Published at: 22/10/2025 09:00 PM

SURVEY ON THE HIGH RATE OF DRUG USE AND STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES

(LIFE Magazine, November 1969, November 1971 and January 1972)

• Two surveys conducted on a universe of 43,000 students and readers of LIFE magazine speak of the boom in the 1960s in the United States of America, of drug use, the establishment of structural violence and the Lysergic Acid (LSD) experiments on human beings.
• In this regard, the two surveys, a reflection and mirror of a nation in crisis, spoke for themselves about the close link between the massive use of all types of drugs and the rise of violence in the big cities of that country:
  • 83% admitted to repeated use of marijuana.
  • 62% acknowledged having used amphetamines.
  • 57% confessed to using the hallucinogen LSD.
  • 35% of respondents reported heroin use.
  • 78% of respondents said they felt insecure in their homes because of robberies committed by “junkies” (heroin addicts).
  • 80% of residents in large cities confessed to being afraid to go out at night, for the same reasons.
  • 43% of the families surveyed revealed that they had been victims of street crime.
  • 41% said they felt unprotected by police forces.
  • 30% bought weapons to repel the underworld.
• The scope of this survey was wide enough to know the motives of structural violence and mass drug use in a generation that, by then, comprised 26 million Americans between the ages of 15 and 21.
• By 1969, marijuana was banned in the United States; but the use of LSD, a laboratory drug administered to thousands of people by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was decriminalized.
• The pros in favor of distributing LSD were widely publicized for its therapeutic “brainwashing” properties. Nothing could be further from the truth. The CIA was aware of the high suicide rates and irreversible dementia caused by its consumption.
• LSD, the report highlighted, “does not determine a dependency such as cocaine, heroin and marijuana. It doesn't produce hallucinations.” However, despite their promotion, a scientist and several CIA agents, who served as laboratory rats, threw themselves out of the windows of tall buildings, convinced of their ability to fly. Like Superman, the CIA's flying agents jumped into the void and crashed crashing crashing into the pavement (Project MK Ultra).
• Despite the lawsuits introduced, the CIA never compensated the family members or acknowledged the damages caused. These were classified as the “side effects of an experiment on humans”.
• Marijuana, according to the eloquent graphics, became part of American family life, with group consumption sessions, such as those who invite neighbors to drink tea at 5 p.m., or coffee in the morning.
• Meanwhile, heroin became a panacea for Vietnam veterans, who anesthetized the horrors of war and plunged into addiction. Two out of three war veterans were reduced to being addicted, considered by the precarious Social Security Service to be social burden or human scrap.

Mazo News Team