"Crazy thing that we still do as human beings. And the problem is, I don't see a way out of it because terrorists are real."

"Criminals are real bad. People are real. This is the world we're living in. Unless you take mushrooms, we gotta get mushrooms legal for the entire country, the whole country and just force them down. Everybody's throat, force people to do mushrooms do it for everyone else."

Said Joe Rogan, an hour into his 3-hour podcast with Duncan Trussell.

The "crazy thing" under discussion was war and "any kind of violence — like stabbing your neighbor."

The question whether the category "any kind of violence" includes forcing drugs down "everybody's throat" was not noticed by Rogan or Trussell. Obviously, the answer is yes. Note the incoherence: If "mushrooms" were the cure to violence, someone who's had the cure would not recommend violence.

I wanted to add a note about the decades old idea of putting LSD in the water supply and googled "plan to put lsd in the water." I was thinking about hippies, but my screen filled up with items about the CIA. I'll just link to this BBC article from 2010: "Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning: Did the CIA spread LSD?"

On 16 August 1951, postman Leon Armunier was doing his rounds in the southern French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations.

"It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms," he remembers.... He was put in a straitjacket but he shared a room with three teenagers who had been chained to their beds to keep them under control....

Doctors at the time concluded that bread at one of the town's bakeries had become contaminated by ergot, a poisonous fungus that occurs naturally on rye.

That view remained largely unchallenged until 2009, when an American investigative journalist, Hank Albarelli, revealed a CIA document labelled: "Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin - tell him to see to it that these are buried."

F. Olson is Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who, at the time of the Pont St Esprit incident, led research for the agency into the drug LSD....

It is well known that biological warfare scientists around the world, including some in Britain, were experimenting with LSD in the early 1950s - a time of conflict in Korea and an escalation of Cold War tensions.

Albarelli says he has found a top secret report issued in 1949 by the research director of the Edgewood Arsenal, where many US government LSD experiments were carried out, which states that the army should do everything possible to launch "field experiments" using the drug.

Oh! I wish my parents were still alive so I could ask them about Edgewood Arsenal. I've only just recently seen that Edgewood Arsenal was the site of US government LSD experiments. My father was drafted into the Army just after the end of WWII and he — who, by the way, had a degree in chemical engineering — was stationed at Edgewood Arsenal. That's where he met my mother, who was one of the first WACs. My mother spoke of working with men who were in terrible shape suffering from "battle fatigue."

Now, I have to wonder whether those men were part of the Edgewood Arsenal human experiments. If they were they volunteered.