Research On Humans
Research on human subjects showed that LSD lodged primarily in the liver, spleen, and kidneys. Only a tiny amount (.01%) of the original dose entered the brain, and it only remained there for 20 minutes.
This was a most curious finding, as the effect of LSD was not evident until the drug had disappeared entirely from the central nervous system.
Some scientists thought LSD might act as a trigger mechanism, releasing or inhibiting a naturally occurring substance in the brain, but no one could figure out exactly why the drug had such a dramatic effect on the mind. Many other questions were in need of clarification.
Could the drug be fatal? What was the maximum dose? Were the effects constant, or were there variations according to different personality types? Could the reaction be accentuated by combining LSD with other chemicals? Was there an antidote?
Some of these questions overlapped with legitimate medical concerns, and researchers on CIA stipends published unclassified versions of their work in prestigious scientific periodicals.
But these accounts omitted secret data given to the CIA on how LSD affected operationally pertinent categories such as disturbance of memory, alteration of sex patterns, eliciting information, increasing suggestibility, and creating emotional dependence.
The Agency turned to Dr. Ewen Cameron, a respected psychiatrist who served as president of the Canadian, the American, and the World Psychiatric Association before his death in 1967.
Cameron also directed the Allain Memorial Institute at Montreal's McGill University, where he developed a bizarre and unorthodox method for treating schizophrenia.
With financial backing from the CIA he tested his method on 53 patients at Allain. The so-called treatment started with sleep therapy, in which subjects were knocked out for months at a time.
The next phase, depatterning, entailed massive electroshock and frequent doses of LSD designed to wipe out past behavior patterns. Then Cameron tried to recondition the mind through a technique known as psychic driving.
The patients, once again heavily sedated, were confined to sleep rooms where tape-recorded messages played over and over from speakers under their pillows. Some heard the message a quarter of a million times.
Cameron's methods were later discredited, and the CIA grudgingly gave up on the notion of LSD as a brainwashing technique.
But that was little consolation to those who served as guinea pigs for the CIA's secret mind control projects. Nine of Cameron's former patients have sued the American government for $1,000,000 each, claiming that they are still suffering from the trauma they went through at Allain.
These people never agreed to participate in a scientific experiment, a fact which reflects little credit on the CIA, even if the Agency officials feared that the Soviets were spurting ahead in the mind control race.
The CIA violated the Nuremberg Code for medical ethics by sponsoring experiments on unwitting subjects. Ironically, Dr. Cameron was a member of the Nuremberg tribunal that heard the case against Nazi war criminals who committed atrocities during World War II.
Like the Nazi doctors at Dachau, the CIA victimized certain groups of people, who were unable to resist: prisoners, mental patients, foreigners, the terminally ill, sexual deviants, ethnic minorities.
One project took place at the Addiction Research center of the US Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. Lexington was ostensibly a place where heroin addicts could go to shake a habit, and although it was officially a penitentiary, all the inmates were referred to as patients.
The patients had their own way of referring to the doctors, hacks or croakers, who patrolled the premises in military uniforms. The patients at Lexington had no way of knowing that it was one of 15 penal and mental institutions utilized by the CIA in its super-secret drug development program.
To conceal its role the Agency enlisted the aid of the navy and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which served as conduits for channeling money to Dr. Harris Isbell, a gung-ho research scientist who remained on the CIA payroll for over a decade.
According to CIA documents the directors of NIMH and the National Institutes of Health were fully cognizant of the Agency's interest in Isbell's work and offered full support and protection.
The CIA also expended considerable effort to monitor the latest development in LSD research on a world-wide scale. Drug specialists funded by the Agency made periodic trips to Europe to confer with scientists and representatives of various pharmaceutical concerns, including, of course, Sandoz Laboratories.
Initially the Swiss firm provided LSD to investigators all over the world free of charge, in exchange for full access to their research data. (CIA researchers did not comply with this stipulation.)
By 1953, Sandoz had decided to deal directly with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which assumed a supervisory role in distributing LSD to American investigators from then on.
It was a superb arrangement as far as the CIA was concerned, for the FDA went out of its way to assist the secret drug program.
With the FDA as its junior partner, the CIA not only had ready access to supplies of LSD (which Sandoz marketed for a while under the brand name Delysid) but also was able to keep a close eye on independent researchers in the United States.
The CIA would have been content to let the FDA act as an intermediary in its dealings with Sandoz, but business as usual was suspended when the Agency learned of an offer that could not be refused.
Prompted by reports that large quantities of the drug were suddenly available, top-level CIA officials authorized the purchase of 10 kilos of LSD from Sandoz at an estimated price of 4240,000 enough for a staggering 100 million doses.
A document dated November 16, 1953, characterized the pending transaction as a risky operation, but CIA officials felt it was necessary, if only to preclude any attempt the Communists might make to get their hands on the drug. What the CIA intended to do with such an incredible stash of acid was never made clear
But glad that you're able to see, in her passing, freedom for both of you--though of very different kinds.
