The soldiers have an herb named marijuana, which they roll into small cigaros and smoke. It produces intoxication which lasts for five days, and for that period they are in paradise. It has no ill after-effects, yet the use is forbidden by law. It is commonly used among prisoners. One cigaro is made, and the prisoners all sitting in a ring partake of it. The smoker takes a draw and blows the smoke into the mouth of the nearest man, he likewise gives it to another, and so on around the circle. One cigaro will intoxicate the whole lot for the length of five days.

The only earlier mention of marijuana in English that my research fellows and I can come up with—courtesy of Isaac Campos, author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origin of Mexico's War on Drugs—is this description of the Chichimec people's customs, from the 1874 volume by Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America:

"When a young man desires to marry, his parents make a visit to those of the intended bride, and leave with them a bouquet of flowers bound with red wool; the bride's parents then send round to the houses of their friends a bunch of mariguana, a narcotic herb, which signifies that all are to meet together at the bride's father's on the next night. The meeting is inaugurated by smoking; then they chew mariguana, during which time all preliminaries of the marriage are settled. The following day the resolutions of the conclave are made known to the young man and woman, and if the decision is favorable, the latter sends her husband a few presents, and from that time the parties consider themselves married, and the friends give themselves up to feasting and dancing."

For five days, it would seem.

Kathy Bates Stars As a Dispensary Owner in New Netflix Series

Actress Kathy Bates, who recently said she shared "some good sh##" with Susan Sarandon and Melissa McCarthy, is starring as a lawyer-turned-dispensary-owner and advocate in the new Netflix series "Disjointed," set to premiere on August 25.

I caught a taping of the show's pilot last year, and found it witty, charming and quite funny. Bates's character Ruth and her son, an MBA, do battle over the future of the business, with her wanting to keep it focused on healing and her son focused on profits. It’s a somewhat accurate depiction of what’s taking place in the cannabis industry today.

You can see for yourself in the trailer below:

Bates also played a marijuana-smoking lawyer in the 2011-12 series "Harry's Law," and portrayed Alice B. Toklas's lover Gertrude Stein on film in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris." She told AARP Magazine—which dubbed her "Smokin'"—that she's enjoying playing a sexier role for a change, and that marijuana "helped tremendously" to ease nausea and chronic pain from her cancer treatments.

Amazon's "The Last Tycoon" Misses the Marijuana

Kathleen and Siva in the 1976 film The Last Tycoon

The makers of the Amazon Prime series "The Last Tycoon" say they seek to make it an authentic representation of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's last, unfinished Hollywood novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, set and written in the 1930's. But right out of the gate the series demotes its female love interest from a goddess to a waitress. And it erases Fitzgerald's intriguing, possible references to marijuana and the drug experience.

One of the characters in Fitzgerald’s book calls Hollywood “a mining town in lotus land,” a reference to the Land of the Lotus Eaters from Homer’s The Odyssey, where explorers get lost in a drug-induced stupor to forget the horrors of war.

In the novel, Tycoon’s main character, producer Monroe Stahr, first sees his love interest Kathleen Moore floating on a studio-made head of Siva that had become dislodged from a set in an earthquake. To this day, worshippers in India drink bhang (a drink made with cannabis) to celebrate Siva’s the marriage to the goddess Parvati.

That night, cameraman Pete Zavras attempts suicide by diving off an office building on the studio lot. “I knew he’d gone to pot,” says Stahr. When asked why he’d done it on the lot, Zavras replies, “Before the oracle. The solver of the Eleusinian mysteries.” Those were the Greek rites whose attendees worshipped the grain goddess Demeter and took the mind-altering drug kykeon, thought to be related to LSD (derived from ergot, a mold that grows on grain crops).

In the novel, when Stahr goes to Kathleen’s door, she says, “I’m sorry I can’t ask you in. Shall I get my reefer and sit outside?” (A reefer is also the name of a sailor’s coat.) Kathleen is next described sitting at a long white table that “became an altar where the priestess sat alone.” Like the similarly blonde Faye Greener in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (also written in 1937), Kathleen personified the mysterious, sacramental and unattainable love object and Stahr worshipped at her altar.

Monroe first sees Kathleen in Amazon's Tycoon

Stahr—who takes Benzedrine, alcohol, and an unnamed medicine from a bottle in the book—meets Kathleen at his house, where he has had a strip of grass brought in from the prop department. Kathleen laughs and asks, “Isn’t that real grass?” Stahr replies, “Oh yes—it’s grass.” The scene is reminiscent of one in Fitzgerald’s 1925 book The Great Gatsby, the first novel about a drug dealer. After Gatsby sends a servant to mow his neighbor Nick’s lawn, Nick tells him, “The grass is fine.” “What grass?” asks Gatsby, before saying, “Oh, the grass in the yard.”

In the made-for-Amazon version there's a head of Siva, but Kathleen doesn't get near it. Instead she meets Stahr as a waitress fetching a sandwich.

In one upside to the series, a woman is revealed to be a better scriptwriter than her husband. Of a scriptwriter on the movie lot, Fitzgerald wrote:

Out the window Rose Meloney watched the trickle streaming toward the commissary. She would have her lunch in her office and knit a few rows while it came. The man was coming at one-fifteen with the French perfume smuggled over the Mexican border. That was no sin—it was like a prohibition. 

Who smuggles French perfume over the Mexican border, and calls it a prohibition? Rose is a flower like marijuana, which was called Santa Rosa or Santa Maria in Mexico. Her surname starts with an “M,” like marijuana.

Jeanne Moreau in The Last Tycoon (1976).

The reference to knitting may have come from Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s 1857 book The Hasheesh Eater, wherein he describes a hashish-induced vision of a crone knit of purple yarn. In Food of the Gods, Terrence McKenna connects the expression “spinning a yarn” to hemp’s dual purpose as a fiber and an intoxicant leading to flights of fancy.

The character called Rose in the Amazon series is no writer, but rather a cheating wife (played by Rosemarie DeWitt, who was a lot better as a pot smoker in Mad Men — until those writers turned her into a hard drug addict). Lily Collins tries as the ambitious Celia, but Theresa Russell was much more interesting in the 1976 movie version of Tycoon that cast Very Important Pothead Robert Mitchum as the studio chief and VIP Jack Nicholson as the labor leader. The best thing about the movie version wasn't De Niro as Monroe but rather Jeanne Moreau as the diva Didi opposite VIP Tony Curtis. Moreau just died at age 89, probably so she could roll in her grave over Jennifer Beals trying to play her role.