“We thought about the possibility of putting some in a city water supply and having the citizens wander around in a more or less happy state, not terribly interested in defending themselves,” a former member of the Agency’s Technical Services Staff (TSS) told Marks. But according to some testimonies, entire populations could have been one bad judgement call away from being drugged to a frenzy.
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The full extent of MK-ULTRA might remain unknown, however, because CIA Director Richard Helms had nearly every record of the project destroyed. “The ethical codes were not so highly developed, and there was a great need to know in order to protect the public in assessing the potential use of narcotics,” he told the Senate subcommittee in 1975, “I personally think we did a very excellent job.” In one horrifying case, Isbell kept seven men tripping for 77 days straight. The Addiction Research Center effectively operated as a prison for addicts, many of whom were compensated with their drug of choice for volunteering to take part in the LSD experiments.
Harris Isbell conducted his tests on captive participants. Sinai were also used as testing grounds, while at Lexington Kentucky’s Addiction Research Center, Dr. “In effect, the scientists would write openly about how LSD affects a patient’s pulse rate,” writes Marks, “but they would tell only the CIA how the drug could be used to ruin that patient’s marriage or memory.” The full extent and purpose of the studies were even kept a secret from staff who worked on the project, and although some of the information collected was made public, knowledge of the Agency’s involvement was limited to the CIA scientists leading the research. He also left a limited paper trail that proved its existence.Ĭollege students across the country would become Guinea pigs as campuses including Columbia University, the University of Illinois, the University of Rochester, and the University of Oklahoma became testing grounds for MK-ULTRA. In April 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles approved Gottlieb’s program with a heap of cash in order to begin testing.
So their next step was to dose hundreds of unwitting test subjects in the name of black magic and pseudoscience. As Marks points out, “A two-suiter suitcase could hold enough LSD to turn on every man, woman, and child in the United States.” But beyond that, not much else was known about the effects of LSD. Their testimonies uncovered that the CIA had been experimenting with drugs since early in its history and proved that its most well-guarded secrets could put the wildest of storybook spies to shame.Īccording to The Search for the Manchurian Candidate by John Marks, Sid Gottlieb, the chemist in charge of the project, told Congress that MK-ULTRA’s purpose was “to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behavior by covert means.” In other words, in the early days of the Cold War, the newly-formed CIA believed itself to be in a race against the Reds to unlock the secrets to mind control.Īfter several unsatisfactory trials guided by the Agency’s top men believing marijuana as the ideal substance for the project, Gottlieb settled on LSD as the most likely candidate to put the mind into a malleable state.Īt the time, LSD was believed to simulate the effects of psychosis ( recent research shows that the opposite is true) while the small doses that were required to send a subject into a downward spiral made it the most efficient choice. They were brought to the Capitol to testify about a CIA project known as MK-ULTRA, which New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh had recently exposed. In 1975, law enforcement agents, scientists and prostitutes gathered in Washington to talk drugs. Illustration by: Ryan Garcia / The Plaid Zebra