NRP Spring 2023. Harrison Witmer: From MKUltra to Medicine, the story of MKUltra and LSD.

The show Stranger Things may seem far-fetched and fictitious, yet that show was actually inspired by the events of a real program ran by the CIA. This program was called MKUltra.

The main purpose of MKUltra was to research mind altering substances that could be used for mind control, information gathering, and psychological torture. The most well known substance used was Lysergic acid diethylamide otherwise known as LSD. Even though LSD was used horrifically to torture, it has found new use as a possible breakthrough therapeutic for the treatment of anxiety and depression.

Despite MKUltra being an American project, its roots are from the experiments done in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The first recorded use of a psychedelic drug for the purpose of manipulation occurred in 1942 asking for a supply of mescaline, one of the drugs MKUltra eventually ended up testing as well. The purpose of this drug was for “interrogation purposes” in order “to eliminate the will of the person examined” (Passie). None of the people that were experimented on were willing participants, a common idea for the entirety of MKUltra’s duration.

Starting in 1953 the United States began to develop techniques that had the potential to control human behavior. These experiments included dosing people with “thiopental, atropine, amphetamine, methamphetamine, sodium amobarbital, alcohol, scopolamine, pentobarbital, morphine, caffeine, and mescaline” (Passie). Then in order to simulate espionage scenarios, they used patients who were unaware they were being experimented on. These patients included prisoners, CIA employees, and college students. One of these unwilling patients was a prisoner named James Bulgur. Bulgur was lied to and told that he was a part of “an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia”, yet the actual experiment was to see if the effects of long-term usage of LSD could cause madness. The experiments partially fulfilled this goal as  Bulgur described the experience as thinking he was going insane. He wrote, “I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me”.

The official end of MKUltra was in 1973 when the CIA director at the time ordered all MKUltra documentation to be destroyed, so it’s uknown when the experimentations actually concluded. Furthermore, these substances were outlawed for research purposes thorughout the 1960’s.

While the CIA performed these experiments, psychiatrists and mental health professionals explored LSD’s use as a treatment for disorders such as anxiety, depression, and alcoholism. Yet LSD and other substances that the CIA attempted to use for mind control became associated with the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s, making them illegal. For approximately 30 years there was no American research into any of the drugs past 1970 due to prohibition of these substances. This has changed though in the last 10 years with multiple pilot studies being done on classical psychedelics, and, for the most part, these studies have yielded positive results with little to negative side effects. What specifically makes these drugs special though is there ability to treat conditions such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD in patients where existing treatment doesn’t work, which is ironic for drugs that were thought to be methods of torture. These studies are just the beggining though, since the substances being used can be altered and changed for future, new treatments.

Sources

https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/history-of-mk-ultra

https://www.history.com/mkultra-operation-midnight-climax-cia-lsd-experiments

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief

https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dta.2292

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032719309127?via%3Dihub