The CIA Doctors

by Colin A. Ross, M. D.

  7

  LSD EXPERIMENTS

  LSD was discovered accidentally in 1943 by Dr. Albert Hoffman, a chemist working on ergot alkaloids at Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. He accidentally ingested some of the compound and then had the first LSD-induced psychedelic experience. Sandoz became the major supplier of LSD in the world for several decades. The CIA obtained a secure North American supply of LSD from Eli Lilly in 1953 through MKULTRA Subproject 18, a TOP SECRET grant for $400,000.00. Through this Subproject, Eli Lilly became the first North American manufacturer and distributor of LSD.

  No-one knows the exact number of mind control subjects who received LSD from the CIA and the military. In a U.S. Army memorandum dated July 15, 1975 Kenneth R. Dirks, M.D., Brigadier General, MC, Assistant Surgeon General for Research and Development, U.S. Army estimated that at least 1500 soldiers were given LSD without informed consent as part of Army mind control experiments. Review of the list of drugs tested by the U.S. Army up until 1973 included in Appendix I, and the fact that there are three branches of the military plus the CIA, leads to the conclusion that a large number of people received mind control drugs without giving true informed consent.

  Many leading figures in American psychiatry in the second half of the twentieth century were among the first people to take LSD in North America. These ingestions began in the late 1940’s and continued to be discussed in public into the 1960’s. The CIA sponsored LSD research through MKULTRA and it also financed LSD conferences and books. In one of these books1, major figures in psychiatry discuss their own experiences with LSD and how they obtained the drug. The book, published by CIA cutout, The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, is the proceedings of a conference held on April 22-24, 1959 with financial support from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals (see Appendix J). The doctors state:

  Charles Savage (p. 9): In 1949, under Navy auspices, I was looking for improved methods of inducing psychocatharsis and facilitating psychotherapy, as I had found sodium amytal and pentothal disappointing. I ran through the gamut of alkaloids, from mescaline and cannabis, through harmine, harmaline, scopolamine, and cocaine. I was primarily interested in mescaline, but was disappointed by the intense nausea it produced in both me and my patients.

  Gregory Bateson (p. 10): My interest in LSD began when Dr. Abramson gave me 35 ug., about two years ago, and was revived the other day by the study just mentioned by Dr. Savage, in which Dr. Abramson gave me 100 ug.

  Sidney Cohen (p. 11): I work at the Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Veterans Administration, in Los Angeles … It was an easy jump from the examination of toxic psychoses to my own provocation of these states with LSD.

  My first subject was myself, and I was taken by surprise. This was no confused, disoriented delirium, but something quite different.

  Louis Jolyon West (p. 12): I am a clinical psychiatrist and became interested in LSD while I was in the Air Force. Many Air Force prisoners of war were subjected by their Communist captors to various kinds of stress, sufficient to cause them to sign confessions of germ warfare, in which, in fact, they had not been engaging. At that time, many of us concerned with this problem were considering the possibility that special drugs, hyposis, Pavlovian conditioning, or what not, were being used to elicit these confessions.

  T.T. Peck, Jr. (p. 13): From the peyote buttons, then, I became interested in these drugs that could promote physical as well as mental health. I made some studies among the Hopi Indians in Arizona, and then went into Mexico after Dr. Wasson’s trip down there [MKULTRA Subproject 58], and ate some of the mushrooms; and I also tried peyote…. When LSD came out, with Sandoz’s help, we used that.

  C.H. Van Rhijn (p. 14): I had a vision, and I still have a vision, of mass therapy: institutions in which every patient with a neurosis could get LSD treatment and work out his problems largely by himself. Classical psychotherapy or psychoanalytical therapy is, of course, a costly procedure, and most people do not have enough money to undertake it; nor do we have health benefits to pay for individual psychotherapy. I hope that there will eventually be health insurance funds to pay for LSD therapy.

  Ronald Sandison (p. 14): The introduction of LSD has transformed the situation, as we are now able to deal with these patients. It has done more than that: It has transformed the entire hospital, because the whole atmosphere engendered by LSD has spread throughout the hospital and, in fact, forms an essential part of the hospital culture.

  Betty G. Eisner (p. 15): I first read about LSD in Life. Then I heard that a friend of mine was to do an experiment with LSD. I offered to help, with the provision that I be one of the subjects. The experience so impressed me that I felt LSD had therapeutic possibilities, and so I tried it therapeutically on myself, with such extraordinary results that Dr. Cohen and I felt a therapeutic study should be done.

  Keith S. Ditman (p. 16): I am a research psychiatrist in the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA … But after experiencing LSD, which I had done under Dr. Cholden’s supervision, I was impressed that here was something, at least, that had some effect.

  Sidney Malitz (p. 19): I joined the team, which included Dr. Hoch, Dr. Pennes, and Dr. Cattell. As I worked very closely and directly with the patients, I learned much about mescaline, LSD, and psychosurgery.

  Arthur A. Chandler (p. 20): In taking the drugs ourselves [mescaline, ibogaine, amphetamines], we followed two general principles: (a). Nearly everything I see down in there is me, or some aspect of me; even if it looks like mother or father, there are many of my projections on it. (b). There is nothing I find in any of my patients that in some way is not also in me. If I cannot find it down in my subconscious, it must be blocking somewhere. On these principles, and with some prolonged treatment, we felt that we had explored our own and other people’s subconscious rather deeply.

  Mortimer A. Hartman (p. 20): About a year and a half ago, Dr. Wesley told me that Dr. Cohen and Dr. Eisner had achieved some spectacular results with an hallucinating agent called LSD, and I joined Dr. Wesley in some research on it. When I took the drug myself, I found I was suffering from the delusion that I had been psychoanalyzed. I had spent seven and a half years on the couch and over $20,000.00, and so I thought I had been psychoanalyzed. But a few sessions with LSD convinced me otherwise.

  Charles Savage (p. 30): The first time my wife ever took LSD, she noticed how dirty the ceilings were and got after me to repaint them.

  Harold Abramson (p. 33): In my experience, the use of LSD seemed to introduce a new era, a new search for magic. It had a glamorous appeal. Magazine articles distorted the situation very much. I, and I am sure many of you, have been besieged by people who wanted to take the drug, who wanted to experience the LSD reaction. This reaction produced anxiety in many of us and in many others connected with research in the field.

  Abram Hoffer (p. 41): Dr. Abramson, in my statement about being unable to detect the effect of 100 ug., the subject was a psychiatrist who had probably taken it a hundred times.

  Louis Jolyon West (p. 46): To what extent does the subjective experience of the therapist or the observer, who almost inevitably has taken LSD himself, influence the results he finds in therapy?

  Charles Savage (p. 56): … the effects with the doses you are using may be quite different from those with the doses of 400 or 500 ug which Dr. Hoch is using.

  Arthur A. Chandler (p. 60): There is a case I have heard about in Europe, where a person was given it without knowledge and jumped out of a window. We have to be careful about this sort of thing.

  Abram Hoffer (p. 89): How many months gestation?

  T.T. Peck Jr.: Five and a half months. She was gravida III, had had previous shock therapy, and had been under psychiatric care for a long time … she was very apathetic, wanted to die, wanted to kill the baby. She had been taking pills and barbiturates by the handful. She was given about 175 ug of LSD … We also gave LSD to a deaf girl during her first pregnancy, and to two other women, one 3-months pregnant and another a little over 6-months pregnant.

  Robert C
. Murphy, Jr. (p. 91): I treated three children with LSD over a period of several months. One eight-year old boy made a good recovery. That was completed nearly three years ago …

  Louis Jolyon West (p. 101): With small doses, this is the case; in larger doses the other phenomenon occurs. This would fit in nicely with Marrazzi’s ideas however.

  Louis Jolyon West (p. 131): If the hypnotic experience is a controlled dissociated state or reaction, what is seen in the subjects under LSD are spontaneous dissociative reactions, in which all sorts of dissociative phenomena occur.

  C.H. Van Rhijn (p. 172): The male nurse is 55 years old, married, and has observed a great deal of psychiatric treatment.

  Arthur L. Chandler: Has he ever taken LSD himself?

  C.H. Van Rhijn: No, not yet, but he should.

  There is a large psychiatric literature on LSD psychotherapy from the 1950’s and 1960’s1, 2, 158. Many psychiatrists gave highly positive reports about curing alcoholism, homosexuality (which they considered to be a perversion) and other illnesses with LSD. Dr. Sidney Malitz1, the current archivist-historian of The American College of Psychiatrists, describes being introduced to LSD research by his mentor, Dr. Paul Hoch130.

  In his obituary in The American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Hoch179 is eulogized by Dr. Malitz178 as a great leader in American psychiatry. The obituary omits the fact that Dr. Hoch killed tennis pro, Harold Blauer with an injection of Army mescaline on January 8, 1953, at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The family was told that Harold Blauer died as a result of a reaction to a drug given for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes, but this was a lie. A settlement for $18,000.00 was approved by the New York Court of Claims on June 17, 1955. Dr. Hoch’s partner in mescaline research, Dr. James Cattell131 is quoted184 as having told Army investigators into Blauer’s death, “we didn’t know if it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him.”

  Another psychiatrist whose obituary appeared in The American Journal of Psychiatry57, was child psychiatrist Dr. Lauretta Bender. Faretra and Bender91 describe an experiment in which they gave LSD or psilocybin to 50 boys age 7 to 15. The children took these hallucinogens daily for weeks or months at a time. The dosage of LSD was 150 micrograms, a hallucinogenic dosage level of the drug equivalent to a strong adult street dose. In another study, children given LSD were 6 to 12 years old32. Some of Dr. Bender’s child subjects received LSD daily for a year or longer31.

  Dr. Bender’s experiments were conducted on the Children’s Unit of Creedmore State Hospital, Queen’s Village, New York. There is no evidence that Dr. Bender was funded directly by the CIA or military, however her LSD experiments on children demonstrate that the climate for such work was highly permissive. Her experiments were discussed at meetings of the Society for Biological Psychiatry and published in the medical literature.

  On May 8-10, 1965 The Second International Conference on the Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism was held under the auspices of South Oaks Psychiatric Hospital in Amityville, New York. MKULTRA contractor and Director of CIA cutout, The Human Ecology Foundation, Dr. Harold Abramson was Director of Research at South Oaks Hospital and edited the proceedings of the conference2. He and Dr. Frank Fremont-Smith, former Medical Director of CIA cutout, The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation were co-organizers of the conference.

  Attendees at the 1965 conference overlapped with those in the first conference and are listed in Appendix J. MKULTRA contractor, Dr. Louis Jolyon West attended the first conference while Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation consultant, Dr. Daniel X. Freedman attended the second. Dr. West and Dr. Freedman Co-Chaired a session at the Meeting of the Society for Biological Psychiatry entitled, “Session IV. CLINICAL CONSIDERATIONS: a. Model Psychosis b. Therapeutic Use and Therapeutic Potential” in which Morris A. Lipton172 presented a paper entitled, “The Relevance of Chemically-Induced Psychoses to Schizophrenia.” In that paper, Dr. Lipton states that:

  A few reports of the accidental ingestion of LSD by children and anecdotal reports of people who took LSD without knowing it suggest that it is a terrifying experience that might closely resemble an acute schizophrenic reaction. There are also persistent rumors that psychotomimetics have been administered to naïve troops in the Army with devastating results. Whether or not this is the case remains a military secret.

  Dr. Lipton was the subject of an obituary in The American Journal of Psychiatry, written by his co-author, Dr. Charles Nemeroff211, 245. Dr. Nemeroff states that, “One of my most vivid memories of Morrie was sitting in his office one summer day when he related his idea that hallucinogenic drugs, if proved safe, could be used to provide impoverished adults with a choice for a “vacation” or “a trip.” Even when discussing psychopharmacology, he was always a humanitarian.”

  Dr. Freedman was the Editor of the most prestigious psychiatric journal in the world, Archives of General Psychiatry from 1970 till his death in 1993, according to his obituaries in The American Journal of Psychiatry14 and the Archives of General Psychiatry314. Besides working for the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, Dr. Freedman published research on LSD96-98. He was also a discussant of many presentations on LSD at meetings of the Society for Biological Psychiatry.

  Among his numerous appointments, Dr. Freedman was at the U.S. Army Chemical Center from 1965 to 1967. From 1983 to 1984, he was on the Research Advisory Committee of the Texas Research Institute for Mental Sciences (TRIMS) which received funding from the CIA, Army, Navy, NASA and Air Force (see Chapter Thirteen). In 1972 Dr. Freedman was appointed to the Scientific Advisory Board of the Scottish Rite Foundation Schizophrenia Research Foundation. The Scottish Rite Foundation funded a great deal of hallucinogen research, sometimes concurrently with MKULTRA and MKSEARCH funding. Dr. Freedman was also President of the American Psychiatric Association, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and the Society for Biological Psychiatry.

  The interlocking academic relationships of the mind control doctors involved the most influential figures in American psychiatry in the second half of the twentieth century. Not every doctor in the network was directly funded by the CIA or military, and some, like Dr. Morris A. Lipton, were genuinely unaware of the scope of psychiatric participation in CIA and military mind control. Others, like Dr. Louis Jolyon West, who killed an elephant with LSD at Oklahoma City Zoo, had TOP SECRET clearance with the CIA and branches of the military.

  One of the attendees at the May 8-10, 1965 LSD Conference was Dr. John Lilly169, who described giving LSD to dolphins. In another paper, MacLean, MacDonald, Ogden and Wilby174 describe LSD treatment at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver; the paper includes a Table describing 338 patients who received LSD. Dr. James Tyhurst, a psychiatrist who attended BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE oversight meetings in Montreal in 195105, practiced at Hollywood Hospital for a period of time and also received funding from Canada’s Defense Research Board304.

  In the same volume Dr. Abram Hoffer132 describes LSD treatment he conducted in Saskatchewan in partnership with Humphry Osmond133 before Osmond226 moved to Princeton, New Jersey to become the Director, Bureau of Neurology and Psychiatry, New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute. The Institute was the site of hallucinogen experiments by Dr. Carl Pfeiffer funded through MKULTRA and MKSEARCH. Along with John Smythies, Carl Pfeiffer was the Editor of International Review of Neurobiology238. Dr. Smythies was from the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, site of MKULTRA Subproject 8. Contributors to the volume included Dr. Robert Heath, who received CIA and military money for hallucinogen and brain electrode implant research at Tulane University (see next Chapter). Associate Editors of the volume included Dr. Hoffer, Dr. Heath and the British psychologist, Dr. H.J. Eysenck, the contractor on MKULTRA Subproject 111.

  An article in the February 12, 1996 Sunday Times and another in the October 11, 1995 The Guardian indicate that LSD was widely used in England from 1952 to 1972. At least 4,500 National Health Service patients were given LSD by 74 different doctors. The main hospitals included Powick, in Malvern, Worcestershire; M
arlborough day hospital, in Wiltshire; Clifton Hospital, in York; and Roffey Park, in Lincolnshire. The Times article says that LSD was also given at a private hospital in New South Wales, Australia. How much of this LSD was given under military contracts is unknown.

  By 1965 the American mind control doctors were having difficulty obtaining LSD. The Federal Drug Administration was starting to limit the supply of LSD and was about to make it illegal. How did the mind control doctors react? They lamented the move towards criminalization of LSD and saw it as uninformed and anti-scientific. In the Preface to The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism Dr. Frank Fremont-Smith99 says: