What you don’t know about government mind control

Smith

Imagine this scenario: A master sergeant in the Army has his tap water spiked with LSD. He goes temporarily crazy, but guess what? The effects of the drug don’t go away after he stops drinking the contaminated water, and as a result, his marriage suffers, and he ends up beating his wife and children.

After 17 years, he’s informed that the Army itself performed this LSD “test” on him to see what would happen. Sound like an episode of “The X-Files?” Well, this soldier was just one of many people who were (and are) subjected to experiments that investigated the mind-controlling (i.e., behavior modification) potential of certain drugs, including LSD.

Let me just say upfront that the validity of the documentation regarding these tests is not in dispute. People who have the temerity to slap “alleged” after any of these claims are just deluding themselves.

On the other hand, some of the documentation surrounding these tests is confusing, where almost all of the tests were conducted independently of one another.

In addition, so many tests were conducted and different methods of testing used to make it impossible for me to summarize them all. I’ll just try to hit the highlights.

The idea for these experiments can be traced back to 1941, when the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA) started a “truth drug” program that explored the interrogation potential of scopolamine, morphine, mescaline and barbiturates, to name a few. Captain George Hunter White was an OSS agent and ex-law enforcement official who conducted interrogation experiments with a drug dealer by slipping him cigarettes laced with a marijuana extract.

Fast-forward to 1954 where the CIA had replaced the OSS, and White had become a high-ranking Federal Narcotics Bureau officer. White was loaned to the CIA, where he first set up a brothel in Greenwich Village (later in San Francisco) to start LSD experiments. The brothel was equipped with two-way mirrors where johns were drugged and then observed to see how effective a combination of LSD and sex was in extracting information.

As if this wasn’t appalling enough, several other CIA and federal government experiments were initiated at about the same time.

The tests conducted by the CIA and the government can be broken into three general groups: those conducted on unwitting “participants” in real-life settings (including military personnel), those conducted on prisoners and those conducted in mental hospitals and the Veterans Administration hospitals.

Some of the more bizarre experiments were conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal.

Dr. Cameron kept patients in a “sleep room” where they would remain unconscious for weeks at a time.

In the sleep room they would be subjected to strange subliminal messages (“You killed your mother,” for example), LSD and other drugs and electro-shock therapy.

One woman was unconscious in the sleep room for 86 days, and when she woke up, she had no memory of her previous life.

She had to be toilet-trained, and to this day she only recognizes her children because she has been told that they are hers.

Testing on military personnel has been fairly extensive, with 1,500 soldiers having been subjects in drug tests.

Some of the soldiers were pressured by their superior officers to participate, while others were volunteered after complaining of depression and psychological stress.

Soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal were given LSD, put in sensory deprivation chambers and then rigorously interrogated.

Others at Edgewood had the misfortune of being subjected to BZ, or quinuclidinyl benzilate.

This is a drug that induces a series of psychotic experiences and totally isolates an individual from his or her environment.

The main effects of BZ last up to 80 hours, while after-effects can persist for as long as six weeks.

One paratrooper who had been exposed was so disoriented that he was found showering in his uniform while smoking a cigar. The BZ experiments went on for 16 years.

The MKULTRA program was finally investigated by a senate subcommittee in 1974, and the government’s role in mind-control experimentation was denounced.

The experiments never stopped. Now it was just a matter of how to route the funding so it would be harder to prove that the government was paying for the experiments.

Why should I care, you might ask? Well, I personally find it disturbing that the CIA, the Army and other government agencies can operate in direct opposition to the Nuremberg Code (in a weird twist, Dr. Cameron actually served on the Nuremberg Tribunal).

Nothing really substantive beyond the occasional wrist-slap has been done to curb these experiments, and it’s frightening that at one time operatives within the CIA spiked the punch at a Christmas party with LSD just to see what would happen.

You won’t find any references to these experiments on the nightly news, in spite of the fact that as recently as 1995 three inmates at the Vacaville Medical Facility died as a direct result of such experiments.

I think a quote from Captain George White says it all. “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?”


6079 Smith is a senior in psychology from Flint, Mich. Send your responses with “Smith” as the subject to [email protected].