The Legacy of the CIA’s Secret LSD Experiments on America

[steve2470]

http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/23/the-legacy-of-the-cias-secret-lsd-experiments-on-america/?xid=gonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true

Before LSD escaped the lab and was evangelized by hippies, the U.S. government was secretly testing the effects of the drug on hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel. In a must-read feature on newly unclassified material on the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert operation, the MK-ULTRA program, which ran from 1953 to 1964, SF Weekly fully exposes the bizarre world of the CIA’s unethical drug tests. The utterly-unbelievable-but-true story involved using hookers to lure in unwitting johns for undisclosed testing, narcotics agents who slipped drugs into drinks, and a U.S. marshal who held up a San Francisco bar not knowing he was high on acid.

It sounds like something out of a paranoid dream. And indeed, before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic. But the U.S. government’s history of secret human experimentation ought to be kept in mind, particularly when we consider the power we grant to it and the way we regulate drugs.

The LSD experiments were purportedly carried out because the U.S. believed that communist Russia, North Korea and China were using the drug to brainwash captured Americans. Consequently, the CIA didn’t want to fall behind in developing and responding to this potentially useful technology.

So, incredibly, it decided to slip acid secretly to Americans — at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. For a decade, the CIA conducted completely uncontrolled tests in which they drugged people unknowingly, then followed and watched them without intervening. In some cases, the agency used the drug to perform interrogations, but these procedures were conducted so inconsistently that they proved equally useless in providing useful data.

[dipsydoodle]

1. Associated : Frank Olson

His family had no knowledge of the details of the accident until the Rockefeller Commission started uncovering some of the CIA's MKULTRA activities. In 1975, the government admitted that Olson had been dosed with LSD without his knowledge. The government offered his family an out-of-court settlement of $750,000, which they accepted.[citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson

[ananda]

2. Geezus!

Can you imagine, just going somewhere and suddenly tripping for what you think is no reason... only to find out that the CIA did this?

What are those guys NOT capable of?

[saras]

4. Actually, everyone EXCEPT the people they abused LOVED the stuff - that's why it caught on.

Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion, by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain

It's probably the single most valuable thing the CIA ever did. Without it, McCarthyism may have progressed straight into Bush-era fascism with no pause.

One of my favorite stories is where they take two investigators, tell them both separately in private that their job is to closely observe the other person in the room with them, secretly dose them both, and put them in a room to observe each other.

[azul]

3. The race to inner space,

in the name of war, cold undeclared war, was well lost long ago. Now we are free to imagine that we think what we will, and free to choose between the excellent candidates put up before us by the CIA.

[allan01]

5. re:The Legacy of the CIA’s Secret LSD Experiments on America

It is my long heald belief that the C.I .A should and must be disbanded . Now . Being a total rouge outfit of the us gvvt