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Search the sitePeople are often troubled about the Nazi experimentations on humans during the World War II,
while they are ignorant of the fact that American and other Western doctors had been conducting
similarly evil, unethical and illegal experiments on humans even after the end of
WWII. This was a period of the Cold War, where USA agencies were paranoid that communist countries
like Russia and China themselves already had knowledge of and were using any evil weapon
available against them, and thus they were
willing to go as far (and as unethical) as possible in an attempt to keep ahead of the game.
Here is just a summary of the researchers, mostly "highly respected" ones, that were involved in
some of the most gruesome experiments ever performed on humans, in their horrific attempt
to gain funding, status, and anything else that the CIA had to offer them.
Spring 1942 saw the first concerted attempt by an American espionage to modify the human mind. It started with General William Donovan (chief of the Office of Strategic Services), who recruited American scientists in a top-secret research program that searched for interrogation agents.
Members included: Dr. Windfred Overhulser, (then superintendent of Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC), Dr. Edward Strecker (then president of the American Psychiatric Association), and Harry J. Anslinger (head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics).
As part of the project they tested on themselves, and on witting or unwitting subjects drugs that included alcohol, barbiturates, caffeine, peyote, scopolamine and marijuana. They found the results too conflicting so they lost interest.
In the meantime, Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp experiment with mescaline as an interrogation agent on prisoners. They conclude that its use as a brainwashing tool was, unlike hypnosis, imposible, but that it can be used to draw secrets from the subject when “questions were cleverly put”.
In 1947, after finding out about Nazis experiments with mescaline as a truth drug, the US Navy initiated Project CHATTER with the aim of obtaining information from people independent of their volition but without physical duress. Dr. Charles Savage conducted experiments with mescaline on both animals and humans at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Since the results were ambiguous, CHATTER was terminated in 1953.
In 1947 the CIA was also formed, who immediately after their formation they started their own the mind-control project, taking the matter more seriously. They came up with so-called narcohypnosis, in which a subject would be administered a sedative. Another technique involved the administration of a barbituratre followed by a type of amphetamine. The state inbetween the effects of the two “opposite” drugs was thought to be one of semi-consciousness where they could extract information from the subject more easily. To control better the dosages and thus prolong that window of semi-consciousnss, CIA doctors would use an intravenous hookup was inserted in each of the subject's arms; one containing the barbiturate, the other the amphetamine. Sometimes marijuana was thrown in the mix. By 1951, the CIA would announce in a document: "We're now convinced that we can maintain a subject in a controlled state for a much longer period of time than we heretofore had believed possible”.
At some point before 1951, all these efforts of the CIA were integrated into a single project code-named BLUEBIRD. Then, in August 1951, the project would be renamed to ARTICHOKE. Much unvouchered funds went into this top-secret project which included the use of various psychoactives on unwitting citizens, mostly psychiatric patients and prisoners. In order to make these subjects unable to recall what had happened to them during such expriments, CIA agents used methods such as “icepick lobotomy (a special kind of lobotomy that would leave no visible scars), rendering subjects "incoherent through psychological and/or pharmacological attacks and then placed in a mental institution by force", or, simply, assassinating them. Another method that was under development was brain surgery via UHF sound waves and a microwave "amnesia beam" that would destroy memory neurons (something most probably scientifically unfeasible)
Some of the drugs they tested as truth drugs included cocaine and its derivatives (e.g. procaine), heroin (and the “cold-turkey” effect of its withdrawl symptom), LSD (which they first begun experimenting with in October 21, 1951, possibly finding out about it reading Werner Stoll’s study from 1947), morphine, ether, amphetamine, alcohol, and mescaline. With LSD they get really intrigued by its powerful effects and continue trying to find ways to utilise it: as an interrogation drug, as a drug to protect their captive soldiers against interrogation, as a way to brainwash someone to commit an assassination, as a way to slip it into the drink or food of an enemy in order to humiliate him (e.g. they had unsuccessful plans of doing this to Fidel Castro before a public speech).
They also start getting paranoid that the Russians and the Communist Chinese might already be utilising it for any of these purposes; which causes their efforts to intensify. And in fear of the communists using it on US personnel as an interrogation drug, they planned to have programs whereby CIA personnel would be given the drug as a form of acid test: those who passed were ironically called “enlightened”; those who didn’t were deemed susceptible to "anxiety proneness” and excluded from critical missions. Another method was to threaten an interrogated subject that they would leave him in a permanent tripping state unless he spills the beans.
CIA were among the first to learn about LSD. By the time they did find out about it, only a handful of researchers knew about it in the scientific field. As a method to promote, control, and keep a really close eye on all data about it that they could find, they begun sponsoring researchers using real or fake organisations as proxies.
One of the first to benefit such welcome funding was psychiatrist Dr. Max Rinkel, who in 1949 travelled to Sandoz company in Switzerland and obtained LSD and brought it to the USA – the first person to have brought there. The same year, he partners with Dr. Robert Hyde who after trying LSD he has what would later be commonly called bad trip. They also test it on healthy subjects at the Boston Psychopathic Institute, but, a while before Timothy Leary and others would popularise the influence of set and setting on such psychedelic sessions, many had “bad trips”. Their study was published and this was the beginning of the link between LSD and “psychosis” that would eventually lead to it being called a “psychotomimetic”.
Soon later, another psychiatrist funded by the CIA, Dr. Paul Hoch, would test LSD, mescaline and related drugs on unwitting psychiatric patients, inducing in them extreme anxiety and thus later “supporting” Dr. Hyde’s hypothesis that these drugs are “psychotomimetic”. Dr. Hoch would follow up his “research”, again on unwitting psychiatric patients, by administering mescaline or LSD and then lobotomising them, sometimes removing sections of their brain one by one in order to see what would happen. In other experiments, he would combine the administration of a psychedelic with electroshocks. Such experiments showed the ignorance that certain doctors and the CIA had (back then, at least, about the human brain, and especially about the effects of psychedelics. There was no way on earth that such experiments would produce any useful results (even for the CIA).
Also funded by the CIA was a highly respected psychiatrist, Dr. Ewen Cameron. Dr Cameron was a psychiatrist who served as President of the American Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, the American Psychopathological Association, the Society of Biological Psychiatry, and the World Psychiatric Association. All this while being under criticism for sexual abuse of children, administration of patients with poisons (e.g. curare), and other illegal and unethical “methods” that we’ll see now. Under the CIA’s control in their search for methods to brainwashing people using LSD, Dr. Cameron tested on unwitting patients at Allan Memorial Institute psychiatric hospital, forced patients to sleep for several months at a time, before giving them massive electroshocks and frequent doses of LSD to “depattern” them. Then he would sedate them again, keep them confined in “sleep rooms” and have tape-recorded messages played over and over (for several thousand times) from speakers hidden under their pillows.
Another doctor funded by the CIA (with the National Institute of Mental Health as proxy) was Dr. Harris Isbell, who was also a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulant Drugs. Dr. Isbell carried out his “experiments” at the Addiction Research Center of the US Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. This was a penitentiary for heroin addicts and was used mostly as a source of “guinea pigs” for CIA’s experiments. Dr. Isbell was known to pay off the addicts who would take part in his experiments with morphine and heroin. In some of his experiments, inmates were administered with a psychedelic (e.g. LSD or psilocybin) for several consecutive days, while multiplying the doses to overcome tolerance. Over eight hundred drugs would be handed over to Dr. Isbell by the CIA for testing on inmates. Many of these were psychedelic, including bufotenine, cohoba snuff, LSD, psilocybin and DET.
Another researcher funded by the CIA was Dr. Carl Pfeiffer a pharmacologist who conducted experiments with LSD on inmates at the federal prison in Atlanta and the Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey.
