Karen#1
Well-known member
One of the surprises we learned from the leaked audio of the March 14 L. Ron Hubbard Birthday Event was Scientology leader David Miscavige announcing that yet another shrine to Hubbard is about to have a grand opening: The villa in Las Palmas where Ron penned OT 3.
We understand Dave’s motivation for purchasing and renovating places where Scientology’s founder lived over the years, and creating shrines out of them in order to influence donors and “opinion leaders.”
But the Las Palmas villa in the Canary Islands? The place where Ron dreamed up the Xenu story? That seemed a bit outré to us. So we turned to a real expert, Jon Atack, to get his thoughts about what that place really means in Scientology history, information that visitors are likely not going to hear about…
I visited Las Palmas some years ago — though not to see the Hubbard shrine. It is in this vicinity that Hubbard fell in the street and would later claim to have broken his back through ‘research.’ Gerry Armstrong first told me of a letter from Hubbard to Mary Sue saying he was taking ‘pinks and greys’ — likely the opioid Demerol (a close cousin of heroin). I twice interviewed Virginia Downsborough, who answered Hubbard’s desperate call for help. When she arrived, he was incoherent, surrounded by reams of paper covered in scribbling — some of which made it to the Operating Thetan Section Three course. She said he had not eaten for days and was living off a ‘shelf of drugs.’ She indicated a shelf at least two feet long. He was a man of mighty appetites.
In 2013, I told David Mayo that Virginia had refused to name any of the drugs. He said she’d told him, but sadly he didn’t pass the information on. As we know from Ron’s recommendations in various books and lectures, the amphetamine Benzedrine had been his go-to for some time (Dianetics:MSMH p.363; p.389 in later editions). In Science of Survival (Book II, p.223), Hubbard said, ‘better effects … can be achieved by the administration of stimulants such as benzedrine.’ Then there is his admission in a lecture of 15 June 1950 to having been addicted to the hypnotic barbiturate phenobarbitol. Of course, in D:MSMH he also said: ‘Making one drug immoral and another taxable is a sample of the alcohol engram in society’ (p.365).
My video Never Believe a Hypnotist gives much more detail and many references.
It seems likely that Ron’s collapse in the street was a consequence of his multiple drug use. The shelf of drugs has probably not been reconstituted in his ‘cliffside landmark.’ This is also where the Sea Project (later Sea Organization) was bruited and Virginia Downsborough was the first person to turn down the offer to join.
— Jon Atack
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Scientology restores the villa where Ron dreamed up Xenu? Jon Atack has thoughts.
One of the surprises we learned from the leaked audio of the March 14 L.
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