The National Security Archive’s 1,200 documents reveal the dangers of the 1950s CIA mind control experiments, including the use of LSD, which should serve as a warning against today’s looming $5 billion psychedelic drug and research market.
By Jan Eastgate
President CCHR International
January 10, 2025
The U.S. National Security Archive and ProQuest recently released a scholarly document collection uncovering the shocking secret history of mind control research programs conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the 1950s to the 1970s. Titled CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, the collection includes over 1,200 records documenting what the Archive describes as “one of the most infamous and abusive programs” in the history of psychiatry and behavioral science. These experiments included the use of hallucinogens, such as LSD, on unwitting subjects.[1] CCHR was exposing these experiments in 1969 and we welcome the release, as it serves as a warning against psychedelic drugs now being considered and approved to treat mental health issues.
Newsweek highlighted the significance of the document release, stating, “The documents will prompt further discussions on MKULTRA’s implications on ethical boundaries in scientific research and governmental oversight.”[2] Between 1975 and 1977, CCHR monitored three federal hearings that investigated these unethical research activities.[3] Testimony presented to the U.S. Senate in 1977 revealed that 80 institutions, including universities, were involved in CIA mind control experiments. The agency funded 185 non-government researchers in 149 separate projects, many conducted at well-regarded universities. For example, “The chairman of the Department of Pharmacology of Emory University directed four MKULTRA subprojects, all of which involved the use of drugs, including LSD, to induce psychotic states. The horrifying series of experiments left many of his subjects…scarred for life.”[4]
Currently, over 70 universities in the U.S. are conducting clinical trials involving psychedelics, with Yale University having the highest with 37 studies, followed by Johns Hopkins University with 17, then Stanford University and Washington University School of Medicine with 11 each, and Northwestern University with 10.[5] It is a lucrative field. The psychedelic drugs market was valued at $4.87 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $11.82 billion by 2029.[6]
The Psychedelics Drug Development Tracker, which monitors psychedelic research, reports that nearly 40 companies are currently conducting psychedelic drug clinical trials.[7] Among them, MindBio Therapeutics recently completed the first phase of research on LSD microdose therapy, marking the first time participants were allowed to self-administer the drug at home. The company secured $1.44 million in government funding for LSD microdosing trials targeting “major depressive disorder.” Meanwhile, researchers at McGill University in Montreal—where CIA-funded experiments took place in the 1950s—are exploring the use of language processing technology to analyze psychedelic drug users’ experiences through voice assistants or search engines.[8]
In the 1950s, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, later known for producing the antidepressant Prozac and antipsychotic Zyprexa, was the primary supplier of LSD in “tonnage quantities” for CIA experiments.[9] Today, researchers often obtain psychedelic substances through the federal government. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) maintains a catalog of controlled substances available for researchers, including MDMA, ibogaine, and LSD, which are provided free of charge under the Division of Therapeutics and Medical Consequences (DTMC). Researchers must document their study proposals and demonstrate to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) how they plan to conduct research and prevent substance diversion. Additionally, Ceruvia Lifesciences, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company established in 2017, offers cost-free LSD to researchers.[10]
The whole system can easily spiral out of control. Although LSD was an investigational drug decades ago, authorized only for experimental use, by the late 1950s, psychiatrists and psychologists were administering it to treat neuroses and alcoholism and to enhance creativity. A 1960 study by American psychiatrist and researcher Sidney Cohen concluded that LSD was safe if given in a supervised medical setting. However, “by 1962 his concern about popularization, nonmedical use, black market LSD, and patients harmed by the drug led him to warn that the spread of LSD was dangerous,” as was reflected in a 1997 study.[11]
The earlier clandestine research operated under CIA code names such as MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE. Doctors conducted experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, electroshock and other extreme techniques on human subjects, often U.S. citizens, many of whom had no idea what was being done to them, according to a report on the document’s release.[12] Psychiatrists were interested in whether LSD could be potentially useful in “[gaining] control of bodies whether they were willing or not.”[13]
The bulk of the records that the National Security Archive relied upon were drawn from those compiled by John Marks, the former State Department official who filed the first Freedom of Information Act requests on the subject and who wrote the 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. Marks later donated his FOIA documents and other research papers to the National Security Archive.
An example of those documents are:
- A 1952 entry about drugs like LSD being tested and other experiments on unwitting Americans.
- A 1956 memo in which MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb signs off a project that would “evaluate the effects of large doses of LSD-25 in normal human volunteers” on federal prisoners in Atlanta.[14]
- A document dated December 3, 1951, stated that a person “can be reduced to the vegetable level” through the use of electroshock.[15]
The National Security Archive covered how individuals were part of the infamous “depatterning” experiments conducted by the late Dr. D. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Cameron was president of the World, American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations between 1952 and 1966. His methods combined electroshocks, and “psychic driving,” under which drugged subjects were psychologically tortured for weeks or months in an effort to reprogram their minds.[16] The research also included putting patients into a prolonged sleep through the administration of barbiturates and LSD, then administering massive doses of electroshock, ultimately reducing patients to a childlike state.[17] The patients did not consent to the treatment and were never told they were being used for research.[18]
As BBC journalist Gordon Thomas put it in Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse, Cameron was a psychiatrist “ready to pursue experiments in sensory deprivation to their ultimate conclusion—the irreversible scrambling of a patient’s mind.”[19]
Cameron’s procedure, also known as deep sleep treatment, was practiced at Chelmsford private psychiatric hospital in New South Wales, Australia from the 1960s to 1979. At that hospital, psychiatrists placed patients into a two-week drug-induced coma, during which they were electroshocked, often without their consent or knowledge. CCHR had the treatment banned in 1983 after discovering a series of deaths linked to it. In 1988, CCHR played a pivotal role in obtaining a two-year New South Wales Royal Commission government inquiry into deep sleep treatment. Former NSW Health Minister, Peter Collins, called it “the darkest episode of the history of psychiatry in this country.” The treatment became synonymous with madness, barbarism and horror; of psychiatry run amok, of bizarre experiments that, one magazine said “rival those performed by Dr. Josef Mengele in Nazi Germany.”[20]
With this documented history of psychedelic and other psychotropic drug and electroshock abuse—and now companies profiting from psychedelic drug research—CCHR has issued a warning that the growing trend toward the use of hallucinogens is dangerous. These substances should never be approved to treat any “mental illness.”
It is of note that in 1969, CCHR was established by professor of psychiatry, Dr. Thomas Szasz and the Church of Scientology, which exposed numerous instances of brainwashing or mind-control practices, following L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, being acknowledged as one of the first to discover and expose mind control experimentation conducted by U.S. military and intelligence agencies.[21]
References:
[1] “CIA Mind Control Experiments Focus on New Scholarly Collection,” National Security Archive, 23 Dec. 2024, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments-focus-new-scholarly
[2] “What Is MKULTRA? CIA Secret ‘Mind Control’ Program Records Unsealed,” Newsweek, 24 Dec. 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/mkultra-cia-secret-mind-control-program-records-unsealed-2005560
[3] https://www.cchrint.org/2023/12/11/1950s-mk-ultra-mind-control-experiments-prompt-warning-about-psychedelic-research-today/; https://www.cchrint.org/2023/01/06/cia-psychiatrist-jolly-wests-1960s-lsd-mind-control-experiments/, citing: Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring, “Inside the Archive of an LSD Researcher With Ties to the CIA’s MKUltra Mind Control Project,” The Intercept, 24 Nov 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon-west/
[4] “80 institutions Used C.I.A. Mind Studies,” The New York Times, 4 Aug. 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/08/04/archives/80-institutions-used-in-cia-mind-studies-admiral-turner-tells.html; “CIA Mind Control Experiments Focus on New Scholarly Collection,” National Security Archive, 23 Dec. 2024, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments-focus-new-scholarly
[5] https://psychedelicinvest.com/educational-organizations/
[6] https://brandessenceresearch.com/healthcare/psychedelic-drugs-market
[7] https://www.cchrint.org/2023/12/11/1950s-mk-ultra-mind-control-experiments-prompt-warning-about-psychedelic-research-today/ citing https://psychedelicalpha.com/data/psychedelic-drug-development-tracker
[8] https://www.newsweek.com/how-psychedelics-industry-taking-future-1735733
[9] “CIA Mind Control Experiments Focus on New Scholarly Collection,” National Security Archive, 23 Dec. 2024, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments-focus-new-scholarly
[10] https://psychedelic.support/resources/how-studies-get-psychedelics-a-comprehensive-guide-to-clinical-trials/; https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ceruvia-lifesciences-to-supply-lsd-to-qualified-researchers-at-no-cost-301557317.html?tc=eml_cleartime
[11] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9154737/
[12] “CIA Mind Control Experiments Focus on New Scholarly Collection,” National Security Archive, 23 Dec. 2024, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments-focus-new-scholarly
[13] https://www.cchrint.org/2023/12/11/1950s-mk-ultra-mind-control-experiments-prompt-warning-about-psychedelic-research-today/ citing Brianna Nofil, “The CIA’s Appalling Human Experiments With Mind Control,” History Channel, https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments; Tom O’Neill, Dan Piepenbring, “Inside the Archive of an LSD Researcher With Ties to the CIA’s MK-Ultra Mind Control Project,” The Intercept, 24 Nov.2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/11/24/cia-mkultra-louis-jolyon-west/
[14] “CIA Mind Control Experiments Focus on New Scholarly Collection,” National Security Archive, 23 Dec. 2024, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments-focus-new-scholarly
[15] https://truthaboutect.org/captive-brains-electroshock-for-mind-control/; Document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act dealing with the Central Intelligence Agency’s MK-ULTRA program “Artichoke” dated 3 December 1951 entitled, “Artichoke”–… (blanked out).
[16] “CIA Mind Control Experiments Focus on New Scholarly Collection,” National Security Archive, 23 Dec. 2024, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments-focus-new-scholarly
[17] “In Memoriam: D. Ewan Cameron, 1901-1967,” American Journal of Psychiatry, Dec. 1967; Julie Vandeperre, “Declassified: Mind Control at McGill,” section “The CIA seeks key to mind control,” The McGill Tribune, https://www.thetribune.ca/mind-control-mcgill-mk-ultra/
[18] “25 Years of Nightmares,” The Washington Post, 28 July 1985, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1985/07/28/25-years-of-nightmares/cb836420-9c72-4d3c-ae60-70a8f13c4ceb/
[19] Gordon Thomas, Journey into Madness, The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse, (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), p. 194
[20] https://truthaboutect.org/tribute-to-whistleblower-nurse-who-exposed-deadly-drug-and-shock-practice-deep-sleep-therapy/, citing: Philip Hickey, Ph.D. “Deep Sleep “Therapy” in Australia in the 1960s & ’70s: Could Something Like This Happen Today?” 27 Aug. 2020, https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/08/deep-sleep-therapy-australia/; “Australian inquiry discloses abuses at psychiatric clinic,” The Toronto Star, 20 Dec. 1990; Jayne Newling, “The Forgotten Children of Chelmsford,” New Idea, 14 Aug. 1992, p. 34
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