Among the scientists brought back to the States were Nazi chemists who had experimented on prisoners at Dachau, using mescaline. The newly created Central Intelligence Agency, eagerly searching for biological weapons that could both start large-scale epidemics and be used to target individuals for assassination, found out about these Dachau experiments. Their interest was piqued, even though the experiments were, by all accounts, failures. Torturer-physicians like the Nazi Colonel Hubertus Strughold*1 had tried to use mescaline to elicit absolute obedience in their victims, to no avail. Nonetheless, the spymasters eagerly embraced these physicians and their experiments, and arranged for them to continue their work in the United States.
When Brigadier General Charles Loucks, chief of the Operation Paperclip scientists, heard about LSD, he tasked his Nazi physicians and chemists to work with the CIA to research the potential of LSD as a mass poison and a means of controlling human behavior. The resulting project brought together the Army Chemical Corps and the CIA in an unusually cooperative endeavor. They teamed up in operations code-named Bluebird and Artichoke to develop what they called “unconventional interrogation techniques” using LSD and other drugs. For nearly twenty years, these programs and the CIA’s large-scale mind-control program, code-named MK-ULTRA, tried to weaponize psychedelic drugs.*2 Among their methodologically suspect studies was one in which they set up brothels in San Francisco and New York designed to lure men whose drinks would then be spiked with LSD; their behavior was observed through one-way mirrors, as if they were some kind of twisted focus group. It’s not clear what the CIA sought to learn from these “studies,” beyond answering the question of what the effects of LSD are on an unsuspecting subject under peculiar conditions. The CIA also surreptitiously dosed their own officers, ostensibly to determine what might happen if an enemy agent was secretly given LSD, or if a CIA agent was so dosed by the enemy. Nothing useful was gleaned from these experiments, though many people suffered psychic and emotional discomfort, some of it long-lasting. One can hardly imagine a worse set and setting for a psychedelic experience.
Among the unwilling and unwitting victims of this “research” was a scientist named Frank Olson, a bacteriologist working for the CIA on biological and chemical weapons. In 1953, a week after being secretly dosed by his supervisor, Olson was believed to have thrown himself out of a thirteenth-story window. The CIA claimed that the LSD caused Olson to suffer a paranoid nervous breakdown. Olson’s family, however, believes that he was murdered, probably because during his LSD experience he gained insight that led him not only to refuse to continue his work in germ warfare, but to threaten to expose the government program. According to Olson’s family, the CIA murdered him to keep him from divulging details about the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.
Given what I’ve learned about how the risks of LSD have been wildly overstated, and given what we know about the CIA’s role in overthrowing governments, assassinating world leaders, and setting up black sites around the world in which to torture perceived enemies, not to mention its practice of conducting unethical LSD experiments on uninformed subjects, I find the family’s explanation more convincing than the Agency’s.
Olson’s death, whether it was suicide or murder, had little discernible effect on the CIA’s continuing LSD research. According to testimony before Congress, the CIA partnered with no fewer than eighty academic and medical institutions to study LSD in order to develop it into a tool of war and assassination. This research had an unintended consequence: it introduced thousands of subjects of these various studies, among them Ken Kesey, to the drug. Unfortunately, fearful at the prospect of congressional investigation and public disclosure, the CIA destroyed the bulk of its documentation of the MK-ULTRA experiments. We know some of what they got up to, but much of their nefarious activity will forever remain a secret.
Leave it to the CIA to take a drug that is a tool of enlightenment for so many, and try to turn it into an agent of chemical warfare. We should be grateful for the one positive thing we can say about their endeavor: it failed.
* * *
*1 ?Strughold was a longtime NASA employee who later became known as the Father of Space Medicine. One can presume that the small children victimized by his experiments with oxygen deprivation would have found this honorific ironic, had they survived.
*2 ?For a discussion of these and other experiments, see John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control—The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences.
Day 24
Normal Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Fine, though hardly joyful.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Restless.
Work: Not great.
Pain: Minor.
Today I had a crappy day. My mood wasn’t prickly; I didn’t argue with my husband or yell at my kids; but my work went poorly, and I spent much of the day surfing the Web.*1 My sense of dissatisfaction continued until I went to therapy. Sometimes I think I pay this professional for the privilege of having a ready ear for my complaints, in order to spare my friends and family from having to listen to them. Today my topic was how my lousy workday awoke feelings of insecurity and dissatisfaction, which inevitably led to concerns about the possibility of my depression’s return.
It was harder than usual to whine about these typical complaints, because I haven’t yet told my therapist about my microdose experiment. I know I’m not being fair to her. How can she treat me when she’s missing such basic information? But I’m afraid she’ll be shocked. Worse, that she’ll judge me. Or, worst of all, simply say, “That’s interesting,” then nothing else, while she silently judges me. She might even fire me! I know it’s silly to care this much about what your therapist thinks of you, but I do. Like a fourth-grade teacher’s pet, I want to be her best patient, her A student, funny and successful. I don’t want her to be disappointed in me. It’s not lost on me how ironic it is to want to give my therapist the impression that I totally have my shit together. It’s like tidying up because the housekeeper is on the way. But not telling her has felt dishonest, especially since I’ve been able this month to make such good use of the tools of cognitive behavioral therapy she has recommended to me. I worry that right now she’s feeling I’m doing such a good job, which means she’s doing such a good job. How is she going to feel when she finds out that her lessons have finally sunk in not because of her wisdom or tenacity but because I’m taking acid behind her back?
My therapist is very young, and very beautiful. (Her beauty is irrelevant to either her competence or this story, but I cannot help mentioning it, because this is the kind of beauty that makes it difficult to concentrate on one’s own minor desperations.) She is also very sensible. She practices cognitive behavioral therapy—none of that wishy-washy, self-indulgent analytic crap for her. Or for me, frankly. I prefer to take my self-indulgence with a bracing dose of pragmatism.