Straight Dope on Medicine: MK Ultra

Author

Scott Ganser
June 19, 2023

“They were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late.” — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

The United States government has a long history of experimenting on its citizens.

For instance, there was the US military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. As NPR reports, “All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren't recorded on the subjects' official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health-care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn't tell doctors what happened to them.”[i]

The U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Syphilis Study at Tuskegee was conducted between 1932 and 1972 to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis. As part of the study, researchers did not collect informed consent from participants and they did not offer treatment, even after it was widely available. The study ended in 1972 on the recommendation of an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel. After the study, sweeping changes to standard research practices were made. Efforts to promote the highest ethical standards in research are ongoing today.[ii]

And then there was the CIA’s MKUltra program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. As Time reports, “before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic.” The CIA funded studies at Columbia University, Stanford University, and other colleges on the effects of the drug.[iii]

MK-Ultra also included experiments with MDMA (ecstasy), mescaline, heroin, barbiturates, methamphetamine and psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”).

They’d even spike Kool-Aid with LSD and give it to children who were unaware.

The program involved more than 150 human experiments involving psychedelic drugs, paralytics, and electroshock therapy. In all, at least 80 institutions and 185 researchers participated, but many didn’t know they were dealing with the CIA.[iv]

Unabomber. Might he have not been the Unabomber if he weren’t in this ugly program? We’ll never know.

Kaczynski, though crazy, did have some insight into the current Leftism.

He didn’t like their ideology or technology. Here is an excerpt from his manifesto:

This was written in 1995.

All they needed was the levers of power and they would become full on tyrants.

Exactly.

We are starting to develop an information underground to combat the propaganda spewed by corporate media and our societal elite, but we might take some pointers from the North Koreans who have been at it a lot longer.

One of the least understood countries in the world, North Korea has long been known for its repressive regime. Yet it is far from being an impenetrable black box. Media flows covertly into the country, and fault lines are appearing in the government’s sealed informational borders. Drawing on deeply personal interviews with North Korean defectors from all walks of life, ranging from propaganda artists to diplomats, Jieun Baek tells the story of North Korea’s information underground—the network of citizens who take extraordinary risks by circulating illicit content such as foreign films, television shows, soap operas, books, and encyclopedias. By fostering an awareness of life outside North Korea and enhancing cultural knowledge, the materials these citizens disseminate are affecting the social and political consciousness of a people, as well as their everyday lives.[v]

Fact can be stranger than fiction because after the Korean war, captured Americans were freed from the repressive regime, and they came home spewing communist propaganda. This interested the CIA which envied the mind control techniques deployed by the nefarious captors.

The Unabomber isn’t the only notable who participated in MK-Ultra. Ken Kesey, author of the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, volunteered for MK-Ultra experiments with LSD while he was a college student at Stanford University.

Kesey later went on to promote the drug, hosting LSD-fueled parties that he called “Acid Tests.”

Other volunteers included Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist; Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston mobster.

The U.S. government views its citizens as less then human and subjects available to be experimented on.

Need I mention the mRNA Covid vaccines?

They did more harm than good.

And are still doing it.

Germany is still experiencing 43% excess deaths, and many if not most of these can be chalked up to the mRNA vaccine.[vi]

From the perspective of pharmacovigilance, the simultaneous onset of excess mortality and vaccinations represents a safety signal. Safety signals such as the observation of a temporal relationship between the administration of vaccines and the occurrence of adverse events do not necessarily imply a causal relationship since there may be potential third variables that influence both the course of vaccinations and the course of excess deaths. Thus, a safety signal does not indicate a causal relationship between a side effect and a drug but is only a hypothesis that calls for further assessment.

In fact, in a study by a research team led by Schirmacher [28], out of 35 bodies found unexpectedly dead at home with unclear causes of death within 20 days following COVID vaccination, autopsies revealed causes of death due to pre-existing illnesses in only 10 cases. From the remaining 25 cases, in three cases, it was concluded from the autopsies that vaccination-induced myocarditis was the likely cause of death, and in two cases, it was concluded that vaccination-induced myocarditis was possibly the cause of death. As shown in Supplementary Table 1 published by Schwab et al. [28], vaccination was the cause of death in further cases as well.

They are also seeing elevated levels of stillbirths.

 

Extra deaths in the US (raw data) show a jump in deaths in the US in 2020 from 2018/19 levels of more than half a million.[vii]

In German, Gottlieb means “God lives.”

This was a godless man bent on conducting a godless study.[viii]

During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. This was their working explanation for the Chinese and Russian governments having such an abundance of control over their citizens. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.

NPR, journalist Stephen Kinzer, who wrote Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Contorl, said, “Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people’s minds, and he realized it was a two-part process. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void.[ix]

Kinzer told the Los Angeles Review of Books that Gottlieb himself tookd LSD “more than 200 times.”

Some historians credit MK-Ultra with setting off the drug and hippie culture of the 1960s.

"Instead of waging war, [the CIA thought] 'we'll just find a way either to hypnotize leaders, or to hypnotize entire populations to control other people's minds from far away'," Mr. Kinzer says.[x]

"The prize would be nothing less than global mastery."

Some of Gottlieb's experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany, and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide), according to Kinzer's research.

Kinzer notes that the top-secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments. "We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed," he says.

It shouldn’t be a hard sell to portray the CIA involved in clandestine experimentation involving abuse, drug use and brainwashing. They are masters of manipulation and zero sense of ethics and responsibility.

Involving American citizens in anything is against the stated reason for the CIA to exist: “the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (an organization which says its ‘mission is to collect information related to foreign intelligence and foreign counterintelligence.’”[xi]

Americans are supposed to be off-limits.

Obviously, that wasn’t observed.

Throughout the search for the secret behind mind control, many people from different backgrounds were recruited, including Dr James Hamilton, Dr Robert Hyde (p. 100) and Dr Louis Jolyon West (p. 88) who were all American psychiatrists. Hamilton worked at Stanford University, and he became the researcher behind Subprojects 2, 124 and 140. Subproject 2 examined how synergistic activity of drugs can eradicate consciousness completely, as well as ways to drug a person without their knowledge. Subproject 124 tested whether inhaling carbon monoxide gas would induce a trance, and Subproject 140 tested the psychological effects of thyroid hormones (p. 99). Hyde coordinated Subprojects 8, 10, 63 and 66, which studied the effects of psychotropic drugs, in particular LSD-25 and alcohol (p. 100). West was paid $20,800 by the CIA to test the effects of dissociative drugs (p. 88). As drugs were a key area of research, pharmacies and pharmacologists were also key allies. The American pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly was behind Subprojects 6 and 18, where the CIA paid $400,000 for bulk purchases of LSD, making Subproject 18 the most expensive subcontract (pp. 86, 130). Dr Harris Isbell was an American pharmacologist who studied the effects of LSD, mescaline, psychotomimetic drugs (that cause delusions) and even worked on the pre-clinical development of new drugs (p. 95). Another recruit was Dr Carl Pfeiffer, an American physician and biochemist who studied depressant and hallucinogenic drugs (p. 97).[xii]

Not everyone recruited was from traditional backgrounds. One of the most well-known figures was George Hunter White, who held the title of Federal Narcotics Agent and CIA Consultant under the pseudonym Morgan Hall. White enlisted prostitutes to lure clients to their ‘safe houses’, where they were drugged without their knowledge so that CIA psychologists could study the effects of sex and drugs on the human psyche (Kinzer, 2019: 149–51). This was known as Operation Midnight Climax.

At the 1954 convention of the American Psychological Association, Gottlieb’s officers were drawn to a Canadian study by Dr Donald Olding Hebb at McGill University, testing the ‘effects of radical isolation upon intellectual function’. Hebb was dubbed the ‘father of neuropsychology’ for his innovative research that combined neuroscience and psychology. His participants were McGill students who volunteered in exchange for $20 compensation per day of the experiment. In these sensory deprivation experiments, the participants lay on hospital beds with translucent goggles, arms cuffed, and speakers that emitted buzzing noises in their ears. After three days of this treatment, participants experienced surreal hallucinations (Hebb and Heron, 1955).

After further investigation into Dr Hebb’s research, CIA officers became even more interested in a colleague of Hebb: Donald Ewen Cameron. He adapted Hebb’s experiments using a greater degree of force, using drugs and hypnosis to induce a ‘clinical coma’, and he compared the subjects’ psychological breakdown to criminals breaking down under interrogation (Kinzer, 2019: ch. 8).

Cameron launched a campaign on his pet theory “depatterning.” Patients were reduced to an infantile state, from which he could freely program them however he wished. This was achieved by a method called “psychic driving.” Psychic driving involved subjecting drugged, sleep-deprived patients to continuously repeated audio messages on a looped tape.[xiii] For example, insulin would be administered to put a person into an insulin coma.

One man was put into an insulin coma for 36 days, with a tape beside his bed saying “Your mother hates you” over and repeatedly. It was constant.

Page-Russell electroshock treatments were also in the regimen. These are 50-75 times more powerful than a normal electroshock. These are designed to “wipe memory.” One individual had 54 of these applied, which were accompanied by 54 grand mal seizures.

After this man got out, he couldn’t recognize his own family anymore. He lost his job, and his family went into poverty.

MK-Ultra was terminated in 1973. The government got busy erasing much of the records. It blew up because of a whistleblower named John Marks. He went on to write a book about it called the Manchurian Candidate.

During congressional hearings the CIA admitted that the program existed and that it “probably wasn’t the right thing to do.”

Fake contrition to effect damage control.

The CIA is who needs to be reprogrammed. Responsibility, compassion, ethics, and morality would be on the menu.

As Rod Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “ Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.


[i] https://www.rcreader.com/news-releases/us-government%E2%80%99s-secret-history-grisly-experiments

[ii] https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/index.html#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Public%20Health%20Service%20(USPHS)%20Syphilis%20Study%20at%20Tuskegee,after%20it%20was%20widely%20available.

[v] https://www.amazon.com/North-Koreas-Hidden-Revolution-Transforming/dp/0300217811

[viii] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief

[xi] https://sites.duke.edu/lawfire/2019/10/01/a-question-for-america-should-a-cia-official-ever-be-obliged-to-face-the-public/

[xii] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0957154X231163763?rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org