Part Two: MKUltra: When The CIA Tried to Destroy Free Will

and Garrison and Sophie and other fantastic people. Uh though, or it will be a Q and A so you can submit questions and you can purchase tickets now at moment house dot com slash I h H. Remember it's on October at six pm, but the link will be good to watch the show for up to a week after it airs, and you can purchase tickets now at moment house dot com slash i h H, where you will also be able to submit questions. Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. Um. I am Robert Evans. We're

talking about m KLT. This is part two of our series with Jason Pargeon. Jason, how who what are you? What are you? Jason? How much time do we have? Uh? No, I am a full time author now who used to be Evans boss speck of crack. Although if you're coming on our part two of this episode, you know that you should circle back and what you listen to part one? If you're if you skipped it, Jason. We have a

whole a whole series of fans. We call him backwards these and they wait until the whole series is out, and then they listen to everything backwards like Momento. It makes it less depressing because then it's the story of a terrible person who ends up as a baby. Um. Yeah, Anyway, I'm here promoting a book called If this book exists, You're in the wrong universe. It is not a book

about mk ulture or anything we're talking about today. It is a work of fiction that is a sequel to the film and movie John dies at the end, which fans of mine know that. Well, people who have never heard of me, Uh, look at that. If you like it, I mean, can you can go buy this book and it'll it's in the same universe, in the same characters. You say, it's not part of m k Ultra, But if you were working for the CIA, that's what you'd say.

So you know, people can make their own People can make their own decisions about whether or not they think you're part of the CIA. But we should probably talk about who the guy who is your boss if you are working in the CIA's mk ultrip program, Sydney Gottlieb. Actually he's been dead for decades. But now at this point it is not yet called MK Ultra, right, Nope, it is still it is a Project Artichoke is what

it's moved on to now, right. So it starts out as m K Naomi and then Project Bluebird and now Project Artichoke UM and these are all they just kind of keep getting more funding and getting a bigger sort of purview to go try and do weird mind control shit. And by the time Gottlieb takes over the Chemical division because he's like running like the CIA's the chunk of the CIA that's like fucking with chemical right, pretty obvious.

So it's everything from like we need a drug for if guys get captured that they can like bite down on a fucking fake tooth and kill themselves like in dune Um, which is like they do stuff like that. They actually do stuff like that um Like Sydney for for an idea of where his career goes. He's the guy who makes the poison cigars they try to kill

Castro with, like he's that guy for the CIA. But also obviously it includes stuff like lsd um and Alan Dules by this point has been promoted to the number two man at the CIA, so he has steadily risen up. And because he's a big believer in mind control, that means that Gottlieb is just getting more and more money in the early fifties to start pumping into this project Artichoke shit Um. New research at the CIA is heavily driven by what this blue blooded paranoid egomaniac decided he

what he wanted researched. And in nineteen fifty two Alan adds to his interest in psychedelics an interest in hypnosis, so he's he's already like thinks that there's some sort of mind control drug that the Soviets have that he's putting money into. And in fifty two he also starts

to become like a fan of hypnosis. And this is because he actually like goes to a show in New York City and he watches a famous stage hypnotist um And the thing that convinces him that hypnotism has military or has like applications for the CIA is that he goes it winds up hanging out with this stage hypnotist after the show, and the guy's like, oh yeah, I regularly rape women after putting them into a hypnotic trance. It's really easy. You can make hypnotize women and just

have sex with them. And this is like a thing that I do. And you know everything you need to know about Alan Dulis by the fact that this guy says this and he immediately signs up to take a four day course from him. That is that is the man Allen d sis Uh. People who have never listened to the show before, I realized that it seems like Robert and I are laughing at extremely inappropriate moments. The please understand, this is a coping mechanism. We do not

actually think that it is funny. What else do you do when you hear about that like that? When you hear about a like the the second in command at the CIA, that's his fucking thought process? Is this man's like, I commit felonies all the time on using hypnosis and he's like, oh yeah, let me take I want to

take a fucking course from you. And your audience knows that hypnotism, like that form of hypnotism, like the pop culture form where you can make somebody squawk like a chicken, like plaining, like that's not a thing, right, Like they know that's not a thing. No, this man is just assaulting people. Um and fucking sure enough, Alan Dulas takes a course from him. We'll talk about actual hypnosis in a little bit, but Allendlis takes this course and he goes back to work at the CIA and d C,

and he tries to hypnotize his female co workers. Um. He uses CIA secretaries as his guinea pigs. He induces trances in them. Stephen Kinser says that he got them to quote do things they might not otherwise consider, like flirting with strangers or revealing office secrets. And my the feeling I get is that they're kind of playing along to an extent because this guy is their boss and

they don't want to make him angry. Hopefully he doesn't from kindser doesn't say he actually assaults any of these women. So hopefully this doesn't go any further than just you know, grossly inappropriate sexual harassment. Um. But we really don't know, because it is the c i A. I mean without the aid of some sort of a medication or chemical

or something that probably cannot be done. Like stage hypnosis works because you get people up on a stage and they like to participate in the show, so you're like lowering their inhibitions, basically giving them permission to be part of the show. And so like some of it, it works in like a subconscious level. But the type again that the type that exists has existed in pulp culture pop culture for decades where you can like turn somebody

into a zombie and make them do whatever purely through hypnosis. Again, hypnosis paired with whatever drugs they were working with at the time may do that put somebody where they're in like a half awake state of you know, they're not fully making decisions or whatever. The just hypnosis. Uh, that's no,

that's just a sleazy weirdo. It's a sleazy where And probably what is actually to the extent that that hypnotist is like hypno quote unquote hypnotizing and then having sex with him and like well he gets them alone because he's famous, and then they like you know, pretend to be hypnotized because it's the safest thing to do, right or or none of it ever happened, and he just

lies he's a liar. That's entirely possible too, that he's such a sleezball that he lies about using hypnosis to rape women because he thinks that makes him look cool, and guess what, back at the time, it did. So all of these things are possible. We will not know what exactly happens, but we know the result of this is that after being a real creep at work and Dulus writes a memo to the Project art at Choke

team quote. If hypnotic control can be established over any participant in clandestine operations, the operator will have an extraordinary degree of influence, a control in order of magnitude beyond anything that we have considered feasible. Now, as you said, Jason, hypnosis is like a thing. There's a there's like studies that scientists do on people's brains, and hypnotic trance is

a thing that people experience. There are documented effects of being hypnotized, and hypnosis can be effective in conjunction with certain therapies. But as you said, hypnotizing does not mean that you're putting someone into a state where they will take commands and do whatever you can kind of induce or affect feelings of anxiety and pain and trauma. Actual professionals who use hypnosis will use it to like you, can there's some evidence that can be used to reduce

chronic pain in certain ways. It can be reduced, it can be used to reduce the pain of childbirth. Hypnosis has been shown to have some efficacy at treating addiction and PTSD. I'm not gonna get into it. I don't understand hypnosis. Well, I don't think anyone really does. It seems like the kind of thing that there's still a lot of like debate about, but like it is a thing. It's on the same level something like meditation has absolutely

measurable effects. No one would question that. But that's somewhere out there, there's somebody claiming that, you know, you're meditating, you're tapping into the energies of the universe or whatever, you're leaving your body, and you're not. It's just we don't understand a lot about how the brain works. But it's just that what he's talking about was like, well, if you could do the thing where you wave a watch in front of somebody and then now using a

keyword later, you can make them your slave. The thing as it exists in the Manchurion, Canada or whatever. You know, all these movies, these throwers that were made in the wake of people believing hypnosis was real. That's the thing that doesn't exist in terms of using this way to like recover memories, that kind of thing, you know, putting the brain into a relaxed, susceptible state. There's all sorts

of ways to do that. Um. But yeah, yeah, um, so Alan Dullis, you know again, as hypnosis is a thing, but Alan Dullis is mostly interested in using it to take over people's brains and get information out of them. And potentially the thing that he's most excited about, and the thing that everyone of the CIA is kind of most excited about, is the potential to turn people into sleeper agents who can be sent back home to carry out attacks, right, Like that's the the Manchurian candidate thing.

That's what the CIA actually wants to do, and they do believe that this is possible. Um. Gottlieb is certain of it. Um. And Gottlieb tells uh Dullus that like, yeah, you know, hypnosis can work, and particularly if we mix hypnosis with these different hallucinogenic drugs people have started testing. Have you heard of LSD? You know, That's kind of how the conversation goes although they actually do. They start

with marijuana. Um. And this is because marijuana was something the OSS had tested pretty heavily on themselves back during World War Two. Uh. They mixed it into very US foods and they've smoked it to try to prove that it had potential is a truth drug. Um. This did not work, as anyone who's ever had the light of the cops while stoned as hell could tell you. Um. Next the OS or next the CIA used so that under Gottlieb, they do try some marijuana experiments, it does

not prove effective. They move on to cocaine. Next, Gottlieb used CIA cutouts to sponsor medical experiments in which mental patients are injected with cocaine. So they are going into people who are institutionalized with like schizophrenia, and they are injecting them with cocaine to see if it will make people want to talk. Now, Jason, you've never done cocaine, right, No, But I have been around somebody who was on it and they actually did talk quieter they do it does

it does work? For that? I will say that for cocaine, it does make you want to talk now. And also if you need to write a Hollywood screenplay and like one one hundred hour long writing session. Nothing really beats cocaine for that. Apparently, as my my namesake, the other Robert Evans could have told you if his heart hadn't exploded from seventy years of shooting cocaine straight into his lungs. Um. But you know, I think you may also note that while cocaine does want to make people want to talk,

it doesn't make them reliably tell the truth. You can actually lie really well while on a shipload of cocaine. UM. Otherwise, nightclubs probably wouldn't exist in the same form. UM. So cocaine not a great truth drug. After this comes heroin, UM, which if you were going to me and saying which drug is least likely to be an effective truth serum, I would probably say heroin. Stephen Kinzer writes that quote.

Surviving CIA memos note that heroin was frequently used by police and intelligence officers, and that it and other addictive substances can be useful in reverse because of the stress as they produce when they're withdrawn from those who are addicted to their use. So, in other words, cops, when the CIA is like, hey, you know, let's let's reach out to some cops. We know some narcotics guys. Let's reach out to like the FBI. Uh. See what they

say about using heroin as a truth drug. All these field agents are like, well, heroin is like great, uh, and a bunch of like a bunch of the people talk to them are CI agents who are like, well, yeah, you can use it as a truth drug for people. But like, the way it works is you get them addicted to heroin and then they'll do whatever you tell them, right like, and then you take it away of yeah, withdrawal the promise of getting heroin, they will do whatever

you ask. But again, as with all interrogation techniques, nothing stopping them from just lying to you exactly, and that continues to be the problem. Um. One thing I did find interesting is that like a lot of their early info on heroin comes from narcotics agents and CIA field agents who are like, the only reason I haven't killed myself from doing this job is that I use heroin. Like, those are a lot of their early sources, which tells you a lot about these agencies. Um. There's like a

couple of very funny moments here. My favorite is that at one point using like working. As part of this program, the Navy sponsors a study where they pay college students to take heroin to see if it works as a truth drug. Um it does not. Uh So the next thing they try is mescal, And the Nazi doctors the CIA had hired to help them with their torturing people at black sites had all given mescal into prisoners at Dokao.

And so when they bring these guys in, they tell the CIA, Hey, mescalin seems like it might work as a truth s here. Maybe you should try that next. But of course mescalin does not work that way. No drug works that way. I have lied to cops on a number of hallucinogens. None of them seem to function as a truth serum and my experience. But the assumptions they're making here about how the mind works, that's the thing is it's almost to imply that when somebody is

intoxicated that they're becoming more honest. I don't I think that's true in almost any way. Like you lawre somebody's inhibitions, they may be just as likely to say the most outrageous thing they can think of. Like I I don't think that being incredibly drunk revealed like Nel Gibson's perfect true feelings. I think it made him more racist than what he probably is in everyday life, because it just unleashed his ability to just say the worst possible thing

that popped into his into his head. Yeah, And it's also like I think the thing that and I think they are starting to recognize that at this point because the early they keep having these experiments and like they never find their truth drug, but they do find. Like one thing that is true is that people who are really fucked up are easier to manipulate, you know, like a drunk person. If you're sober, maybe you'll be it'll be easy for you to get them to do something

that you want them to do, right. And the same thing is true within limits to people who are on other substances. People are a little bit easier to like convince to do things sometimes in certain ways. If those things aren't you can't, like somebody's tripping on acid, You're probably not going to convince them to commit murder. But if they are the kind of person who is inclined to like strip naked and one through a party, it will be easier to convince than the strip naked and

run through a party, right they are. It does make people suggestible in that way. So one thing that's happening in this period is the CIA is moving away from like, well maybe this maybe we'll we'll we'll back burner, the mind can or the truth serum, but we think this stuff will let us program people because it does seem to make them more susceptible, right, So that's kind of as they're sort of experimenting with this stuff. It's not

just truth serum. They're also like, is this the drug that's gonna let us reprogram Soviet spies and like send them back as saboteurs because that is increasingly the thing that Dolus thinks is going to be possible. And they're they're thinking about like, well, let's try giving them cocaine and then we'll hypnotize them. Let's try giving them mescaline

and then we'll hypno ties them. And obviously none of this works great, but they're getting at least enough that they're convinced they're just sort of like one drug away from making it work. Um. And by the way, that the funniest part to me, And it's funny again in the context that I mentioned earlier. It's darkly humorous is as far as I can tell. They now in two by far the most successful examples they have of like flipping people or turning people into double agents and all that.

It's just by giving them a big old suitcase full of cash that works really well, and they finally, finally, after spending billions or however much money they spent on this stuff over the years, it's like, hey, we have found a way that can manipulate to make somebody turn against their own country, which is if you give them like a Lamborghini and a giant suitcase full of cold, hard cash, they're actually willing to flip on their own country,

their friends, their their comrades. Yeah, yeah, people will do like I mean, you know, there's also still Heroin is actually still a big one. Like when the FBI was breaking up the green during the Green Scare, when the FBI was like breaking up environmental extremists like organizations, they would often target like individuals who they knew were like

addicted to smack. Because you find somebody who's got that addiction, you take it away from them, it's a little easier to get them to roll on their friends, or you arrest them and you tell them like, hey, we've you've got this amount of stuff on you. We have you did the rights. It's a twenty five year sentence unless you help us out by rolling on your friend. Right, Like, all of these things can be used to control people's behavior, but none of it works. The two things that work

best our prison time and money. Yeah, yeah, just threats and threats and money, the same thing that worked years ago. And the Soviets, by the way, never don't know this. Well, they're fucking around with the psychic research. They're just being like, well, we either bribe people or we hit them. This works great. Um, it's the CIA. It is convinced there's some much more

esoteric way to do this. Ship. Uh So Gottlieb, as they kind of go through this rolodex of drugs and none of them work, starts to become convinced that the answer to his boss's prayers, to Dulus's prayers might be L S D. Because again he's read about this scientists, smart people. Especially again, Gottlieb's kind of a proto hippie. You know, the hippie movement hasn't exist yet, but he's one of the kinds of people who's going to feed into it um all of that, those kinds of those seekers,

that people who are interested in mysticism and stuff. They're all starting to talk about hallucinogens, and they're all starting to talk about acid. So Gottlieb reaches out to Harold Abramson. Abramson is a doctor who had worked with the CIA on past mind control and poison experiments. He was also a seeker himself, and he'd taken LSD several times and given it out to colleagues on multiple occasions. Acting as one of the first modern trip sitters. Abramson gave Gottlieb

l s D and the two hung out. Sidney wrote this about his first trip. I happen to experience an out of bodiness, a feeling as though I am in a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole body and it is shimmering, and I have a sense of well being and euphoria for most of the next hour or two hours, and then it gradually subsides. And I think he takes a pretty small dose, because LSD a normal dose to LSD if you're like taking a solid dose if you're actually tripping, it lasts like eight

to sometimes twelve hours. You know, like some you can you can make it last longer if you take a very heavy dose. Longest I've ever tripped is maybe eighteen hours. Jesus Christ. One reason why I've never experimented with the stuff is I absolutely would be the guy who just sits there, like my body is a sausage. I'm assigned a skin sausage. It's not an unpleasant thing necessarily to

be a skin sausage. Um LS like LSD is whenever I recommend, like if people are curious about hallucinogen, silo cybin is by far like the easiest to start with because kind of no matter how much you take your top out at three or four hours, So it is the kind if you have a bad time, it's going to be over soon. LSD. If you take too much or have a bad time, it can be really unpleasant because it lasts a long time. So it's it's the kind of thing people shouldn't mess around with unless they've

like built up to it. That that would be my opinion. I'm not telling you to commit illegal acts by taking drugs, but maybe I wouldn't start with LSD if if you're asking for my advice on this stuff. Um, But the other advice is to go to a very reliable source where you know how much you're getting. Yeah, because I think half the people I've ever talked to have taken acid have an experience for one time they took it,

absolutely nothing happened. Yeah, It's like, well, yeah, because you just got it sold to you by a guy and he just gave you a piece of paper, like and and nowadays a lot another problem is that, like you don't usually know you're getting acid, there's a bunch of other research chemicals that work similarly that you can also that you could just dissolve in water and put on stuff, and they're easier to get that acid. Um, which is

normally fine. A lot of people probably take something that's not acid, think it's acid and have a good time. But some of that stuff has more healthcare. LSD is fairly safe actually, unless you're taking nightmare doses of it, like it doesn't. I don't think it even has a recorded LD fifty. I'm sure. I'm sure they found enough to kill people, but like it's very difficult to have like an overdose in the way that is like like

heroin or something. Um. But there are other research chemicals that you can die on that people sometimes just sell as acid because it's an illegal, unregulated market, right, which is as Jason said, you should always know your dealer if you want to start playing around with this stuff. There's organizations like Project Dance Safe that sell test kits for a number of different substances. If it's possible to test and know what you're taking, you always should. Um,

they're not we're advising illegal acts. Yeah, there's sebredits that do nothing but discuss, like share information about this kind of thing, which, as much as we criticize Reddit and actually having a community like that um to warn you about what to lookout for things like that actually matters a lot. This has always been an argument for the legalization because then you can actually know precisely what you're getting. Yeah, you know, Um, but that that is the argument I

would make. But that's we're we're off the off the map below here. So LSD. Gottlieb has his first trip and he has a pretty good time with it. Um, he starts to get kind of obsessed with it. And this is a thing I can't prove this subjectively. I haven't even found this written any of the writing about Gottlieb. But like a thing that I have noticed in my own life as a guy who hangs out and does drugs is some people just kind of get obsessed with LSD.

It is a particular thing to LSD. It had you noticed, like Albert Hoffman, right, for whatever reason, before he even takes it, he they synthesize this thing and for five years he can't get it out of his head until he actually tries it. Right. There's just kind of something that certain people find really fascinating about this substance. And

I think as much is everything else. The fact that Gottlieb just kind of gets obsessed with acid is a big part of why it becomes the drug of m K ultra right, because it doesn't work any better than these other drugs. It does not, again spoilers, none of this creates a perfect mind control drug. Um. Probably we'll get to that a bit later. Um, but it is It's a thing I've seen happen to more people. And this is not usually a bad thing. People just like

take a lot of acid that can be fine. Um, and chemists and neuroscientists are especially likely to find themselves fascinated by LSD. You will, this is about to happen to a whole generation of very smart people, Folks like Kinksey Um, Folks like uh oh, Jesus, Timothy Leary. Goddamn um, I can't believe I forgot Timothy Leary's name. Uh. So, yeah, you have this like generation of like all And and

Leary and uh And and Kinks and whatnot. They're all kind of in a lot of ways similar people to Gottlieb. They have these similar opinions. Unlike these this grarian back to you know, nature sort of stuff. They they're they're these they're fascinated by Eastern mysticism and spiritualism. Like the degree to which the CIA's head poison guy is kind

of a hippie is very important to this story. Um. Now, at no point did Gottlieb have any hard evidence that LSD would make a better truth serum or mind control drug than any other narcotic he tested. But he starts to become convinced that it holds the secret to all of the things he's trying to accomplish for Alan Dullis, and so he's going to spend the next ten years dosing possibly tens of thousands of people to try and

improve that. First, he starts by dosing other CIA agents and some scientists working in adjacent government spook projects because they're testing initially, they're trying to use this as a weapon, right, They're still trying to see, like, can this be used to like take over somebody's mind. Can this be used

to at least, like, you know, disable a spy. A lot of these guys agree to be dosed by surprise, so this is consensual, right, There's nothing wrong with saying, yes, you can sneak LSD into my food at a random point in time, because we want to see what happens when you're surprised by LSD in the middle of like a workday. Because nobody has done that, right, they have not started like horribly doing things with this yet, but you can see kind of where stuff's about to go.

Because the very next group of people they start to drug is army trainees, and these people are have agreed to be in studies for the army. They don't know that they're going to be dosed with LSD, so they're just kind of like drugging eighteen year old boys with this mystery substance that nobody's really tested. Um, and a lot of people have very terrible experiences, which probably shouldn't surprise you. Um, it does seem like a lot of these Army guys have great times too, and a lot

of the CIA guys have a lot of this. Like is they're partying right, Like they're not just dosing each other and taking diligent notes. They're like having a good time. Um, and you know the government's paying for it. In these early days, Gottlieben, his fellow Bluebird Artichoke researchers, dosed themselves more often than they do to anyone else. They'd carry out fake interrogations and try to convince each other to give up secrets that they promised before taking drugs not

to tell um. And they were able to get each other and army officers to reveal like secrets. But this is like this is not a real test, right, Like they're agreeing ahead of time, what's the secret? You're not going to give up? Okay, Now we're gonna drug you and we'll see if we can get you to give up the secret. Jason, can you think of any reason why that might not be replicable to actually trying to get information out of somebody. Really hard to overstate the

role of consent in this whole thing. Yes, and they're playing a game which even at that, at that early stage, they should have. It feels like basic logic should have

played a role in this. But yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, so this is all very flawed and everything they're going to do is deeply flawed research at like the conceptual level in ways that I don't part of it's probably just that the concept of hallucinogens um, particular, particularly like artificially created hallucinogens, you know, because LSD does not just randomly occur in the way that like mushrooms do, is much newer than so I think some of it's just

that people don't understand this stuff as well. But it does really seem like they're making basic failures of logic here um. But there are some reasons I have to say, there are some reasons why you can see people at this time would have thought LSD could be a really good weapon for like spy ship um acid is colorless and odorless. You can put it in basically any liquid or other kind of substance, and people can't there's no

way to tell that you have asset on you. Um, so you can transport significant quantities of it without being detected in a pretty much infinite number of ways. It's once you are able to make it, it's pretty much free on a per dose basis, and very small amounts of asset have gigantic effects. So there's good reasons why the substance is like, well, yeah, if you could make this work for us, this would be a great thing. We can very easily sneak this on spies and get

them into anywhere. Okay, But I think I want to ask the question that I think a lot of the listeners are asking, which is like today, when we hear about the experiments done with the stuff, it's experiments on like trying to cure people with PTSD, trying to cure depression, trying to like if it affects the brain that much, if people claim to have had almost a holy experience on it, that's like, well could it? You know, it feels like it shouldn't have just been the CIA dealing

with this. It feels like you should have had whatever the giant pharmaceutical companies were at the time experimenting with it as a therapy, saying, what could this be the drug that will make housewives okay with they with staying at home and doing nothing but laundry all day. Do you see what I'm saying? Was that going on or was it just the CIA that was doing that was working with this stuff. We're actually going to talk about

that in a little bit. Yes, this is going on to an extent, but it's very limited at this point in time. The only people in the world who can make LSD are Sandals laboratories, right, they have figured it out and they're not sharing the recipe, so they are the only source of LSD. They're only making a limited amount, and the CIA buys basically all of it. They do send a bunch out for research. There are other organizations

researching this. There's actually in the Soviet Union and all over the world there's actual studies therapeutic studies on LSD in this period. But the majority of the drug by weight, goes to the c I. A okay, yeah, they that's that tells you a lot about the state of the world at the time that they priorities or whatever, because

you have everything they think they know about this. It's not just oh, this would make a good weapon, Like on the list of things you could do with it to change the world, that's not even in the top one hundred, Like when you're talking about, oh, this totally alters, you know, the way people behave, the way they can be influenced, the way they think that, you know, like

we're everybody who takes it becomes obsessed with it. And it's like you would think just the pure capitalism of the country would come into places like, oh, this is we could make a bunch of money. It's cheap to make, people will pay a lot of money for it. The fact that it's there, I guess it's just a limit

of the imagination. When you're in like a war footing, it's like, no, this could you could get your theory like they have these convoluted, almost cartoonish ideas of like, well, in theory, if you could inject a spy with it, you could make him do this if we also, yeah,

there's just this. It's it's because like number one, the sand DAWs is I think kind of they're looking for any kind of use that will make this profitable, right, and so the first group that has that puts a lot of money down for acid is the c I A. So that has an impact from the beginning, like who else gets it and how much of it is available?

And I just don't think. I don't think guys like Gottlieb when they hear stuff like because there is early research on LSD and alcoholism, and when they hear stuff like we can treat alcoholism with LSD, all these guys because they are, as you said, they're so focused on this war. All they hear is that just that means that you can change people with this. You can change there. You can alter a person's mindset, you can like control

their mind. If you can get them to stop being an alcoholic, maybe you can stop them from being a communist, you know, Like that's that's straight where they go. And they have the ability to effectively buy up the world's supply of acid, which they do in this period. In fact, all of the LSD that gets out in the early eras of the hippie movement, and like is the is the acid that like fucking dudes like Hunter Thompson and the Beatles are taking right that ship all comes from

the CIA. Oh, I had no idea but it makes sense. I mean that's you know, and not all just as part as MK ultra. Because guys like Abramson, who gives Gottlieba's first dose, he's working with the CIA as a contractor. He's also just a guy who's interested in this and does it with his friends. And his friends include a lot of these like influential intellectuals who are going to be big leaders in the sixties. Um. And so they all start taking LSD that he gets from the CIA. Together.

That's like how acid gets out. It's through the agency, um, not always in controlled ways, not always as parts of studies. But we're building to that. But you know what else we're building towards Jason an ad break an ad break, Jason, have you ever heard of Blue Apron No. I it's weird because I listened to like four hours of podcast today,

but I've never it's never come up. Well, that's a it's a company that makes food boxes, and we used to have a running joke here behind the Bastards about how they also had an island where people could hunt children for sport. And I thought, Jason, I thought that was a joke that everyone would recognize as a joke. But it turns out a lot of people messaged us distraught thinking that there was a real child hunting island. Um, so now we're warning people and a couple of different

episodes of the show there's no child hunting island. It's fine. That was a joke. We're not going to make the joke anymore. Please please stop being worried that Blue Apron has an island where people hunt children for sport. They don't. Anyway, here's ads possibly including Blue Apron. Ah, we're back, um,

and we're talking about Sydney, Gottlieb and the CIA. So the other reason that Gottlieb is able to kind of get the agency to focus on LST there's you know, it makes sense, there's reasons why it might be a good weapon. Um. But he's able to bring up a bunch of Russian scientific journals, which in the early fifties start to file the first Soviet Union report on the discovery of LSD. Obviously LSD has existed for a while.

Information does not travel as fast in these days, so the Soviets kind of start, you start and this is not there's actually nothing sinister here. It's just academics in the Soviet Union, who are like, and now there's this this thing called acid, and we're getting small amounts of it from Sandas and we're testing it in these ways. Um. This causes dolus Is analysts to claim that the l the U S s R is stockpiling argot as a raw material. Um. Now their own assessments admit there's no

evidence that this is happening. And in fact, here's exactly what dollus Is analysts right. Quote. Although no Soviet data are available in LSDI, it must be assumed that the scientists of the U. S. S are are thoroughly cognizant of the strategic importance of this powerful new drug and are capable of producing it at any time. That's must be assumed that we have to be a key phrase that I think is going to get used, that's gonna

get used a lot. Yeah, that like, yeah, we just have to assume that not only do they think the same thing about this is us, which is that it should be used to destroy people's minds, but they're already mass producing it. Obviously they are not. Uh, it is hard to make acid. No one knows how to other than sand DAWs. Yet and the Soviet Union as far as all evidence suggests, the Soviet Union has no capacity

for manufacturing LSD at this point. Um, it's going to take years before a US company with c I A help will crack the recipe. Um. But yeah, it is worth noting that kind of about it. This is actually there's not even l s D as far as we can tell in the Soviet Union in this period in

the early fifties. I think the first evidence that we have of acid in the Soviet Union starts in the early nineteen sixties when Communist Bulgaria starts carrying out a series of LSD experiments, this from sixty two to sixty eight, and it's again to kind of as evidence that there's not really capacity to make this in the Iron Curtain. When Bulgaria starts experimenting with acid, they buy it all

from sand DAWs Sandas Library sends it to them. Um, sand DAWs is selling LSD under the generic name to Delhi sid Um and they spend about three million dollars giving their new hallucinogen to universities and mental hospitals in the early nineteen sixties. So again that's well after the period we're up to in the actual and k Ultra story. You know, this is all being fucked with by the CIA before pretty much anyone is able to study it. And I'm gonna quote from a write up in Atlas

Obscurity here. Among the human guinea pigs were doctors, artists, miners, truck drivers, and even prisoners and mentally ill patients. These research subjects were involved in some hundred and forty trials. Their aim for these experiments with LSD was to allow scientists to understand psychotic disorders like schizophrenia better by using the drug to mimic the effects of a naturally occurring psychosis.

There were some similarities between drug induced psychosis and natural ones, but it was easier to do a controlled study when causing psychosis through drugs. So in Czechoslovakia, which is also a communist state at this period, LSD is per fickly illegal and available over the counter. This is like most of the nineteen sixties. If you're living in the Czech repoor in Czechoslovakia, you can walk down to like the

pharmacy and you can just buy some acid. I have to ask when did it become illegal in the United States? Because it was a brand new substance banned immediately. No, no, no, it's not. It's it's legal for most of the period, like the hippie period. Um, that's why I thought, Yeah, it is not banned in the United States until nineteen sixty eight. Um. Yeah, largely as the result of like some of the stuff that you know, a bunch of

you know, that's a story for another day. Um, But for most of the nineteen sixties and Czechoslovakia, you know, the Bulgarians are doing acid studies with LSD they've bought from Sandaz. Czechoslovakia is getting acid from Sandas too, And rather than it being like a thing that like is being secretly used on people behind like the scenes, people are just buying acid from pharmacies in like communist Czechoslovakia. Doctors at psychiatric hospitals are taking acid so that they

can understand what it's like to be schizophrenic. I mean, I don't know how well that actually prepares you to treat somebody, but that's how they're using it, right, Like it's like we've got all these people who are hearing voices, Let's take this drug so that maybe we can understand them better. Um. Eventually, a Check pharmaceutical company cracks the recipe and millions of doses are produced and given out

for free across the country. Um Numerous scientists, including Stanislav Groff, took LSD and had experiences in this time that impacted their future work. Artists dosed themselves to great effect, as this piece from an article in PRIs Kros, which is a Check news site, makes clear. Among them were well known painters such as Evo Medic and Jerry Enderley, as well as young intellectual singers and students. According to an unverified account, one of them was the current CHECK president

Milo Simon. A number of years later, Carol Got reluctantly admitted that he just once took LSD in the presence of doctors. I returned to my earliest childhood memories buried deep within my subconsciousness. Many participants of the psychedelic sessions, especially artists, recalled their explorations of LSD is unique even

formative experience. However, others experienced so called bad trips. Suicide soon followed, and several main centers, especially the psychiatric hospital in Satska near Prague, research was carried out on a mass scale. According to unconfirmed reports, one of the provincial hospitals carried out tests on children as young as three years old who were experiencing mental health issues. In another hospital, experiments were supposedly carried out on prisoners. So everybody does

fucked up ship with this. Every state does when they get access to it. Um although they're not trying to write like the checks, aren't trying to create a mind control drug. They're just like, maybe this will cure kids with illnesses we don't understand. Let's give it to that three year old, which isn't good behavior, but it's not like malicious, right, it's there's a little here responsible. Yeah. Yeah,

and there's a level of ignorance around the substance. But the way you the way you become knowledgeable is not well, let's see what happens to mentally all three year olds. Yeah, that's certainly not ideal. Yeah, and then we'll know and then be ignorant anymore. After all, how else are we going to find out? Yeah? We we who knows what else? Like I don't know, and they are like, I'd be really interested. This is an area where I don't know as much. I'd be really interested in, Like what they

actually found in terms of how this impacted doctors treating patients. Um, but yeah, I don't have great context on that, but this is a thing that's going on in this period. It does eventually, the check security services they're kind of KGB or c I a equivalent, start to do some early research on whether or not they could weaponize LSD. And again this is like a decade after they do US in the United States, so they're like, well behind the curve here. Um, they do some early kind of experiments,

there's no record of anything serious. Um, the primary interest, like the State Security Service, gets into this and they kind of say, oh, maybe we can weaponize this. But the thing they actually start doing is using it to make a shipload of money because they kind of always have a cash flow problem. This is true of all of the communist security services, and they recognize that like, oh shit, Americans will Europeans will pay a funkload for

LSD just to party. And so for nearly a decade, a huge amount of the LSD and like the early like right before it gets banned and right after it gets banned, a lot of the LSD that gets into Western Europe and the United States and kind of the late nineteen sixties, including the famous Summers of sixty eight and sixty nine. Comes from the Check Intelligence Services, and they're smuggling acid to the West, not to destroy capitalism, but because they they want they need money. It's very

profitable to sell drugs, it turns out. So that's kind of a fun story. Um, that's all more than a decade in the future from the CIA stuff. But the point is there's never as far as I found, there's not ever any real Soviet LSD mind control experiments, And in the early nineteen fifties, there's no evidence that any communist country even saw the drug as having that kind of potential. They didn't have a lot of access to it,

so it would have been hard for them too. After a few months of benign experimentation on his friends and colleagues, Gottlieb leaves the United States to test LSD on human prisoners for the first time. One study later reported quote in nineteen fifty one, a team of CIA scientists led by Dr Gottlieb flew to Tokyo, Japanese suspected of working with the Russians were secretly brought to a location where the CIA doctors injected them with a variety of depressants

and stimulants. Under relentless questioning, they confessed to working for the Russians. They were taken out into Tokyo Bay, shot and dumped overboard. The CIA team flew to Soul in South Korea and repeated the experiment on twenty five North Korean prisoners of war or They were asked to announce communism. They refused and were executed. In nineteen fifty two, Don'tus brought Dr Gottlieb in his team to post war Munich in southern Germany. They set up a base in a

safe house. Throughout the winter of nineteen fifty two to fifty three, scores of expendables were brought to the safe house. They were given massive amounts of drugs, some of which Frank Olsen had prepared back at Detric which is where they're the camp where they're doing this, to see if their minds could be altered. They were given electro convulsive shocks. Each experiment failed, the expendables were killed and their bodies burned.

And even what you're describing there, whenever they what are effects they got, it seems like it's just plain old subjecting them to extreme discomfort, using the stimulants and the presents or whatever to like get their body racing and then slowing it down. Like that's just that's just putting

them through pain. Yes, you can just hit them with a stick and do the same thing, like like all of their sophisticated talk of a wow, the magic of the human mind and mind control he or it still seems like it just comes back down to regular brutality and then the people still not cooperating, then you just shoot them. That's what's so interesting to be Jason, because they all all they're doing is using LSD to torture people in the way that like the Soviets just hit

them with sticks until they do what they want. Right. But I think what's happening is Gottlieb he keeps he's taking acid. He's tripping constantly throughout this period. I think he's having really powerful, like spiritual and emotional experiences on it, and so he's convinced that like there's something more going on with this particular substance, and thus there must be a way to like turn it into a tool for this purpose. And one of the things I find most

interesting about him is he's having. He's this educated man, he's this thoughtful guy who studies religion and spirituality, and he that he's having like experimenting on expanding his consciousness with hallucinogens, and then when he actually uses them on people, it's the same way you'd use like a fucking razor blade on a person you have tied up or whatever. Like there's not he's not being subtled. There's no like

artifice to it. It's just cruelty. And it seems like they were so eager to get some kind of a result that they're just the way you describe. It's like there was no art to what they were doing. It's just the same old I don't know, it's like this is a part of what I found interesting about this, I said in the first episode is separating the reality from like the conspiracy stuff, because the conspiracy stuff always the differences between what they thought this could do and

what it actually did. That's the difference between the conspiracy theories. And because in the world of conspiracy Manchurian candidates absolutely exist, whereas the reality as they wanted that, there's no doubt they wanted that outcome. It just they couldn't do it, and the actual reality on the ground is so much more disorganized and stupid and just thuggish than what than

the the supervillains you imagine. It's almost like you imagine a more sophisticated type of when in reality, like a lot of it is just bureaucrats trying to get more funding to their thing. Um, I don't die. I do not doubt that some of the people at this point knew it didn't work or had lost faith in it. But it's like, well, this is where all the funding is going, and you've got to put food on the table, and I don't care about the people were killing, so like, yeah,

let's keep doing it. And yeah, so these experiments got leave travels around Europe and Asia to just we don't know how many black sites. We don't know how many people he doses with LSD and then killed certainly hundreds, um potentially over the lifetime of the c I A LSD experiments significantly more than that. But we really have no idea. We do know that so many people were being killed at these sites that it created a body disposal problem, even at the black sites that had been

built as death camps. Stephen Kinzer quotes from an American translator at one of these places, camp King, which I believe is in Germany. Um. And she writes this home in a letter in nineteen fifty two, arrived back in Frankfurt from Paris son morning and time to spend all day at the Oberseel swimming pool, acquiring a nice tan.

They dragged a dead man out of the pool at tin Am, like this is the pool that they have at like the facility, and there's like, yeah, the corpses are just kind of like showing up places, um, because they're they're just creating so many of them. Gottlieb seems to have I don't know, I don't I don't really,

he's a fascinating character. I don't really have a great concept of what's going on in his head because he's like every day after doing this, he goes home and he milks his goats and he hangs out with his wife and kids, and he's this kind of like kindly

proto hippie nerd who's just very interested in psychedelics. Um. Well, this is the thing, because when you told his story in the last episode, like his early his upbringing, there's a key part of the story that is missing because we describe why, Well, he was young, he went off to school, he married a preacher's daughter, you know, he was kind of a hippie, you know. And then and then he was asked to be a part of this program because it's like, well, he's interested in these drugs

and in these chemicals. And then immediately it's like, okay, well we we invited you him to go torture this guy that we were torturing with with and trying to use this It's like, well, and not, hold on, did

did he have any kind of qualms about that? The transition from normal guy who's curious about these chemicals too, being at a black site and it's clear what's going on, Like the reality of it was certainly not hidden from him, and you are torturing another human being who it may not be guilty of anything really and it's like, okay, you did he object? Was he afraid? Did he? The way?

So Stephen Kinzer, who writes Poisoner in Chief, which is about Gottlieb, is the guy who I think has done the most detailed work up on Sydney as a man. His angle on it, the way he kind of explains it is that Gottlieb is is a patriot. He is very sore about the fact that he missed out on participating in World War Two, and he has been convinced by Dullus and other people in the agency that this is a life or death struggle with the Soviet Union and that only the most like they have to try this.

They have to find this out. This is the most critical weapon that could possibly exist, and if the Soviets have developed it, then it could be the end of the world. Right, they could destroy the entire country if they get people in the right positions. So we have to know how to That's that's what Kinser says. Now Kinser is working from information after the fact. He doesn't know Gotlieb. I don't to an extent. The man is unknowable, right, just like everybody. I don't actually know if I think

that's what's going on. If I think maybe for all of his kindly exterior Gottlieb is like a fucking serial killer, because that there's I could see that when you look at some of the stuff this guy does, I could see there being an element of just sort of like joy and hurting people, and maybe we're just missing it.

Because he didn't talk about it to people, right, And maybe Kinzer is trying to fill in a less frightening thing than just a man who likes to hurt people and gets a job at the CIA where he gets to do it. Kind of whatever is going on in his head what he's doing is often like serial killer ship. For an example, in late nineteen fifty two, Project Artichoke researchers decided to conduct a test into whether or not

people with hepatitis are more vulnerable to lsd UM they are. Apparently, it's like a thing if you have hepatitis or have had it recently, acid will can have like potentially dangerously high effect on you. Um Gottlieb has his people. He sets up the CIA, has a deal with the American Hospital in Paris, and so he has agents waiting there as patients come in for like the right person to dose. This turns out to be Stanley Glickman. Now, Glickman is

an American artist. He'd won prizes for his work and had gotten to go to a fancy art academy in Paris. So he's like a young man who was just getting started in the world. He's gifted, he's gotten this like incredible opportunity to study in Paris. Life is going good, and then this happens. I'm gonna quote next from Kinser's book quote. His studio was nearly select, but after a while he came to prefer another, cafe Le Dome, just

across the Boulevard du Montparnesse. One evening in October nineteen fifty two, he was drinking coffee there when an acquaintance appeared and invited him over to lay Select. Reluctantly, he agreed. At lay Select, the two joined a group of Americans whose conservative dress set them apart from the rest of the crowd. Talk turned to politics and grew heated. Glickmant rose to leave, but one of the men insisted on buying him a last drink to show there were no

hard feelings. Glickman said he'd have a glass of chartrouss an herbal liqueur. Rather than call the waiter. The man walked to the bar, ordered the chartrous himself, and carried it back to their table. He walked with a limp, Glickman later recalled the next few minutes were the last of Glickman's productive life. After taking a few SIPs from his drink. He began to feel what he later called a lengthening of distance and a distortion of perception. Soon

he was hallucinating. Others at the table leaned in fascinated. One told Glickman he could perform miracles. Finally, overwhelmed by panic and fearing that he had been poisoned, he jumped up and fled. And for Glickman, the hallucinations don't stop right, he loses his mind. He goes running into the street. He's there for hours. He gets taken by an ambulance, eventually back to the American hospital who has this secret working relationship with the CIA. And at the American hospitals,

he gets taken in hallucinating and freaking out. They dose him with sedatives. They electrocute him repeatedly, like they give him electroshock therapy dozens and dozens of times, and they dose him with more LSD. They discharge him eventually, but he never recovers like because he like at no point in his life does he recover. He eventually gets like taken back home and he spends the rest of his days like hiding alone in an apartment owned by his parents.

He can only be social like with dogs. He can't really be around people ever. Again, he's in a seat, He's got a girlfriend, they're about to get married. He leaves her, and he never paints or read books or has reads books or has a romantic relationship. Again, like his mind is destroyed by this, Like he is ended as a human being, is effectively because of what gets done to him. And kind of based on the reports, it's probably Gottlieb who puts the fucking acid in his chartreuse.

And the thing is, we're probably going to get into it, Like do they regard this as a result in their experiment, Like see, this is proof that you can Yeah, because all it proves is that if you do enough damage to somebody's brain, you can ruin their wife. Like again, if you if you people, yeah you bashed them in the head with a baseball bat, you can also prove this like oh yeah, this guy never worked another day in his life. But it works. It's like you haven't

discovered anything. You've just discovered that if you treat someone horrible,

you can you can permanently mess them up. Yeah. I think the thing they take out of this is that like, oh, yes, people who have hepatitis are more vulnerable to LSD, but also like, well, but you also like in terms of like it being a bad study, well, you also like forced him into like a hospital room and electrocuted him and sedated him and gave him more acid, So you don't actually know how much of his reaction was due to the LSD and the hepatitis, how much of it

was due to the electro shock, how much of it was due to the sedative. Like you've ruined your own experimental study by conducting it so shodily, Like just as if you're if you were a soulless monster who thinks it's okay to test this on people, and you care about the science deeply, you still wouldn't do it this way. Like maybe you'd kidnaped this guy and give him acid and see what would happen, but you wouldn't just start

adding random shit. It's kind of similar to people that kind of have this really high idea of what the Nazi scientists accomplished because like, well they didn't have to worry about ethics to had all these these human subjects. How much of their science was just pure trash. It's yeah, their methods, everything about how their record results like you look at how sloppy this is in terms of getting

any kind of a result. There's no control group, Like everything about it is these people just they're bad scientists, Like this is not the way you find out what they're trying to find out. And that's that's the degree

in terms of like what's going on with Gottlieb. That's the part of me that's like maybe he is just kind of like a serial killer, Like I don't know, maybe that's maybe he just this is what he does to I don't get off in whatever way, and then he's able to go home and be this like normal hippie dad. But he's just got this like deep cruelty in him that he needs to in the same way that like you have all these people who were like murdering folks their entire lives and they're married and they

have kids and stuff like we have. There are examples like this. There's like John Wayne Gacy, right, Gaycy I think is one of the ones who had like a family. Um, maybe I'm wrong, but there's there's like examples of serial killers everybody, like they're fairly prominent where there it's like, well, he was just a normal man. We all thought he was just this you know, he had a wife and he had kids, and everyone just assumed he was a

member of the community. Um, maybe that's what got leave is you know, that's the actually the less cynical interpretation, because the more cynical interpretation, is it, any is a lot of people if you gave them a job and it's like your boss just tells you to do it, you just do it because your boss told you to do it, and it's otherwise I'll get fired, and this is my career on the line, and so that if that, you know that that's part of the lesson the Holocaust,

is it. It didn't take it didn't take millions of serial killers. It just took a lot of bureaucrats who kind of like, what else am I gonna do? It's you know, they is my job. This is what I was told to guard this building and not let anybody out, Like that's that that was my job? What you want me to do? Definitely, I mean obviously, like that's most of the CIA, right, that's most of the m k

Ultra people. Gottlieb there is that like that particular story where he's just like he's looking at a bar for a young kid. He can drug and he does it himself.

That's the thing that like makes me, I don't know, I know we're getting into more satisfying personal curiosity, but no. But I think that's what makes a story interesting because again, the the conspiracy stuff makes certain assumptions about the type of people that work at the CIA, and I think it almost imagines him as a different kind of human being versus so much of this is people just screwing around like this here, like just dosing this the stranger

to see what happens like this is just this is reaching stage where you're just screwing around, like there's it's just your there's not enough oversight. There's nobody checking your method, there's nobody making your report every single thing you do because it's all secrets. So you know, um yeah, and I hate that it as mundane as that it's like, well, he wasn't reporting to anybody, so it's like, well why

not see what happens? You know, I think you you get so immersed in this stuff where anything can become normal if that's just like your day to day job. Yeah, I mean that is it's to an extent and unknowable question. But yeah, I but I don't know. Well, well, we'll come back around to this as we get through, um like more of this story and you get to know

a little bit more about Sydney Gottlieb. But kind of right around this time, as Gottlieb is dosing Glickman and destroying his life, he convinces his boss, Alan Dullis to merge all the different government teams working on truth serum and mind control research together. Now, most of what this means is they're bringing the Army Chemical Corps, who is still doing separate research into stuff like this, and the

CIA teams under one roof. In November of nineteen fifty two, a month after Gottlieb drugs Stanley Glickman, Dwight D. Eisenhower wins the presidency. In a nineteen fifty three he makes Alan Dullis the new head of the CIA. So, now this is the kind of ship Sydney has been able to get up too, with his patron being the number two man at the CIA. Now is buddies running things, and stuff's gonna go off the rails. But you know what else goes off the rails? Jason capitalism, I don't.

I mean, yes at some point, um, but but but probably not while we're all alive. Um. So sit back and enjoy capitalism and don't think about how it ties into what these guys were defending by dosing random people in Paris. Ah, we're back, okay. So Jason Alan Dullis is now running the CIA. Dwight D. Eisenhower is the president. John Foster Dulas is the Secretary of State, and the agency gets given the go ahead to open more black

sites around the world. At this point, Gottlieb is also able to expand the scope of his mind control research, and for the first time, he brings an outside science to conduct torture experiments. One of these scientists is Paul Hook of the New York Psychiatric Institute. Gottlieb wanted him to inject a patient with mescalin to see what would happen. Hawk chose Harold Blower. Now. Blower was depressed after a divorce and he had gone to Hawk for help. Hawk

is a psychiatrist. Blower is a sad man who in the fifties is like, you know what, I'm gonna get over the macho bullshit that like my culture teaches me about seeking help, and I'm going to go to a psychiatrist to deal with my divorce. Um. And as a reward for being that self aware and responsible and taking control of his mental health, Hawk's assistant and secretly injects

Blower with concentrated mescalin, telling him it's depression medicine. He does this five more times over the course of several weeks, and and Blower complains, right, he's he's hallucinating. He's having nightmarish hallucinations every time they give this depression treatment to him. And he's like, I want to stop. This is not helping me being sad about my wife leaving. Um, my depression has not been cured by these random, horrible hallucinations. Um,

can we please stop? And Hawk basically tells him, you can't quit the treatment midstream. You have to finish the course of medications otherwise it will be really bad for you. So let's just let's just keep taking this ship. In January of nineteen fifty three, just days after Dwight Eisenhower is sworn in, Hawk was injected with a dose fourteen times higher than what he'd been given previously. He began to have seizures. He had a heart attack, and he

was pronounced dead about three hours after the injection. Hawk is one of two Americans who are known to have died from the n kal dr experiments. Right, Um, as we'll get too later. Most of the there's a lot of data about this that's lost. But howk is one of the two guys that we know for certain was killed as a result of these experiments. Um one of doctor or not Hook Blower, one of doctor Hawk's medical

assistants who had been giving Blower them. Escalin later said, quote, we didn't know if it was dog piss or what it was that we were giving him. So maybe these people were not Maybe there's some medical ethics problems here too, Jesus Christ. Yeah, And so okay, if you had to put money on all right, there's two people we know died. If you just had to put down a bet as to whether or not there were at least one or two more people that we maybe don't know about, would

you take that bet or would you? Yeah? I mean, I don't want to be irresponsible here and the information out there, but it just seems it feels implausible. Yeah, seeing how fast and loose they were playing. I don't know. We will never know because they destroy much of the evidence. Well we'll we'll explain that later. But like, I don't I don't see how the the death toll. And we're talking obviously they've been killing people for a long time. But those people are yeah, Americans who die kind of

accidentally as a result of experiments. I would be shocked if it weren't dozens, and it might be more like but we'll but we'll never know, right, And so it's sometimes it's hard to tell because like a lot of people have lifelong problems as a result of this and then eventually die as the result of like and maybe like, how does the LSD impact the fact that they die very young of a heart disease or does it make them take other substances that contribute to their right? This

is all messier. It's usually not as clear as it is with blour, where he just gets injected with a massive dose of something and has a heart attack. Um, but yeah, it's it's heart. It's impossible to say exactly, but my my, if I'm taking that, bet, I feel pretty good about my adds. Um, now are they calling? Is this still operating under Artichoke? Or have they started calling it m kale. It's it's just about to be

m kale. So in April of nineteen fifty three, again, everything we've talked about has happened over about a four year period, right, this is not a long span of time that's past. In April of nineteen fifty three, Alan Dulas gives that big speech at Princeton where he says that communist spies are about to play the American mind

like a phonograph. A few days later, on April nineteen fifty three, he like officially bundles up all of the research the US government is going doing into mind control, and he called launches mk Ultra at Gottlieb's insistence as the final iteration of the secret mind control research project. Now, under the terms of the agreement that Gottlieb had made with Dullus, mk Ultra is granted six percent of the entire CIA operating budget. There are no no requirements for

accounting and no oversight. Alan Dulls is not told what they're doing. The President of the United States does not know about this program in anything but the broadest terms. Like every now and then someone will be like, you know, we're we're continuing our work on like mind control research because the Soviets have something right, but like um, no one is being looped in. Gottlieb has six percent of

the CIA budget and zero oversight. And again we can criticize it in you know, in hindsight, but hindsight at the time, they had no way of knowing that I could turn into a carnival of horror. Yeah, so many things go well when you give a man effectively a license to kill in drug whoever he wants, millions of dollars and say, no one's watching him? Who himself is tripping balls much of the day? Who is? Who is? Yeah, it must be said, is hallucinating an unknown but significant

percentage of the time. Now, maybe this is not something that made into the records. Did they know that mk Ultra was an awesome name for a project. Yes, it was randomly generated. They actually kind of break their own rules to call it him k Ultra. So with cryptonym, the MK part is normal, right, that just means it's

part of the technical division. The second part of the name, like we had M k Naomi earlier, it's supposed to be completely random because if somebody, if if some spy like leaks a document to the Soviets that mentions MK ultra. You don't want anyone to be able to tell what it is, Gottly make sure it's called ultra because it's the most secret thing in the US government, right, Like that's why he calls it that because he and I think it's just because he thinks it's cool that that's

his project. Like the most secret thing anyone's doing is his project, and so it's it's ultra. Yeah. If you sneak into an office at the Pentagon or somewhere and you see a folder called Project Artichoke, you're probably not even going to open it, right If you stumble across a big fat red folder marked MK ultra, Oh yeah, absolutely, you're stealing that thing. It's like, this is either aliens or to doomsday weapon, Like you would almost be disappointed

at what it actually is. Yeah, it's but it's certainly like it is actually a pretty bad cryptonym because it immediately you're like, well, this has to be something pretty fucking serious, right Yeah. Um, So Adney Gottlieb gets his blank check and his license to do whatever, and over the next decade he makes full use of the resources that have been made available to him under mk ULTRA, and increasing share of the workload gets farmed out to

independent scientists. One of these is Dr Ewen Cameron, a former head of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations as well as the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron had been born in Scotland, but he worked mostly in Canada. He was one of the top couple of psychiatrists on the planet in the mid nineteen fifties. Again, he is the former head of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. He is like, you don't get much more prestigious than that in this period.

And I want to quote now to talk about what this motherfucker did. I want to quote from a write up from the CBCS long form series Brainwashed. Quote. Three years after the CIA launched mk ultra IF, they approached Cameron through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a research foundation and one of their front organizations through which they funneled money. They encouraged him to apply for

a grant, which he did and quickly received. From January nineteen fifty seven to September of nineteen sixty, the CIA gave Cameron sixty dollars US equivalent to slightly more than half a million today. Now, in nineteen fifty five, a Canadian woman named Esther Schreier marries the love of her life after a blind date. The two of them have a child three years later, but the baby dies of

a staff infection a three weeks old. Esther is obviously very sad about this, and she blames herself for the death. Her life up to this point has been pretty difficult. Her father had died when she was young, then her mother had died like right after him. She and her brother has been a lot of time in foster home. So this is a woman with a lot of trauma. And when she gets pregnant two years later, she finds herself kind of so consumed with anxiety that she's worried

that it's going to harm the baby's health. So Esther and her husband do the responsible thing. They go to the best psychiatrists that they can afford to try to get help. And the psychiatrists they go to is Dr Ewan Cameron. Uh. They had been told that he is quote godlike when it came to treating issues of anxiety and depression. And I'm going to continue from quoting from

that CBC right up now. Esther Schreier entered the hospital in February nineteen sixty to receive what her family thought was the best care money could buy, but her medical notes showed disregard for her well being and that of her unborn child right from the start. She spent thirty days in what was called the sleep room, a place where patients were put in a drug induced coma and roused only for three feedings in bathroom breaks per day.

She lost thirteen pounds that month. Her records showed that she couldn't stand up because she was too weak. She also underwent a treatment called deep patterning. Cameron believed that breaking down patients minds to a childlike state through drugs and electroshock therapy would allow him to work from a

clean slate, whereby he could then reprogram the patients. Part of his reprogramming regime would involve what he dubbed psychic driving, which meant playing recorded messages to the patients for up to twenty hours a day, whether they were asleep or awake. These voices were played through headphones, helmets, or speakers, sometimes installed right inside a patient's pillow. Records show that some

patients would hear these messages up to half a million times. Um, okay, very very briefly, just yeah, got a question there, Jason. People who follow me on social media and follow me on my many many podcast appearances know that I have this drum beat that I come back to, which is how much the past sucked. And I get that there are lots of things about the modern world that are terrible, and that it feels like things going in the wrong direction.

The world's becoming just everything is anxiety and stress. Um, you know, in inequality, all of the problems. You did not want to live in the nineteen fifties, a fucking lutly not and whatever you've seen where it's like, well, you know, back my my dad or my grandpa when he got married, they on just one income, you know, at a coal mind they were able to afford a house in a car and his wife could stay home and take care of the kids. What happened to that?

That's that's perfectly valid. Like everything you're saying there, you didn't want to live in the nineteen anyone out there listening to this, who is getting any kind of mental health care? Like in many many ways. We are still in the dark ages of mental health care. Like anybody who's taken any depressants or anti anxiety medication knows how the effectiveness is all over the map. The dosage is getting it right, the withdrawals are terrible, side effects are terrible.

Like our treatments are not great now. The treatments, God, the treatments back then, they were just experimenting with different ways to torture people. And like everything he described, if you were trying to inflict the worst like mental suffering on somebody, these are all the things you would come up with. It's sadistic, it's it's it's bug fuck, and it's made worse by like there's stuff going on that's like in this realm that them like potentially attempting to

test treatments. Cameron isn't just trying to help her, He's also he's also trying to experiment with the destruction of human thoughts and memories. Right, He's trying to change like people's personalities through medical torture, right, Like that's part of the goal here. She doesn't know that that's what she's agreed to do, but that's what happens. And by March twelfth of nineteen sixty Esther Esther Schreier is quote considered

completely depatterned. According to Cameron's medical records. The bad news is that being deep pattern means that she had forgotten the face, name, and existence of her husband. She could not control her bladder or bowels, She could not speak, She had trouble even swallowing. Her son later told journalists that, according to Esther, she could not remember how to boil water.

Despite being deep patterned. The torture continued. Dr Cameron would give her four or five days of rest at a time, and then he would take her in and subject her to hundreds of electro shock treatments. These continued until the eighth month of her pregnancy. In two thousand four, Esther told BBC Scotland what it was like when she actually had her baby, completely stripped of her understanding of how to be a person. I had a new baby and

I didn't know what to do with the baby. I had help a baby nurse, but she had to have a day off and she left me a book. And I'll just give you a little example from you book. From the book, when you hear the baby cry, go to the room, pick up baby, and step by step

how to feed the baby. And that was very frightening, Like she she had to have it explained to her, like how to feed, like that a baby needed feeding, all of this stuff like it had just And I think what's happening here is not that because she recovers eventually she it's not that he's obliterated these memories. It's that he's done so much damage to her ability to like focus and function and think by blasting her with noise basically ceaselessly. Um that she's discovered depending at all,

that's all garbage nonsense. It's if you if you just relentlessly attacks someone in many different ways for a long enough period, Yeah, their whole sense of their whole function will break down. There's nothing magical and mysterious about it. If you torture somebody enough long enough, their ability to function in all sorts of ways. Like you said, she also lost a bladder control. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you ruin this person's brain temporarily through sheer harm you were

doing to them. Again, you could get the same effect by bashing them in the head with a pipe. It's there's nothing like these these people think they're playing god. It's like, no, you're just brutalizing people. Yeah, and that's that's all that's happening. Um. So again, esther does recover, she does get to live a full life, unlike some of these people. She comes back to herself. Obviously, she and her son suffered trauma because he's in the womb while a lot of this is happening, Like, none of

this is good for anybody. Um, and his early childhood is not ideal as a result of his mom going through a lot of this stuff. Still, he and his mom, you have to say, are kind of the better case scenarios for Dr Cameron's patients. McGill University, where he taught and conducted his research, later published a Mia copple where they noted that quote. In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs, as well as electro convulsive

therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. His driving experiments consisted of putting subjects in a drug induced coma for weeks at a time up to three months in one case, while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute from minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered

permanently from this action. Now I wanted to provide a little more context as to just how medieval these fucking experiments were, and so I'd like to quote from one more passage of Kinser's book here before we close out for the day. There, he or she was fed LSD and given only minimal amounts of food, water in oxygen. Cameron fitted patients with helmets equipped with ear phones into which he piped phrases or messages like my mother hates me,

repeated hundreds of thousands of times. In professional papers and lab reports, Cameron reported that he had succeeded in destroying minds, but he had not found a way to replace them with new ones. After completing the treatment of one patient, he he wrote with evident pride that the shock treatment turned the then nineteen year old Honors student into a woman who sucked her thumb, talked like a baby, demanded to be fed from a bottle, and urinated on the floor. Now, again,

that's important. His goal is to destroy their minds. This is part one of what God lead wants, right. They want to destroy people's personalities so that they can put new ones in their place. Right. And they never figure out that second part as far as we know, but they do figure out how to destroy people for a while. Um. The Canadian government has provided no list of the experiments

that Dr Cameron carried out with their approval. This is not something the CIA is doing, and the Canadian government is unaware. The Canadian government is enthusiastically a proving of this, and when the CIA stops funding Cameron, the Canadian government gives him money to continue his research. Um. So again, not just the US involved here. Nine of Cameron's patients sued the CIA in the nineteen eighties for their treatment

under m k Ultra. It was settled out of court in nineteen under the condition that the agency was not accepting liability. Esther was too embarrassed to sign onto the case at that point in time, but she eventually signed on when the Canadian government in nineteen ninety four offered compensation for people who had experienced full or substantial deep patterning. Seventy four patients received hundred thousand dollar payments under the

condition that the Canadian government was not admitting culpability. So even when adjusting for inflation, that is nothing, not not enough money for this. Um, you could not pay me to have this, As someone who has done quite a bit of messing with my own head on chemicals, there's nothing. There's not an amount of money you could pay to go through this. This is the worst thing I can literally imagine. Um, Like, yeah, I'd rather go to prison

than absolutely. There's like there's like fucking labor camps that would be a less traumatic experience than this. At least you're like a person in that right m hm. Anyway, Jason, you got to think you want to plug. How are we only halfway through this story? How bad does it get? Um? It gets a lot worse. I mean it's I'd say it's kind of just stays at this level. Um, so false exectations with the listeners. Anyways, the novel is called if this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. I

am Jason Parson. I used to be one of the head guys that cracked when Evans first started posting there as a literal child, I'm on this is a sequel to the book slash film John Dyes at the end it exists as both of those things. If you're fan of that, Seriousest is the latest book. Otherwise, if you just want to see me posting things on TikTok or on Twitter or on any of the other ones, my name is Jason Pargein p A R. G. I In. I used to write on the Internet as David Wong

back in the day. Um, and we will. We'll be back for parts three and four. We share well. Um, you can find my book after the Revolution if you just type it into anything that will let you buy a book. You know how to use Google. We're done, Go Home. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.