Subject: SNIP -- Is this group still around?
From: dgross@somewhere.edu (Dave Gross)
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 94 21:18:11 GMT
Lines: 94

Shortly after I got out of High School without a diploma but with an equivalency test certificate, after the second time I crossed the blue line at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, but before the California State Peace March, I was a frustrated radical. Frustrated because I had the purity of heart and motive, the ideological sophistication,
and the drive to fight against The Empire, but knew not how.

In other words, I was ripe for the picking. So I fell in with a ZPG spinoff group which called itself "Green Again" in its public dealings (a booth downtown on Thursday nights for Farmers' Market, a column published in the local Womens' Press, etc.) but which called itself SNIP within the group. At the time, it didn't occur to me that SNIP
might be an acronym, but I've speculated since then (Students for a
Negative Increase in Population?).

Anyway, there were maybe ten of us in the group, and our focus was world overpopulation. And we weren't like the population control groups today, who sometimes seem to have the attitude "it's okay if the ignorant little brown people breed themselves into starvation, as long as they don't try to come to our country which is crowded enough thank you," no, we wanted open borders but fewer people.

And we recognized, in our radicalness, that it wasn't little brown people breeding that we had to worry about, but expensive little pink people who were using an inordinate amount of the world's resources. And according to the fliers we read, each little pink larva would grow up to make more little pink larvae in a branching tree which in a few generations was very bushy indeed.

And we decided that since we did not have, and had no hope of having, any sort of political influence or control, and we weren't too happy about the government regulating reproduction anyway (most of us were young and came from the anarchist punk rock tradition); and since the fine population explosion propaganda that had influenced us was failing to influence enough of the rest of the population, we'd have to perform more radical actions.

So we loaded up on psychedelics and short-term deliriants (ether, ketamine), and I did some research at the library, and we put our plan into action.

A typical night would go something like this. We'd send three people out in a specially-rigged car (tastefully hidden interior lighting and mirrors, awesome sound system), sometimes with a backup car following discreetly behind. Then we'd pick up a hitchhiker and connive to hand him (always a him) a beer or a coke or something that had been laced with 300 mics or more of LSD (we tried other psychedelics, but mushrooms took too long to come on, and mescaline made the subjects carsick).

Then we started acting ridiculous, making jokes and such so the initial hilarity of the drug would be masked by the general hilarity in the car. About an hour and a half to two hours into the trip, driving slowly so as not to get to where the hitchhiker was headed too soon, the hilarity would kick in hard core and we'd distract the fellow while our driver picked a deserted side-road.

Then we'd hit the light and sound machine. Lights would come on all over the inside of the car, and beams would be split and reflected by mirrors and chrome. At the same time, a booming sound would come through the stereo, somewhat mechanical, but fully eerie. We'd all panic, and the driver would run the car roughly off of the road, giving me (it was usually me in the back seat) the chance to put the plastic bag with powdered ketamine, or a rag soaked in ether, over the hitchhiker's nose and mouth.

Meanwhile, the two in the front seat (and sometimes those of the confederates in the other car who were not acting as lookouts), would put on cheap halloween masks and gaudy costume jewelry and approach the poor sucker, while I slipped out the door and got the surgical supplies from the back. The stereo by this time had muted the eerie humming and was playing mostly nonsense. Used car lot commercials played backwards, Tibetan chants, the kind of stuff used as psychological warfare at Waco.

The masked folks would gently restrain the baffled guy and monitor his anaesthetic intake (ketamine and ether -- and nitrous oxide in a pinch -- are also anaesthetics of a sort) while I performed the vasectomy. One of the easier surgical operations, if you're not worried about making it reversable.

To cover our tracks, we added a third testicle made out of teflon-coated ceramic, and drew alien symbols in iodine on the hitchhiker's forehead, before letting him go and speeding off for another subject.

Years later when I did some research on UFO reports for Terence McKenna I didn't see any of our subjects' stories directly, but I did notice many motifs which were obviously drawn from our activities.

When I came back from the Peace March, the group had gone underground or disbanded or (maybe, though I didn't hear anything about it) had been caught. I haven't seen any of them since. And I'm have some regret, of course, about the extremes of my youthful zeal. Still, all in all, no harm no foul. Anyone can have children, but not very many people get to have a story about being kidnapped and having one's testicle count augmented by aliens from another planet.