Drug info - The CIA and LSD, by Alfred McCoy

[enquirewithin]

Prof. Alfred McCoy, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Author of "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror" and also "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade" gave an interview recently, part of which is about the CIA's infamous LSD research.

As a part of this comprehensive survey of human consciousness, the C.I.A. tried every possible techniques. And one of the things that they -- at the time that this research started in the 1940s, a Swiss pharmaceutical company developed LSD[Sandoz]...

And Dr. Hoffman there was the man who developed it. The C.I.A. bought substantial doses, and they conducted experiments. One of the most notorious experiments was that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, inside the agency, spiked the drinks of his co-workers, and one of those co-workers suffered a breakdown, Dr. Frank Olson, and he either was -- I don't know whether he was pushed or jumped from a hotel here in New York City --....his son Eric Olson insists that his father was murdered by the C.I.A. Eric Olson believes that his father did a tour of Europe, and he visited the ultimate Anglo-American test site, black site near Frankfurt, where they were doing lethal experiments, fatal experiments, on double agents and suspected double agents, and that his father returned enormously upset by the discovery that this research was actually killing people, and that, therefore, Eric Olson argues his father was killed by the C.I.A., that he was pushed.

They [the CIA]had two kind of party houses. They had one in the San Francisco Bay Area, another in New York City. And what they did in San Francisco was they had prostitutes who go out to the streets, get individuals, bring them back, give them a drink, and there would be a two-way mirror, and the C.I.A. would photograph these people....They were running the brothel....

There were [also involved] some [people] in prisons in the United States and also the Drug Treatment Center in Lexington, Kentucky. The Federal Drug Treatment Center in Lexington, Kentucky, had this. All of this research, all this very elaborate research....

What they found time and time again is that electroshock didn't work, and sodium pentathol didn't work, LSD certainly didn't work. You scramble the brain. You got unreliable information. But what did work was the combination of these two rather boring, rather mundane behavioral techniques: sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarti...40&ItemID=9749

Reputation Comments on this post:

Nice! I've always wondered about the CIA and LSD! GREAT!