U.S. Marines Won't Stop Taking LSD - Has The "War On Drugs" Ended in Defeat?

Day-Tripper

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Interesting - and, to me, surprising - read:


America’s 2nd Marine Division loves to trip balls. The 20,000 Marine strong division is garrisoned at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and many of its members have been caught taking LSD. It’s such a problem that the Marine Corps has begun to randomly test for the drug and publicly announced a crackdown on people taking it.

“We have a drug problem in the 2nd Marine Division,” Major General Francis L. Donovan, commanding general of 2d Marine Division, said in a press release last week. “We are changing the way in which we test for illegal substances.”

Sailors, soldiers, airmen, and Marines are used to random drug tests but they’re not used to being tested for LSD. It’s a weird thing to test for. Most of the signs of LSD are obvious and the Pentagon typically wouldn’t require a test for it unless there was probable cause. But the Marines of 2nd Division love LSD so much that the Corps is changing its policy.

According to a press release, the Marines have performed almost 4,000 LSD tests since the summer. LSD testing is so infrequent that the Marines had to partner with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner lab in Dover, Delaware to mass produce tests. “We are committed to identifying violators of our ethos,” Donovan said. “The vast majority of Marines within the 2d Marine Division routinely uphold our core values, and they deserve to know that the Marines to their left and right are doing the same.”

The most common method of testing for LSD is a urine test. Consumer LSD drug tests claim to have a 99 percent reliability, but need to be administered within three days of the suspect dropping acid. A marijuana test can catch a user within a few weeks of them puffing.

It may seem odd, but LSD has a long and storied history of use by America’s armed forces. At a military base in Wyoming, Airmen in charge of launching America’s nuclear arsenal loved to eat acid between shifts. Monitoring the nuclear arsenal is a boring job and, to pass the time, airmen in charge of the nukes would get high. "I absolutely just loved altering my mind,” one airman said in 2018 when the ring of LSD buddies was busted.

The LSD-Marine connection goes deeper. In February 2019 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, a journal published by the Marine Corps Association, Major Emre Albayrak of the U.S. Marine Corps published a paper advocating that intelligence officers microdose LSD to help them with their job.

“Our own units, such as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, seek cognitive advantages via unorthodox methods such as mind gyms and sensory deprivation tanks,” Albayrak said. “The cognitive advantage they seek is ‘flow”—or ‘ekstasis’ from the Greek, which Plato describes as ‘an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.’ This phenomena is described as a non-ordinary state of consciousness in which individuals tend to have heightened focus, pattern recognition, and reaction time. Flow can be observed in a seasoned close-quarters battle team clearing a complex structure.”

Cool.

Meanwhile, back at Camp Lejeune, the Corps is instituting a zero tolerance policy against LSD users. “Neither I nor any Marine or Sailor from the [2nd Marine] Division can trust someone using drugs to protect their flank,” Sergeant Major Daniel Krause said in a press release. “We have no spot in our formations for drug users.”
 
Hard to believe this is happening 25 miles up the road from me.
 
Did not know there was a test for LSD! Also, who knew the Corps was full of hippy freaks? Should we be glad this is presumably cutting down on meth consumption? And last, there is a DayTripper screen name/LSD posting joke here but don't know you well enough and I'm secretly saving it for the navy/USMC humor forum.
 
Did not know there was a test for LSD! Also, who knew the Corps was full of hippy freaks? Should we be glad this is presumably cutting down on meth consumption? And last, there is a DayTripper screen name/LSD posting joke here but don't know you well enough and I'm secretly saving it for the navy/USMC humor forum.

Well if I had to choose between Marines using meth & LSD I guess I'd pick the latter..........but that's a pretty bad option. Hell, if I had to pick between Marines using Jack Daniels & marijuana I honestly think the former would be more harmful. I knew some damn good Marines who smoked pot back in 1980s & got kicked out because of it. I knew some dirtbag Marines who snorted coke & never got caught. Out of your system in a day or so.

Bottom line ........ 36 out of 50 states now have some form of legal marijuana. 50 years of "war on drugs" have been a total waste of hundreds of billions of dollars. The libertarian in me says "let people do what they wanna do" - and Americans clearly want to do drugs. Prohibition never works. Capitalism always wins. Always. Supply & demand. Basic.

The responsible parent/citizen in me says "stop lethal drugs". But it just doesn't seem to work either.

I don't have an answer. But it bothers me a lot.
 
When used in the appropriate manner, LSD can be a good thing.

A dock landing ship (also called landing ship, dock or LSD) is an amphibious warfare ship with a well dock to transport and launch landing craft and amphibious vehicles. “In Wikipedia”.

Here, Marines in a CH-53E Super Stallion are conducting external load operations to the landing spot on USS Gunston Hall, LSD-44. Props to the Navy-Marine Corp team.

lsd-44-gunston-hall-swa.jpg
 
I remember there being a massive cocaine surge in 29 Palms many moons ago. They were doing whole unit drug tests for months and months there to root it out. Then held Battalion level NJPs and were admin sep processing Marines out within a week. I mean it was 29 Palms after all... surprised they aren’t doing LSD out there and running around the desert loaded. It’s about as exciting as it gets out there.
 
When used in the appropriate manner, LSD can be a good thing.

A dock landing ship (also called landing ship, dock or LSD) is an amphibious warfare ship with a well dock to transport and launch landing craft and amphibious vehicles. “In Wikipedia”.

Here, Marines in a CH-53E Super Stallion are conducting external load operations to the landing spot on USS Gunston Hall, LSD-44. Props to the Navy-Marine Corp team.

View attachment 7491
I very much appreciated this humor!! Should do something with it in the Humor forum...
 
When used in the appropriate manner, LSD can be a good thing.

A dock landing ship (also called landing ship, dock or LSD) is an amphibious warfare ship with a well dock to transport and launch landing craft and amphibious vehicles. “In Wikipedia”.

Here, Marines in a CH-53E Super Stallion are conducting external load operations to the landing spot on USS Gunston Hall, LSD-44. Props to the Navy-Marine Corp team.

View attachment 7491
Dirty hippies.
 
Amid new Marine Corps LSD problem, DoD changes force-wide drug test policy (militarytimes.com)

"The drug was last on the Defense Department’s testing battery in 2006. DoD eliminated it because only four servicemembers had tested positive for the drug after three years and 2,095,398 “specimens screened,” according to a memo from the time."

I thought so. I certainly remember guys getting caught for all types of drugs including THC, Meth, Cocaine, and LSD back in the day.

When I came into the Corps there was rampant drug use. By the time I got out, random urinalysis was frequent and positive tests resulted in an immediate discharge. I observed a very real change where positives became rare but alcohol abuse increased substantially. I suppose pendulums swing both ways and we are back somewhere in that continuum.

Some psychologist can have a field day with this, but I suspect that current culture, the availability of illegal drugs, the acceptance in many states of marijuana, and a dozen other factors along with the psychology of the young military members combines to create these problems. The USMC and other services will fight this as best they can.
 
LSD-45 is the USS Comstock based in San Diego. Had it been christened USS Woodstock, imagine the connotations given the previous posts. They’d be ironic and funny. Go Toreros!
Ok, I’m officially out. As a triton and torero and non-military family I’m reaching my limits.

but can we all dig into hope that by next year that the OMB Over the line tournament is back? You know the important stuff of living in So cal
 
Ah! I fondly remember Operation Golden Flow. Six beers at the squadron bar and can I go first Sir? Asked the MP what he would tell his grandchildren when they asked him what did you do during the war grandpa? The answer I provided, I guarded P*** [yes they guarded you to and from the latrine, head whatever] did not go over well. I remember a General saying that if his plane went down the headline would not be that he was on it but that xxx number of GIs were delayed homecoming.
 
Ok, I’m officially out. As a triton and torero and non-military family I’m reaching my limits.

but can we all dig into hope that by next year that the OMB Over the line tournament is back? You know the important stuff of living in So cal
You’d reach your limit only if there were an Aztec in the mix. SDSU, UCSD and USD - all in the great Navy town of San Diego. Out of state and some in state folks always get them mixed up. USD has a fine ROTC unit with SDSU and UCSD having cross town ROTC agreements. Saw a funny bumper sticker/decal: “UCSD - We’re the smart ones”.

Just to make sure I touched a little on the thread, I hope that there aren’t any more undiscovered drug tunnels along the California-Mexico border.
 
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