An Interest In:
Web News this Week
- March 31, 2024
- March 30, 2024
- March 29, 2024
- March 28, 2024
- March 27, 2024
- March 26, 2024
- March 25, 2024
The creepy chemist behind CIA's search for a mind control drug
In the 1950s and 1960s, chemist Sidney Gottlieb headed the CIA's efforts to find a mind control drug. They thought LSD held the most promise and ran numerous horrible experiments on unwitting civilians to test its efficacy. A deeply creepy chemist named Sidney Gottlieb ran the program, called MK-ULTRA. Journalist Stephen Kinzer tells the tale in a new book out this week titled Poisoner In Chief. From an NPR interview with Kinzer:Read the restSome of Gottlieb's experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer's research.
"Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process," Kinzer says. "First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one..."
Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was.
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/hXQpR5pgvo0/the-creepy-chemist-behind-cia.html