Declassified records reveal coordinated psychiatric participation in behavioral control experiments — raising urgent oversight questions as psychotropic drugs are prescribed to more than 70 million Americans.
By Jan Eastgate
President CCHR International
March 9, 2026
Media outlets are increasingly reporting on the CIA’s behavioral research programs of the 1950s and 1960s, which experimented with drugs and psychological techniques to influence and control human behavior. This renewed attention follows the 2024 release of CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA by the National Security Archive and ProQuest. The collection of more than 1,200 declassified documents reveals how U.S. intelligence agencies and psychiatrists collaborated in programs exploring whether drugs and psychological techniques could manipulate human behavior. The records describe experiments involving LSD, hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation—often conducted on unwitting individuals.[1] Other declassified records and congressional investigations have also documented open-air tests exposing the public in settings such as American cities and subway systems. Together, the records underscore enduring ethical concerns, as critics argue the psychiatric industry continues to subject the public to large-scale behavioral experimentation without fully informed consent.
While some media coverage treats this as newly unearthed history, CCHR began exposing these psychiatric mind control experiments in the 1970s through documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and by monitoring the 1975–1977 federal hearings that investigated CIA abuses.[2]
Operation Artichoke: Engineering an Unwitting Assassin
In 1954, under “Operation Artichoke,” the CIA formally examined whether a person could be secretly induced to commit an assassination against his will. According to a 1978 New York Times article, a project team usually composed of interrogation specialists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and drug experts who evaluated whether an individual could perform “an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of Artichoke.” A January 22, 1954 CIA document discussed whether a subject could be “surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an alcoholic cocktail at a social party.”[3]
The objective was explicit: chemical manipulation of behavior without consent.
What the CIA Memos Reveal
Documents obtained through FOIA show that behavioral control research was systematic and coordinated:
- March 7, 1951 – “Disposal” Memo: Proposed isolating individuals who had been deemed defectors or blown or exploited agents and treating them in ways that would cause “semi-permanent amnesia for approximately one year.”[4]
- December 3, 1951 – Memo: Stated a person “can be reduced to the vegetable level” through electroshock.[5]
- February 12, 1952 – Memorandum: Called for securing and training “super-experts” combining psychiatry, psychology, and medical knowledge to use electroshock, LSD, hypnosis, and other techniques.[6]
- December 27, 1963 – Richard Helms Memo: The Deputy Director for Plans for the CIA wrote that maintaining the capability to influence human behavior required testing on “unwitting” subjects, calling it the only “realistic method.” He emphasized concealing the Agency’s role while minimizing physical or emotional harm, and to remain current on enemy methods of behavioral manipulation. The research was to be coordinated with the Bureau of Narcotics.[7]
- 1956 – MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb Memo: Approved evaluation of large doses of LSD on federal prisoners in Atlanta.[8]
- November 3, 1960 – Memorandum on methods of hypnosis: Sought techniques to induce deep trance in an unwitting and unwilling subject, create indefinitely durable amnesia, and produce through post-hypnotic suggestion, “indefinitely durable control for future behavior,” including “behavior in conflict with the subject’s normal pattern.”[9]
These programs required psychiatrists and scientists using psychiatric “treatments.” The professionals involved were not peripheral consultants; they were essential architects.
Investigative journalist Gordon Thomas captured the ethical collapse behind these programs in Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse (1989):
“Nothing I had researched before could have prepared me for the dark reality of doctors who set out to deliberately destroy minds and bodies they were trained to heal.”[10]
The 1977 Senate hearings on Project MKUltra revealed that 80 institutions and 185 non-governmental researchers and assistants participated in 149 CIA behavioral research projects.[11] This was not rogue psychiatric activity. It was institutional.
Canada-CIA Drug and Shock Experiments
In Canada, CIA-funded mind-control experimentation centered at Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron directed MKUltra Subproject 68. Cameron was president of the World, American, and Canadian Psychiatric Associations between 1952 and 1966.[12] He used electroshock at up to 75 times normal intensity, prolonged drug-induced sleep, massive doses of LSD, and “psychic driving,” ultimately reducing patients to a childlike state. Patients did not give informed consent; many did not even know they were part of research.[13]
A December 3, 1951 CIA document discussed how electroshock could reduce a person “to the vegetable level” and described settings that could induce amnesia or compel someone to talk—demonstrating how established psychiatric tools were evaluated for behavioral manipulation.[14] Cameron later publicly promoted what he called “beneficial brainwashing” at an American Psychiatric Association conference.[15]
Litigation began in 1980, leading to a 1988 CIA settlement with eight former patients, and continued for decades.[16] In 2022, Canadian courts approved that additional claims by survivors’ families could move forward, seeking $1 million in compensation per survivor.[17]
The cases stand as enduring evidence that psychiatric authorities carried out coercive experimentation with profound and lasting human consequences and illustrate the dangers of psychiatric power exercised without oversight or accountability.
LSD as a Weapon
In the 1950s, LSD was explored as a weapon. Pharmaceutical companies supplied LSD to the CIA and U.S. Army for clandestine purposes. According to Gordon Thomas, test subjects often “went out of control in minutes after taking the drug.”[18]
In 1949, L. Wilson Greene of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps authored Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War, recommending systematic testing of LSD and other compounds that could induce panic and mass hysteria in enemy populations. Journalist Stephen Kinzer later detailed how intelligence planners viewed such drugs as tools to weaken resistance.[19]
Hallucinogens were evaluated as instruments of behavioral disruption and control.
The American Public as Test Subjects
The experimentation did not remain confined to laboratories.
In June 1966, covert dispersal tests were conducted in the New York City subway system to evaluate how an airborne agent might spread among commuters, later described in the U.S. Army report, A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents. The New York Post cited claims from researcher H.P. Albarelli that Dr. Henry Eigelsbach, a Fort Detrick biological warfare scientist whose work intersected with CIA MKUltra–era research programs, confirmed that a smaller LSD subway test occurred in November 1950, though little is known about it. Commuters were never informed.[20]
What is recorded is that a group of U.S. Army scientists went to the Seventh and Eighth Avenue lines of the New York City subway, some carried air sampling machines in boxes and on belts; others carried light bulbs. The light bulbs were packed with about 175 grams of a bacterium called Bacillus subtilis (then known as Bacillus or B. globigii), used to simulate biological weapons. The plan was to shatter them and then use the sampling machines to see how they spread through the subway tunnels and trains. This test was one of at least 239 experiments conducted by the military in a 20-year “germ warfare testing program” that went on from 1949 to 1969. A paper from the National Academy of Sciences analyzing military experiments notes that B. globigii is now considered a pathogen and is often a cause of food poisoning. “Infections are rarely known to be fatal,” the report said, though fatal cases have occurred.[21]
Congressional hearings later revealed that between 1949 and 1968, the Army conducted 239 open-air germ warfare tests in U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Key West, and Panama City.[22] On September 20, 1950, a Navy vessel sprayed bacterial microbes into San Francisco’s fog for seven days to simulate biological attack conditions on 800,000 residents. At least one death was later linked to exposure.[23]
Americans were not told.
These actions occurred after the United States had helped create the 1948 Nuremberg Code requiring voluntary informed consent in human experimentation. In 1953, the Secretary of Defense issued, in Top Secret, a memorandum on human subjects based on the Nuremberg Code. The document wasn’t declassified until 1975.[24]
A 1957 internal CIA evaluation later warned that MKUltra activities must be concealed because exposure would have “serious repercussions.” A 1963 review acknowledged that MKUltra testing placed “the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.”[25]
In 1967, a conference titled Psychotropic Drugs in the Year 2000 discussed the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry’s search for “chemical substances which would have mind-altering properties” capable of influencing “selective aspects of man’s life.” Psychiatrists and others predicted “a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act,” stating that such human phenomena could be “started, stopped, or eliminated” chemically and that this capability would “affect the entire society.”[26]
Jolly West: Psychiatry and Intelligence Converge
A figure that best illustrates the integration of psychiatry and intelligence was psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West. West was cleared at Top Secret, conducted CIA-funded research under MKUltra Subproject 43, and later became director of psychiatry at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute.[27]
In 1956, West reported that his experiments had succeeded in replacing true memories with false ones through hypnotic suggestion enhanced by drugs that deepened trance states. In his paper “Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” he claimed it was feasible to cause an individual to recall a fictional event as real.
Psychiatrist Colin A. Ross later wrote in The CIA Doctors that West’s career showed how the mind-control network functioned, not as a single conspiracy, but through overlapping academic posts, grants, conferences, and military ties. Some psychiatrists received direct funding; others conducted research of “direct relevance to mind control, non-lethal weapons development, controlled dissociation, and the building of Manchurian Candidates.”[28]
A National Security Warning Ignored
The question is not merely what occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, but whether institutions have fully reckoned with the behavioral power of central nervous system-acting drugs.
In 2008, the Mitre Corporation conducted a Human Performance Study for the U.S. Department of Defense Research and Engineering Enterprise. The report examined how advances in psychoactive drugs might be weaponized by America’s adversaries. It warned that newly approved drugs would “certainly have extensive off-label use” in the United States and recommended monitoring such use because adversaries might exploit these compounds in training or field operations against the nation.[29]
Yet today, 76.9 million Americans, including 6.1 million children and teens, are prescribed psychotropic drugs. Many carry regulatory warnings for agitation, hostility, aggression, suicidal ideation, and even homicidal thoughts.
Among them is fluoxetine (Prozac), one of the most widely prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which increases synaptic serotonin and indirectly affects multiple serotonin receptors, including 5-HT2A—the same receptor strongly implicated in the psychoactive effects of psychedelics.[30]
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested $27 million into researching how to remove the hallucinogenic component of psychedelic drugs while retaining their neurobiological effects. As one University of North Carolina pharmacologist told Forbes, “If we could have a drug, you take it at night, you wake up and you’re not depressed. It would be the end of Prozac.”[31] The statement underscores a revealing reality: both SSRIs and psychedelics exert powerful effects on serotonin systems, particularly pathways involving the 5-HT2A receptor, which can lead to agitation, irritability, and violence through a complex interaction with the serotonin system.
The contradiction is stark: military planners once studied behavioral drug effects for strategic exploitation, while those same categories of drugs are prescribed at a massive civilian scale.
From Covert Experiments to Mass Violence
The historical relevance becomes clear when examining modern psychotropic use.
The U.S. Violence Prevention Project’s Mass Shooter Database shows that at least 24% of mass shooters were taking psychotropic medications at the time of their attacks. This is likely underreported due to incomplete access to medical records and toxicology tests, if performed.[32]
A 2020 University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy review identified aggression, agitation, irritability, and violent behavior as recognized adverse drug reactions. Of 16 medications with the highest risk, 10 were psychiatric drugs, including benzodiazepines, antidepressants, stimulants, and mood stabilizers. The authors emphasize that acute hostility or aggression may emerge after initiating, adjusting, or discontinuing these drugs.[33]
In 2005, the FDA added “homicidal ideation” to Effexor XR’s adverse event list.[34] In 2025, the European Medicines Agency concluded atomoxetine (Strattera) may be associated with physical assaults and homicidal thoughts.[35] Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration issued similar warnings.[36]
These are regulatory acknowledgments that drugs acting on the central nervous system—particularly psychiatric drugs—can influence behavior in serious ways.
History Demands Oversight
The CIA documents demonstrate that psychiatrists collaborated with intelligence officials to explore whether chemicals could induce unwitting individuals to commit violence. We now see scores of cases of perpetrators of violent crimes taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs.
The subway tests, open-air releases, LSD dosing, and structured collaboration between intelligence agencies and psychiatrists were institutional decisions.
Today, millions, including children and adolescents, are prescribed psychotropic drugs that regulators acknowledge may trigger agitation, hostility, impulsivity, suicidal ideation, or homicidal thoughts.
The released records should not merely provoke reflection. History has already shown what happens when psychiatric authority operates without oversight. Yet policymakers continue to rely on the same professional establishment while dismissing the documented behavioral risks of mass psychotropic prescribing.
Congress and federal regulators must initiate independent oversight, mandate comprehensive monitoring of severe behavioral adverse drug reactions, toxicology tests for acts of senseless violence, and ensure full transparency to the public. Anything less risks repeating a history that has already proven its human cost.
For further reading:
[1] National Security Archive, “CIA Mind Control Experiments Focus on New Scholarly Collection,” https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/dnsa-intelligence/2024-12-23/cia-behavior-control-experiments-focus-new-scholarly
[2] https://www.cchrint.org/2025/01/10/cia-mind-control-files-raise-alarm-on-psychedelic-drug-boom/; https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80M01133A000900130001-5.pdf; https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/resources/intelligence-related-commissions/; https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-hearings-95mkultra.pdf
[3] Nicholas M. Horrock, “C.I.A. Documents Tell of 1954 Project to Create Involuntary Assassins,” The New York Times, 9 Feb. 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/02/09/archives/cia-documents-tell-of-1954-project-to-create-involuntary-assassins.html; “Declassified CIA memo reveals plan to turn citizens into unwitting assassins,” Daily Mail, 27 Feb. 2026, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15595255/Declassified-CIA-mind-control-plot-assassins.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailus; Document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, “Report of Artichoke Team” 22 Jan. 1954
[4] Document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, “Memorandum for the Record – Subject: Informal Discussion with Chief, (Blank) Regarding ‘Disposal,’” 7 Mar. 1951, https://www.cchrint.org/pdfs/7-Mar-1951-Disposal-Memo.pdf
[5] Document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act dealing with the Central Intelligence Agency’s MK-ULTRA program, “Artichoke,” 3 Dec. 1951, https://www.cchrint.org/pdfs/3-Dec-1951-Artichoke-ECT.pdf
[6] Document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, “Office Memorandum, Subject Conversation Between (Blank) and the writer on 12 February 1952,” 12 Feb. 1952, https://www.cchrint.org/pdfs/12-Feb-1952-Memorandum-Conversation-Artichoke.pdf
[7] Document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, “Memorandum for Deputy Director of Central Intelligence; Subject: Testing of Psychochemicals and Related Materials,” 17 Dec. 1963, https://www.cchrint.org/pdfs/17-Dec-1963-Richard-Helms-Memo.pdf
[8] “Memorandum for the Record by Sidney Gottlieb, Chief, Technical Services Section, Chemical Division, “MKULTRA, Subproject 47,” Classification unknown, June 7, 1956,” National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32728-document-13-memorandum-record-sidney-gottlieb-chief-technical-services-section; https://www.cchrint.org/pdfs/7-June-1956-Memorandum-MKULTRA-Subproject-47.pdf
[9] Document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, Untitled Memorandum on Methods of Hypnosis, 3 Nov. 1960, https://www.cchrint.org/pdfs/3-Nov-1960-Hypnosis-Memorandum.pdf
[10] Gordon Thomas, Journey into Madness, The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse, (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), p. 8
[11] “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; U.S. Senate. Project MKULTRA: The CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification. Hearing, 95th Cong., Aug. 3, 1977, https://info.publicintelligence.net/SSCI-MKULTRA-1977.pdf, p. 12
[12] 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/; “In Memoriam: D. Ewan Cameron, 1901-1967,” American Journal of Psychiatry, Dec. 1967
[13] 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/; “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/
[14] Document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act dealing with the Central Intelligence Agency’s MK-ULTRA program, “Artichoke,” 3 Dec. 1951
[15] Gordon Thomas, Journey into Madness, The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse, (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), p. 169
[16] Velma Orlikow et al. v. United States, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (1988), https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/682/77/1583126/; Josh Crane, “Madness, Part 4: Pursuit of Justice.” Endless Thread, WBUR, 15 May 2020, https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2020/05/15/madness-part-4-pursuit-of-justice
[17] “Court allows lawsuit to proceed for families of Montreal brainwashing experiments victims,” iHeart Radio, 2 Mar. 2022, https://www.iheartradio.ca/cjad/news/court-allows-lawsuit-to-proceed-for-families-of-montreal-brainwashing-experiments-victims-1.17273455
[18] Gordon Thomas, Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret Mind Control and Medical Abuse, (Bantam Books, New York, London, Sydney, June 1989), p. 99; Sidell, Frederick R., et al., eds., Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare, “Chapter 11: Incapacitating Agents,” Washington, DC: Office of the Surgeon General, U.S. Army; Borden Institute, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 1997, https://medcoeckapwstorprd01.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/pfw-images/borden/chembio/Ch11.pdf
[19] Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, (Henry, Holt & Company, New York, 2019), p. 36
[20] Philip Messing, “Did the CIA test LSD in the New York City subway system?” New York Post, 14 Mar. 2010, https://nypost.com/2010/03/14/did-the-cia-test-lsd-in-the-new-york-city-subway-system/; U.S. Army, A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents, Miscellaneous Publication No. 25, Fort Detrick, MD: U.S. Army Biological Laboratories, Jan. 1968, https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid%3Afk175qx8156/USAMRIID-nyc-subway-vulnerability.pdf
[21] “The Army tested ‘germ warfare’ on the NYC subway by smashing lightbulbs full of bacteria,” Business Insider, 15 Nov. 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com/biological-agents-were-tested-on-the-new-york-city-subway-2015-11
[22] George C. Wilson, “Army Conducted 239 Secret, Open-Air Germ Warfare Tests,” The Washington Post, 9 Mar. 1977, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/03/09/army-conducted-239-secret-open-air-germ-warfare-tests/b17e5ee7-3006-4152-acf3-0ad163e17a22/
[23] Kevin Lorea, “Over and over again, the military has conducted dangerous biowarfare experiments on Americans,” Business Insider, 25 Sept. 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/military-government-secret-experiments-biological-chemical-weapons-2016-9?op=1
[24] “Introduction,” ACHRE [Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments] Report,https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/chap1_1.html
[25] Tom O’Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, (Little, Brown & Co., New York, June 2019), pp.355-356
[26] https://www.cchrint.org/2024/08/16/fda-rejects-mdma-for-mental-health-treatment/; Psychotropic Drugs In The Year 2000 Use by Normal Humans, (Springfield, Illinois, Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1971), pp. xii, xix, xx
[27] Colin Ross, M.D., BLUEBIRD: Deliberate Creation Of Multiple Personality By Psychiatrists (Manitou Communications, Inc., Texas, 2000), pp. 97, 108, 110, 113
[28] “The CIA Doctors Quotes,” Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/479496-project-bluebird-deliberate-creation-of-multiple-personality-by-psychi
[29] “Human Performance”, Mitre Corporation, JASON Program Office, sponsored by Office of Defense Research and Engineering, Mar. 2008
[30] “LSD-Like Molecules Counter Depression Without the Trip,” UCSF,
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2022/09/423891/lsd-molecules-counter-depression-without-trip#:~:text=The%205HT2a%20serotonin%20receptor%2C%20pictured,very%20different%20way%20than%20psychedelics; James Francescangeli, et al., “The Serotonin Syndrome: From Molecular Mechanisms to Clinical Practice,” Int. J. Mol. Sci., 2019, https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/20/9/2288#:~:text=Abstract,%2Dhydroxytryptophan;%20antidepressants;%20genetic%20polymorphisms
[31] “The Future Of Psychedelic Medicine Might Skip The Trip,” Forbes, 23 June 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2021/06/23/the-future-of-psychedelic-medicine-might-skip-the-trip-rick-doblin-bryan-roth-mindmed-darpa-maps
[32] “Mass Shooter Database,” The Violence Project, https://www.theviolenceproject.org/mass-shooter-database/
[33] “Patient Safety: Aggression, Irritability, and Violence: Drug-induced Behaviors,” University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, Feb. 2020
[34] “Detailed View: Safety Labeling Changes Approved By FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) – November 2005; U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Nov. 2005
[35] “Atomoxetine: New warnings about serotonin syndrome and homicidal thoughts,” Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices, 7 Feb. 2025, https://www.bfarm.de/SharedDocs/Risikoinformationen/Pharmakovigilanz/EN/RI/2025/RI-atomoxetin.html
[36] Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration “Product Information safety updates – April 2025,” 22 May 2025, https://www.tga.gov.au/news/safety-updates/product-information-safety-updates-april-2025-; AUSTRALIAN PRODUCT INFORMATION APO-ATOMOXETINE (ATOMOXETINE HYDROCHLORIDE) CAPSULES; “Atomoxetine: New warnings about serotonin syndrome and homicidal thoughts,” Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices, 7 Feb. 2025, https://www.bfarm.de/SharedDocs/Risikoinformationen/Pharmakovigilanz/EN/RI/2025/RI-atomoxetin.html
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