When I was a kid, there was a widespread rumor that LSD caused genetic damage. Many of us believed it might be true— and we didn’t have ChatGPT to tell us 5 decades hence that “There is currently no scientific evidence to suggest that LSD causes genetic damage. In general, LSD is not known to be a mutagenic substance, which means that it does not cause changes in DNA sequences that would lead to genetic damage… [W]hile more research is needed to fully understand the effects of LSD on human health, there is currently no conclusive evidence to suggest that LSD causes genetic damage.” When I pressed a little to find out the source of the rumors Chat told me that “the use of LSD was highly controversial in the 1960s, and many authorities and institutions sought to demonize the drug and its users. This may have contributed to the spread of rumors and myths about LSD, including the idea that it could cause genetic mutations.” Bingo!
But we didn’t know. And we were high all the time— or at least my friends and I at Stony Brook were. The culture was still ours, not the corporation’s.
Hey partner, won't you pass that reefer round,
My world is spinnin', yeah, just got to slow it down.
Oh, yes you know I've sure got to slow it down.
Get so high this time that you know
I'll never come down, I'll never come down.
I believe I'll go out to the seashore, let the waves wash my mind,
Open up my head now just to see what I can find.
Oh, yes you know I'm gonna see what I can find,
Just one more trip now, you know I'll stay high
All the time, all the time.
Yes, I'll go out to the desert just to try and find my past.
Truth lives all around me, but it's just beyond my grasp.
Oh, yes you know it's just beyond my grasp.
I'll let the sand and the stars and the wind
Carry me back, oh carry me back.
L.S.D.
L.S.D.
L.S.D.
Anyway, the world seemed to be falling apart and none of us thought we’d live beyond 30. So why not get 8 miles high and stay that way? In 1966 I hired the Byrds to play at Stony Brook because I loved that song so much and they took acid for the drive from the City to the campus and broke down and came 2 hours late. Great concert eventually though; The Youngbloods were opening for them and they just kept playing and playing ’til The Byrds arrived. But forget that for a minute. The logic was simple— we were all going to die young so the hell with genetic mutations. I took it a step further and just left America in 1969 and headed down the Hippie Trail to Afghanistan, India and Nepal. After that I settled down in Amsterdam and worked in a meditation center. Today I celebrated my 75th birthday with a pre-dawn swim. Who would have ever imagined!
When I was at Stony Brook for those 4 years, I always looked west towards the City— culture— never east towards… potato farms. Suffolk County was still pretty rural back then, and producing potatoes on a level with Idaho, Maine and Washington. I could swear to you that I had never even seen Riverhead, the county seat, way east of Stony Brook. I could, but I’d be lying. I have no recollection of the town of Riverhead but I know I was there— once.
After the great Stony Brook Bust didn’t manage to nail me, the D.A. offered me a deal— if I would voluntarily testify before the Grand Jury, I'd get immunity and I wouldn’t be asked to name any names. They just wanted to nail the school-- which was fine with me. My lawyer said to take the offer and admit everything I had ever done because I could never be prosecuted for any of it. The list was long. I was one of the county’s biggest drug dealers.
I remember nothing about Riverhead except for walking up the stairs of the county courthouse with Martha and putting out my last joint of the morning before heading into the court room. At one point, the D.A. asked me when was the last time I had gotten high. I said an hour ago… and the courtroom exploded. People thought about drug use differently back then. The grand jury foreman jumped up and started screaming, demanding to know who gave me the drugs. I was so stoned that I found the whole thing unthreatening and completely amusing. I was dumb and fearless back then. I reminded the court of the deal I had with the D.A. about not naming any names. (I mean Martha had handed me the joint and I sure wasn’t about to turn her in to these potato farmers and smalltime dentists.) Anyway, the court erupted even more and the foreman started shrieking about Satan and demons. He never quite started speaking in tongues but I’m sure I saw drool dribbling down his chin.
Nothing came of the whole episode and I kept playing hide and seek with the cops until I finally left the country. They were morons. One would approach me on campus dressed as a Halloween costume store hippie with a fake beard and his big cop shoes sticking out under his bellbottoms and ask me if he could buy a nickel bag. I was only selling pounds and kilos and he was obviously a cop so I told him to go out back and meet me in the woods in half an hour.
Another time I was having lunch in the cafeteria which looked out over the parking lot where my car was. I watched as a police car pulled up to it and a cop got out and “surreptitiously” took out a tool and busted one of my brake lights. That would be an excuse for them to stop my car and search it “legally.” I couldn’t be bothered with their games. I had to get to the City to pick up a kilo of hash. And when the cops stopped my car on the way home that night they searched every inch of it, even pulled out my backseats and took off the tires. They didn’t look at the plain brown paper bag in the front seat though— and it smelled too. In 1968, Science published this about Operation Stony Brook:
Stony Brook. N.Y. In the early hours of 16 January, 73 cars, carrying 198 policemen, unobtrusively took up positions near several dormitories and offcampus student residences of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. With watches synchronized and radios silenced in accord with a 107-page tactical plan titled "Operation Stony Brook,’’ the police waited until 5 a.m. At that time, and without prior notice to university officials, they entered the buildings, presented arrest and search warrants, and took into custody on drug charges approximately 35 college-age persons, a little over half of whom were enrolled at Stony Brook. All the prisoners were handcuffed and immediately taken to jail, where they were booked and held until friends, family, and school authorities had provided for bail bonds, which ranged from $lOOO to $5OOO. In the hours following the raid, which came during the university’s examination week, several others surrendered themselves or were apprehended. Among them was a student who was summoned out of an examination room, handcuffed, and taken away. The total number of arrests eventually reached 47. Of those arrested. 38 were charged with selling or possessing marijuana or other drugs, in secret felony indictments that a grand jury had handed down during the previous few months. The remainder of those arrested were apprehended at the scene on various drug charges. In the course of these raids, the police said, they came upon 10 pounds of marijuana; 1 pound of hashish; various other drugs, including substances suspected to be LSD; a pistol; assorted smoking pipes and auxiliary paraphernalia; two teen-age girls sleeping with boyfriends; and a married couple with two young children in a college dormitory room. The courts will, of course, have the final say on the legal significance of whatever evidence the police choose to present in making their case. But accompanying the raiders, as invited observers, were ten newspaper reporters, and, on the basis of their accounts, it appears that the police did in fact find what they said they found. Following the raids, two state legislative committees announced plans for investigations, and the grand jury that had handed down the indictments summoned campus administrators to testify at a further inquiry into Stony Brook’s affairs. Meanwhile, the police commissioner who masterminded the raid charged not only that the campus administration had wittingly tolerated the use of drugs, but that a university official somehow had got word of the raid and attempted to tip off various students. This was instantly denied. It was also publicly alleged that, in one way or another, several faculty members were more than casually associated with the use of drugs on campus. Thus was “busted” Stony Brook, the 5300-student, 840-acre jewel of New York State’s young and burgeoning system of higher education. Sometimes referred to as “instant Caltech” or “the Berkeley of the East,” Stony Brook, 60 miles from New York City, on Long Island’s North Shore, is now, quite understandably, in a semi-catatonic state following its bludgeoning by the law. And since, in terms of institutional and personal futures, a great deal hinges on the outcome of various judicial and legislative proceedings under way or impending, this is perhaps not the most fruitful time to attempt to divine what happened and why.
Nevertheless. Stony Brook's trauma properly merits attention on the part of anyone who is concerned for the viability and integrity of the nation's academic institutions. For, though the Stony Brook story has its own peculiar characteristics, it is, at the same time, in general harmony with one of the most conspicuous characteristics of contemporary life in the United States namely, academe’s accelerating alienation from the values and purposes adhered to by national and local authorities and, very likely, by the population at large. This alienation goes far beyond the traditional “town and gown” conflict. On the subject of drugs, as well as on Viet Nam, the draft, civil rights, foreign policy, the arms race, sexual mores and even hair styles, it is the campus that is the bastion and staging area for nonconformity or dissent from law, policy, or majority custom. It is true — but also irrelevant that active dissent is manifested by only a relatively small proportion of academe's populace. For that segment, as was demonstrated most prominently at Berkeley and then at scores of other campuses throughout the country, has shown itself to be, first of all. not so small in numbers; second, it is ingenious and energetic in identifying and exploiting grievances so as to evoke at least the tacit support of those who, for whatever reason, choose not to report at the barricades. Thus, it has to be recognized that the campus has become an effective spawning ground for opposition to established authority. What must also be recognized is that the campus-spawned nonconformity and dissent have become extremely painful for those who are committed to existing law. policy, and that, not surprisingly. reactions are beginning to manifest themselves. Against this background, and allowing for some wondrously confoluted local peculiarities, we can proceed to examine the recent events at Stony Brook. The first thing to be said about use of drugs at Stony Brook is that there was a good deal of it, though whether more or less than on other campuses is neither determinable nor relevant. But throughout the campus community, from President John S. Toll downward, it is readily acknowledged that, among Stony Brook students, the use of drugs mostly marijuana and hashish, some mescaline and amphetamines, and, occasionally, LSD was no rarity. Thus, under the law as written, the police had clearcut grounds for taking action. This being the case, the most interesting question is why, in cracking down at Stony Brook, they chose to behave as though they were going after a platoon of Bonnies and Clydes holed up in a fortified camp, when in reality they were going after a ragged collection of confused, frightened, and often pathetic students and dropouts. The book-length tactical plan, “Operation Stony Brook” (its cover bearing a coat of arms consisting of a narcotics-squad shield, a plumed helmet, and assorted leaves and flowers), contains a page of descriptive text for each of the suspects, plus a detailed map of the neighborhood and premises where the police expected to find them. In virtually all cases, the text states, "it is not known if defendant carries a weapon, but because of his use of drugs, he should be considered dangerous." No resistance was offered during the raid, no one tried to escape, and all suspects who were missed by the early morning roundup docilely turned themselves in soon afterward Furthermore, the legal objective of the raid was not to catch the defendants in the act; presumably that had been done some time before by the undercover agents whose testimony evoked the grand jury felony indictments.
The object simply was to haul in the defendants, most if not all of whom would have quiveringly turned themselves in upon receipt of a telephone call or registered letter. (The police contend that felony indictments require instant apprehension, but old-timers in Suffolk County say that on those occasions when the law chooses to go after well-established hoods, they often are accorded the courtesy of being allowed to turn themselves in.) Why, then, was Stony Brook accorded the gangbuster treatment? The quest for an answer requires an examination of (1) the well-intentioned but muddled manner in which the Stony Brook administration sought to deal with drug usage on campus and (2) the roiling party and police politics of Suffolk County, Long Island, whose Commissioner of Police John L. Barry, a Republican and mastermind of the raid, had been publicly accused, just 2 weeks earlier of "insulting insubordination" by the County Executive, H. Lee Dennison, a Democrat. At issue was a dispute over the distribution of police services— a matter that, from a distance, seems esoteric and purely “technical,” but such is the stuff of which local politics is made. When Stony Brook reopened last fall for the 1967-68 academic year, its administration knew that it had a “drug problem” on its hands. During the previous year, some half-dozen students had been arrested on drug charges, and in at least two of these instances the arrests were made on the basis of information provided the police by university officials. In view of recent events, however, perhaps the most important effect of this cooperation between campus authorities and police was simply intensification of the built-in suspicion and, at times, animosity, that students feel toward their academic elders. At Stony Brook these attitudes were, and are, in ample supply even without the complicating factor of a drug problem. Someday, by all indications. Stony Brook will be what is commonly referred to as a "great university,” but today it is a university under construction, with enrollments annually increasing by at least 25 per cent; with many students tripled up in dormitory rooms designed for two; with unpaved roads, vast areas of mud, and overwhelmed library facilities; and, on top of all this, with virtually all the nettlesome problems that plague even the best-settled, bestequipped of the nation’s universities. As student bodies go. Stony Brook’s is not. in the vernacular of today’s campus activists, especially "political.” The great majority of the students come from within 50 miles of the campus and are the offspring of parents who never went beyond high school. “Deadheads” is the description applied to them by a young faculty member who came of age in that pioneering center of student political activism, the University of Michigan. Pointing out that Stony Brook is an isolated enclave, remote even from a movie house or an off-campus hangout, he speculated that "they ‘turn on’ so much because there isn’t anything to do here.”
Nevertheless, the student body, however apolitical, did manage to stir itself now and then to protest conditions on campus. Last year fairly large meetings were held to protest, among other things. dormitory crowding, inadequate garbage collection, and poor lighting. The effect of all this was to sensitize the new and. in a large part, relatively inexperienced administration to the need for tactful and explo-sion-free dealings with the student body Those were charged with building a great university in the state which had been the last in the Union to adopt a system of public higher education did not want to see their baby battered by any intensification of student-administration hastily. And so, despite nudgings from the police, the administration in response to the drug problem, adopted what can only be described as a fairly permissive attitude backed up by gentle and low-keyed admonitions and urgings to stay away from drugs. As was stated in a revised set of campus regulations issued last September, "The University believes that the most effective approach to drug and alcohol misuse is prevention through educational and counseling programs.” The regulations, which permitted, for the first time, consumption of alcohol in dormitory rooms by students over 18, stressed that disciplinary action would be taken for any use of drugs, or for abuse of the alcohol privileges. But, as one of the students who was arrested an extremely bright science major about 20 years old— pointed out in an interview with Science, "At first we used to look over our shoulder when we took ‘pot,’ but we never saw anything, so we even stopped bothering to look You know,” he added, "it’s like atomic weapons When you first learn about them, you’re scared. But they never go off. so you stop worrying about it.” While the students apparently stopped worrying about it, and even got the idea that the administration was shielding them from police action, the administration was actually groping for methods to deal with the problem. An open symposium on drug problems was held last fall; the student resident assistants in the dormitories were sent articles and other literature on drugs, and the administration sought counsel from drug authorities at nearby public institutions.
Meanwhile, the administration was under the impression that it had arrived at some sort of modus vivendi with the local police. The nature of these arguments, to the extent that they actually existed, is impossible to determine, for, quite obviously, whatever deal was made was sub rosa and, in the final analysis, illegal. But among persons in the Stony Brook administration there was an impression that the police were in some sympathy with the administration’s perceptions of the difficulty of the campus drug problem, and that while the administration sought a solution, the police would exercise restraint. However, while the Stony Brook administration looked upon counseling and education as the solution to the drug problem police undercover agents unbeknownst to the administration and posing as casual dropins had been making drug purchases on campus over a period of several months. Clearly, with drug consumption as blatant as it was. they could have moved in at any time. (One faculty member commented, ‘I’ve been around, but I’ve never seen any drug scene’ as wide open as the one here. Christ, you’d see bunches of kids ‘turning on' in public lounges!”) Why the police chose to move when and as they did is their own secret. But it was on 3 January that the hornlocking between Police Commissioner Barry and County Executive Dennsion took place. At issue was Barry’s decision to become party to a lawsuit that a policemen’s group had brought against Dennison and others in an effort to prevent a reduction of police services in certain parts of the county. On 9 January, following Dennison's allegations of insubordination by Barry, the police commissioner withdrew his name from the suit amidst much local newspaper coverage that did little for the commissioner's public image. On the following day, Barry’s undercover men went before the grand jury to present their evidence on Stony Brook. One week later the raid took place. And, though it is widely asserted that Dennison, as the county’s top elective officer, is supposed to be informed beforehand of any unusual police activities, Barry pulled off the raid without telling Dennison though he called all the local newspapers to invite reporters to accompany the raiders. Barry, in an interview with Science, expressed surprise at the furor over the techniques used by the raiders. No, he said, there is no requirement that the county executive be notified of raids: sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It all depends. As for notifying the campus authorities beforehand well, why would we do that? They knew about the drugs, and they failed to do anything to stop it. We were just doing our job, the police commissioner explained. A predawn raid 198 policemen to round up 38 young suspects? Why not? We had felony indictments. It’s standard procedure; no different, he said, “from the way we'd go after a bunch of burglers hiding in a motel.’’ The public reaction, he explained, has been very good Picking up a file of correspondence, the police commissioner pulled out a letter typical of 35 or so that ht had received within a few days after the raid. “More power to you," stated the letter, “and I hope, if necessary, we’ll have more raids on campuses." Stated another, in reference to the university faculty “Bloat of [expletive?] longhaired unshaven idiots haven’t the brains to hold such responsible jobs." Following the raid, the Stony Brook administration announced that it has hired a drug specialist, who comes equipped with a former addict, to head up a new and forceful campaign against drugs on campus. The campaign will include counseling, security patrols to keep out casual dropins, and strict enforcement of drug regulations. How the students perceive the events of recent weeks is difficult to assess, since they view them from many vantage points and with a variety of values. But a good many of them feel little but pure disgust for the performance of their elders. They know that the law proscribes drugs, but they regard the law as inane, and, furthermore, they wonder why, of all departures from law, the police single out the consumption of “pot” as the object of their crackdowns. “The mafia’s running loose around this country,” said one student. “Why don’t they get the mafia?” Said another, “They say we can have alcohol, but we can’t have marijuana. This university is made up of scientists; they know there’s nothing in the literature that says ‘pot is harmful, but you can fill a library with solid findings on the harmfulness of liquor." Meanwhile, those throughout the country who are responsible for the affairs of academe might note that (1) the drug situation at Stony Brook was not unique, and (2), in view of the way a large part of the public feels toward what goes on in universities, this isn’t a bad time for a policeman to make a reputation.
A few years ago, Stony Brook gave me an alumni award and honored me with a dinner. They sent a limo to pick me up at the airport. I got to chatting with the driver. He started asking me some interesting personal questions and finally said, “You’re that Howie Klein from the bust, aren’t you?” Yep, that was me— and you? He was a cop back then and one of the 198 who invaded the campus. He said I was the #1 target and they could never understand why they couldn’t catch me. We both had a good laugh over it. This [above] is a photo of Harry O’Brien that I took in the Stony Brook gym. He was a Suffolk County assistant district attorney at the time and he was saying "Fuck you!" to me when I took his picture. I was oblivious to fear back then. He later became Suffolk County district attorney and 2 years ago he died, age 85, of COVID. I had always assumed O'Brien was a Republican-- I was sure of it-- because he hated me so much. But, nope— he was a Democrat, a Suffolk County Democrat who wanted to put me behind bars. He never did— but he was arrested himself… for having sex with an underage boy, although he eventually got off. And this was me-- when I got to Stony Brook and when I left:
Happy Birthday Howie Klein !!! may you enjoy many more trips (around the sun).