LSD Cases

What Hubbard Had Us Believing

This post is post number 1 of 2 in response to the July 3 (misnamed as July 2, 2025) poll. Be sure to get your votes in on the July 10, 2025 poll.

In Scientology, we believed that Hubbard was the expert in everything. He told us how to eat, how to think, how to give birth, how to feed our babies after they were born with the horrific barley formula that nearly killed my daughter. He told us that they were adults in small bodies and that we could basically ignore them. I didn’t believe that one. I loved my daughter enough to mother her. He was also an expert in his own mind on drugs and their effect on the human body.

I was introduced to his anti-drug stance when I was in the Salt Lake City Mission when I first entered Scientology. We were told that we could not take drugs before we attended course. To back up what we were told, we were made to read this policy.

So, one of the first things I learned when I walked in the door of Scientology was that they were anti every single drug. Except when they weren’t. It was such a conundrum. I was talking to Mike Rinder in a podcast about my broken arm and not being able to take anything for it, not even aspirin. He told me that on the ship, he had the girls take Midol for their period cramps. He told me when he told his wife that, she was like “Really???” I felt the same way. I suffered through a lot, yet there were times when the rules didn’t apply. Hubbard made rules and he broke them just as easily.

For some reason, I bought hook line and sinker that it took six weeks for LSD to leave the body. Of course, later, Hubbard decided it never left the body, it got stored in the fat. According to this article, LSD is eliminated relatively quickly – 8 hours in your urine, 6-12 hours in your blood. As for LSD flashbacks, that has to do with perception changes caused by the drug, and nothing to do with whether it is in your body. Some people will experience them, some won’t and there’s nothing a drug rundown or purification rundown would do to fix that.

But, once he decided LSD was bad, he really decided it was bad. When a person joins Sea Org, they are asked if they have done LSD. If we have done it, it’s automatic disqualification. The funny thing about this is that when he finally “discovered” the sweat program (I’ll get to more on that in a minute), the policy states that his research included two cases. That’s right TWO LSD cases are the entire basis for his anti-LSD stance. But I get ahead of myself.

When I got into Sea Org, I knew I wouldn’t have been able to go there if I had done LSD. For years after I left Scientology, I believed everything Hubbard said about LSD. I was afraid of it and all other hallucinogens to a totally unreasonable degree. I’ve never tried a hallucinogen, maybe I’ve been given one during surgery. But by the time I started questioning whether Hubbard was all knowledgeable, I really didn’t have the desire to go try random drugs.

In the Sea Org Handbook Page 162, in Flag Order 3754, he doubled down on how bad LSD was, initimating that it caused brain damage. For instance, we are told:

That’s right. Sea Org is not a mental hospital. He said it right there. He also specifically states that LSD includes derivatives such as Angel Dust, etc.

But, he continued wanting to handle those LSD cases as well. Well, he wanted the money he got from handling those LSD cases. So he “researched” the way to do that. And by research, I mean he made things up and tried them out on other people to see if it worked. How do I know this? Starting with paragraph 16 in an article I wrote for Tony Ortega in April 2024, I discuss just what I went through while paying for the privilege of being one of Hubbard’s guinea pigs.

I’m telling you about this to show you how LRH’s “research” processes worked. The cost of the program at the time was $1,500 each. It had originally been written in February 1978 for people who had done LSD because according to Hubbard, it never left the body. Then it was revised about seven times until by December 1979 it was what is now the Purification Rundown.

Having started it in July of 1979, this is what we did then: Meet with the Medical Liaison Officer (this is a title, it doesn’t mean the person actually had any training). Take the “Drug Bomb” (1000 mg niacin, 2000 mg vitamin C, 500 mg carbonate, 25 mg B6, 200 mg B complex and 100 mg pantothentic acid) 3 times a day, drink “Cal Mag” (a really nasty tasting mixture of 1 T Calcium Gluconate, 1/2 t Magnesium Carbonate 1 T vinegar dissolved in 4 oz boiling water then add 4 oz cold water) twice a day.

While on the Sweat Program, we also had to eat a minimum of a teaspoon of salt a day. The only food we were allowed to eat was fruit, heavy juices (juiced fruits and vegetables) and 2 oz. of liquid protein a day. Then you had to put on a full body rubberized suit and run at least an hour a day. The end phenomenon was “The individual will become easier to work with and like and feel more comfortable with himself.” But you couldn’t stop doing it until you stopped flushing from the Niacin, that’s when you knew all the drugs were out of your body.

I know this stuff because I wrote it in a letter to my mom. She wrote back a letter to me asking if that was a healthy diet. I didn’t find any evidence that I ever answered that question.

I didn’t know I was pregnant when I started this. My periods had been nonexistent since we left LA. I wanted to see a doctor about it but Mark didn’t think it was necessary. I was in the last 10 minutes of my hour of running in the late August sun when I started cramping heavily and bleeding ended up in the hospital miscarrying. They estimated I was about 4 months along.

That was the end of the Sweat Program for me. Mark continued his until he no longer got the Niacin Flush. No, of course I didn’t get my $1500 back. Shortly after that, the running was discontinued, the sauna was introduced and the diet was drastically changed. There was also a requirement introduced that a physician had to clear you to go in the program and the “drug bomb” was modified.

LRH’s “extensive research” has always consisted of creating an idea out of thin air, experimenting with the idea on people who pay for the privilege of being a guinea pig and then announcing a new discovery when something goes drastically wrong.

The reg then told me I needed to do the Drug Rundown. I was treated as though I had finished the Sweat Program and was ready for this. I questioned this as the Drug Rundown was for PCs. I was OT V. The reg assured me that this was my next step. There was at the time no Drug Rundown for OTs. Translated, that means that the person giving me the auditing did not have the security clearance for me to answer the questions based on the level of auditing I had reached. In real life, it means absolutely nothing, because the questions are so meaningless, as they were with every other procedure.

About halfway through the Drug Rundown, the Case Supervisor realized that I was OT V and stopped it. When I was told by my auditor in session that I couldn’t do the rundown any more, the auditor got a strange look on his face. He said hmmm, you have a “dial-wide f/n.” In other words, my needle on the e-meter was floating as wide as it could possibly float over the news that I got to stop this nonsense.

I was not an LSD case. I did not ever do LSD. I did not do any drugs. I had not even smoked marijuana by the time I started Scientology and certainly didn’t do it in there. I had only had drugs administered to me when I had surgery to repair the damage caused to me from being beat up while in Scientology – oh the irony. Yet I was one of the people Hubbard used to see if the Sweat Program, subsequently renamed Purification Rundown, actually worked.

Here’s the policy that started it all:

I laugh at the part where he says that it is a “Nazi intelligence drug probably intended for use in municipal water systems to paralyze the population just prior to an invasion as the invading enemy would then find them all irrational.” Hubbard always had a sinister motive behind anything he wanted us to believe was bad. And usually it was something as outrageous as that.

But in any iteration, the Sweat Program was designed only for people who were LSD cases. It was Hubbard’s erroneous belief that people who had taken LSD and could not progress any other way. But, as it evolved into the Purification Rundown, it became a cash cow for Scientology which required little or no supervision from anyone, so it started getting sold to everyone, including young children.

It was dangerous then, it’s dangerous now. there is lax medical supervision usually by a Scientology associated doctor. It doesn’t fix what it claims to be designed for and massive doses of vitamins, especially niacin doled out in a one size fits all manner, without medical supervision are simply outrageous. It, like various other Scientology programs is a disaster waiting to happen.