1932: Pacific Psychiatric Institute (PPI) is formed in San Diego to investigate the potential for social control through image-desire mechanisms, psychotropic compounds and orgone therapy. Their clients include Madison Avenue advertising firms, Warner Brothers and the United States Government.
1945: Octagon Ethnobotanical Laboratory (OEL) is formed as a subsidiary of PPI for the purpose of developing new and more powerful drugs from exotic and crossbred plants.
1948: OEL begins receiving secret funding from the CIA through the Joseph Bay Foundation.
1951: Prominent psychiatrist Arthur Cook is named the executive director of PPI and OEL. He is best known for his Hollywood-based psychotherapy practice with patients including Cary Grant, Ginger Rodgers and Alfred Hitchcock.
1954: OEL introduces Marasa, a drug developed from the [TK PLANT], with effects including hallucinations, perceived past life regression, outer body sensations and the disintegration of self.
1957: Amidst rumors of widespread drug use among PPI researchers and administrators, congress initiates official hearings into the ethical nature of the institute’s policy and procedures.
1958: PPI/OEL is stripped of government funding but is able to survive with private investors, mostly from Hollywood. The institute’s practices expand to include research into telepathy, ESP, vortices and time travel.
1961: Cook is forced out over alleged experiments involving minors. He quickly establishes his own organization, the Vortice Institute, headquartered on the top two floors of The Winston Hotel in Santa Monica. It is funded entirely by Norma Friedrich, heir to the Friedrich Rifle Manufacturing fortune.
1962: The Vortice Institute offers a range of Marasa-based therapies, claiming to treat conditions from alcoholism to cancer. Waiting lists are six months long.
1965: Cook and Friedrich start a publishing company, Vortice Books.
1966: The federal government classifies Marasa as a Schedule One narcotic. The Vortice Institute is raided the next day and four liters of Marasa are confiscated. Arthur Cook is arrested.
1967: Cook is acquitted of all charges, but the Vortice Institute is disbanded by court order. Vortice Books remains.
1967: Cook relocates to Monterey, California and where he founds the Artichoke Underground. What appears to be an independent countercultural research group is secretly being funded by the C.I.A’s Office of Scientific Intelligence.
1968: The Artichoke Underground opens “safe houses” around the world, where unsuspecting guests are dosed with various psychotropic substances and observed from hidden rooms behind two-way mirrors.
1970: Arthur Cook publishes Blue Star with Vortice Books, an account of his time travel research involving the rituals of the Hopi Indians.
1973: Arthur Cook is discovered unconscious in a London safe house having overdosed on the drug Batu. He had been in the UK for several months transmitting from a pirate radio station on an abandoned World War II Naval base five miles off the coast of Scotland. After being discharged from the hospital he is not heard from again for seventeen years.
1973-1979: It is later learned that Dr. Cook goes under ground in Jamaica and is a frequent guest at The Black Arc, where he becomes fascinated with the recording studio as an alchemical agent to alter human consciousness. It in this period that erects a sonic laboratory called Black Acid Studios that was designed to investigate the capacities of sound both as a healing agent and a non-lethal weapon. It is believed that many of his discoveries were later utilized by United States Army division psyops for mind culture, interrogation and torture.
1975: The Vortice Institute reopens in upstate New York on the estate of the Friedrich family with an emphasis on New Age healing practices. There is continued research with drugs supplied by OEL but that is kept secret until decades later.
1979: A major Indian pharmaceutical consortium buys OEL. The focus on psychedelic plants is shifted toward amphetamine research and development. PPI is closed.
1985: Vortice Institute closes due to a dwindling clientele. The Institute’s therapeutic practices had increasingly centered on communication with long-deceased Hopi spiritual leaders.
1987: Vortice Books publishes Black Acid Co-op an oral history of the movement starting with the founding of PPI through to the closing of the Vortice Institute. 1988: Norma Friedrich dies on the slopes of Aspen.
1990: After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Arthur Cook is discovered living on a houseboat in Sausalito where he had begun work as a consultant for technology firms. He denies speculation that he had spent the previous seventeen years in Soviet Russia continuing his psychedelic research.
2000: Arthur Cook, having made a fortune during the 90s tech boom, retires and begins a book about the future of computers as tools for new psychedelic research. He dies part way through the second chapter.
2006: Black Acid Co-op is republished with additional chapters exploring OEL involvement in amphetamine production, the explosion of Marasa use in Asia, and Arthur Cook’s alleged research from his seventeen years behind the Iron Curtain.
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