Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

by Tom O'Neill

One hundred and sixty-nine stab wounds! Some of them postmortem! What does that show? I think it’s circumstantial evidence that some people have much more homicidal tendencies than others.” It’s those “tendencies” that recall David Smith’s research. In a 1969 issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Smith wrote that the main purpose of his experiments with mice was to “isolate” the “behavioral” traits of the rodents that would kill after they’d been aggregated and injected with amphetamines—and then to “modify” their behavior using other drugs. Two years later, writing of the study and its parallels to hippies in the Haight in Love Needs Care, Smith admitted that “it has yet to be determined whether amphetamines modify the personality primarily by biochemically altering the central nervous system or by reinforcing or precipitating long-term psychological tendencies.”