Did the CIA test LSD on unsuspecting Americans?

That's what I'm hinky. Can you pull yourself together? I'm together, I'm with it. I am I'm fine. This is this is kind of an important one. It's a little out there, but it's all true. It is okay, So you're fine, I'm fine, I'm good. Let's do it. Well, we're talking today about a certain set of experiments carried out by a certain government agency is known as the CIA. Yes, and they, uh, they carried out an experiment with another

three letter word LSD right on unsuspecting Americans. Yeah. I think most people, uh would not expect to hear those six letters together in the same sentence. And this is not widely known, so no, it really isn't, and frankly it should be. And I think it's kind of one of those things that uh supports just about every American's notion of what the CIA is up to at any given time. And yet it's just so out there, so fantastic that they actually did this that it's kind of

hard to believe. But this is documented. This actually happened. It didn't. Okay, do you want to give a little background first? Uh, well, um, how about you tell us how we know that this stuff happened. Well, because it's on record. It's actually factually on record. Um. Yeah, there

are a couple of congressional hearings on it exactly. And this is what amazes me is this happened in the nineteen fifties, which is even less likely because you think about LSD acid as they call it as the kids call it, You think about the nineteen seventies and or l sixties and wood stock, But it was actually in the nineteen fifties when it was first being experimented with.

And we're talking the early fifties to um. Apparently we were really you know, full on into the Cold War, and um, we believed everything we heard about the Russians. We apparently the c I A Uh found out that the Russians were involved in some sort of truth serum mind constroced mind Controlmenturian candidate experiments, right. Uh. And they found out that the Swiss pharmaceutical company that will ring a bell of um the people who've taken acid and

listen to our podcast Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. Um. They had this stuff that was first created by a Swiss chemist named Albert Hoffman. It was LSD and uh. They apparently had a hundred thousand hits one million, hundred million hits a bowl to anyone who wanted to buy it was on the open market. They were legitimate pharmaceutical company. And this is back when as a lot of people don't know, LSD was an actual legitimate pharmaceutical. It was also often

used later on for um therapy. Did you know that? Uh? Well, in in the States, Carrie Grant was huge, huge in the acid I kid you not my friend. He he took many a trip and he actually I can't remember who he's married to. It may have been me, a pharaoh or somebody. He he essentially chased her off by being so insistent about his wife undergoing acid therapy LSD therapy that she was like, you're a freak. I could see that. Yeah, So okay, so we're let's get back

to the sand. Does thing forget carry grant? Yeah, they've got a hundred million hits of acid on the market, which I mean really, the c I heard this and they're thinking, okay, a hundred million hits. They could take out New York l A. The Russians could get this into the water supply, and all of a sudden, we have a population that's not listening to us anymore. Right,

I guess they were. They wanted to create some sort of chaos or mass hysteria or something like that, or at worst, like the Manchurian candidate program, unwitting assassins who you know, carried out these murders and had no recollection of doing it or being programmed. So they're like these perfect assassins. Right. They kind of suspected that LSD might help with that kind of thing. So uh, when the CIA hears that these these hits are on the market,

they scrambled to buy them. That's what it turns out. There is only Yeah, how much think in the US, good old U S government said we'll take all of them. So they bought forty hits of LSD acid in hand. They start carrying out their own horrific experiments. They went camping. No, I'm just kidding, all right. They built campfires, they went

they that's how a burning man actually started. UM. So they they they they have all this acid and they say, well, okay, we have to figure out how to make our own Manchurian candidates and figure out how to use this as a truth thereom ourselves. It just so happened that this this acid was purchased at a time that the CIA launched this UM project called MK Ultra. And this project was huge. Actually doesn't stand for anything. No I I

never found it either. It doesn't stand There were some other projects like MK projects that did stand for things, but Ultra it didn't stand for anything, which is unusual. UM. So they carry out MK Ultra, which is a hundred and forty nine subprojects, and it's this vast range of basically figure out how to get into people's minds um or kill them like one apparently they had magicians come in and t CIA operatives. How do you slide of

hand and poison people's drinks. Yeah, I can. I can virtually guarantee you a lot of magicians were shot in the back of the head after they gave that class. That was during the big magic freeze of the Yeah, yeah, that would account for it. That was one subproject. Another was UM using electro convulsive therapy to get people to tall, which I'm sure was a lot of fun but it worked too. Yeah, there was radiation treatments. They wanted to see how much radiation people who could be exposed to UM.

And this is actually one of the more horrific aspects of it. There there's a video on YouTube if you, I think type in something like a MK ultra testimony or radiation testimony. There is a woman who's testifying at a hearing I think it's one of the nineteen seventies hearings UM, and she's talking about how she I think she was an orphan and she and everybody else in the orphanage were made to be test subjects by the by the c I A not on LSD, but like

radiation and all that, and it's just clearly broken. She's a broken person. Now she's much older by this time, and it's just crazy to see somebody who actually was experimented on. She's an American who has all these rights and just got thrown out the window. Well yeah, and I know that they experimented on prisoners a lot too. Yeah, specifically black prisoners. So here's where we get into some

of the shadier LSD experiments. That's one of them. They go into a black prison and basically against the inmates, will as far as I know, uh, test LSD on them. Now, imagine taking LSD in prison, right, I can't think of anything worse than that, combo. Uh. And and these were, like I said, this was an all black prison, um, and it was just bad. That's just a bad experiment. Another one was they they lured heroin uh junkies. Yeah. I love this one too because and how did they

lure them? They paid them in heroin. The CIA paid these people in heroin. And this is again documented fact. Uh. There are a lot of other experiments going on. And actually the stuff was so rampant, as you know, Chuck, that the CIA actually developed an acid culture for a while and within their own Uh yeah, they used to dose one another at parties. Um. They used to take it themselves recreationally, like get any been like LSD conference

retreat something like that. The people were probably running around on acid, I know, you know, reading your article, it seemed almost unreal. Yeah, clearly, and it sounded like the nineteen fifties and the CIA. It was almost like a prank, like, you know, hey, agent nine, let's just go drop some acid in agent drink there. That's almost precisely what happened. And there'd be like a group who dosed somebody and then everybody would be watching them and like a half

hour later that the joke will beyond him. He'd spend the next you know, eight to twelve hours just or whatever. Yeah. U. So, yeah, the CIA was well versed in the in how it felt to take acid, But the CIA operative isn't the average American, So they wanted to experiment on a normal people, and I'd say normal kind of unwillingly because they did have a certain criteria of who could be targeted for it.

So they went to kind of the semi under belly of cities and they found like hookers and junkies and uh who else, Um, well, the guy the pornographers. Yeah, the guy who found these folks posts a pimp? Is that right? Yeah? An alternate personality. Let's talk about these people. All right. There's this guy, all right, his name is Dr Sidney Gottlie. This guy has a club foot. He overcame an almost debilitating stutter, and he went on to

become the chief of the Technical division for the CIA. Now, this guy's greatest hits among you know, carrying out the LSD experiments, was developing agent orange, another drug that he had tested by the people who were conducting the CIA or the LSD tests UM eventually gave way to erectile this function drugs Um. He did a lot of crazy stuff and some less uh less solid evidence can puts him in Africa at the time that Ebola broke out of nowhere. Maybe not a coincidence there, Yeah, No, is

he a medical doctor? Was he? He was? He was? He was a medical doctor. He was probably from what I understand him, he probably had several doctorates to different degrees, and I think he was also Now he may have been a chemist actually now I think about it, but I think he did have a medical training as well. Uh. That's that's the guy who's running the head of this he's the head of this experiment. UM right right below him, is one of the most legendary characters you will ever

hear about in your life. George Hunter White. They need to make a biopic film about this guy. I can't believe they haven't already. Um. He originally White originally started out. Um. He really first made a name for himself by posing as a heroin trafficker um for the better part of the nineteen thirties and busting up this Chinese opium ring. And he took down hundreds of people. But to get there, I mean, like, I'm sure he had to smoke opium

quite frequently. Um, And he basically infiltrated this. He took a blood oath with this Chinese gang he was in, and he eventually took him down. Uh. So that's how he made a name for himself. Uh. But he he didn't really, I hate to use this cliche. He didn't play by the rules. Not only did he not play by the rules, the guys totally amoral. He was a completely amoral, a bit of a rogue agent. Yeah. I think he just kind of went whichever way, his his

um his all whichever way pretty much. Yeah, because he was definitely one of the ones who took the acid right. Um, so it all starts with him. Like the most that we know about the LSD experiments, they go back to George Hunter White. So White gets tapped by Gottlieb to carry out these experience experiments, and it all starts in New York. He didn't have a safe house or anything

like this. This guy was doing these experiments on his friends at first in his apartment in New York, basically having acid parties without telling them that they were going to be taking acid. And actually you could argue that George Hunter White held the first acid parties in the history of the earth. Um. This guy was really he'd make up batches of Martinis um and serve them to his guests. And of course the picture of Martini was

spiked to god knows how much LSD well. That's one of the things who I was wondering is at the time they were just starting to experiment, so they didn't even know what was a full dose, what what it would do. I mean, this is how they found out. Yeah, um, and and he had a he had a terminology for, um, what happened if you had a bad trip. He called it the horrors. One of the reasons we know so much about this is because George White kept a diary of notes um that for his experiments, at least to

maintain some semblance of experimentation. He took notes on it. Um. But yeah, so he'd serve his guests martinis, right, and then just sit back and take notes. After it started kicking in. There was a whole subgroup of close friends of his that were actually in a certainly recruited and they would bring their friends and he actually had this kind of um swinger social group um and swinger by every definition of the word. White apparently was into Spike

Hilled boots. He'd do anything for a woman in Spike Hill Boots. Um. Who know, right. His friends were just imagine like the the fifties shade ball porno swinger groups. And this is what White was at the center, except he was, unbeknownst to all of his friends, a CIA operative experimenting on lst need to be a film in the works. I would go that would Uh, So he's carrying out experiments and again there was a certain subgroup

of friends who loved it. They years later, um, in the nineties, a lot of this this information came out and it just fell to the wayside for reasons I can't understand, um, but there a lot of them were like, we loved acid. George loved acid, Like we just took acid all time. Some people didn't like acid. Though exactly can go one of two ways generally when it comes to yeah, there's not really a middle ground of a think now. Um, So there's this one woman in particular

named Barbara Newsome. I felt terrible and she was like a young mother, and um, she was married, and her husband was actually kind of this, um, kind of a cad from what I understand, Um, he was part of White's little swinger group, but I also got the impression that was kind of peripheral. Wanted to be in further, but they just didn't think too highly of him. But White thought his wife was pretty hot. So he waits till her husband's out of town and invites her over.

And Barbara Newsome was not really hip to what was going on. She had a young kid, She had a twenty month old baby that she brought to the party, so she clearly did not know what was gonna totally unaware of what was going on. So White, um doses here anyway, right, and the part of The problem was white quickly got bored, especially if you were on a bad trip. He had no there was no padded room that he took you to, or he didn't hand you like a hash pipe or anything like that. You were

on your own. He wanted you out of his hair, and that was that. So it was a big bummer for him, I guess exactly. At the very least, it made him irritable. So he'd turned you out on the street, just tripping your head off, and um that that's that's what became a Barbara Knewsome. She was turned out on the street. She had a bad trip, and she went home. She never told anybody about it. Um. Her husband later pieces together. They eventually divorced, but he didn't even know

what happened to her. No, I don't think she had a clue what happened to her. She she became depressed, her marriage fell apart. She ended up being committed on and off for the next twenty years. Um. And also again from from the research I did, she was probably a little more fragile than the average person, and it made something else could have happened to her in her life that that put her through this. The fact is

this woman was experimented on. It's documented facts. She she was one of White's test subjects and her life fell apart, right, Sure, she kind of represents the bad side of these experiments. Yeah, I would say that's definitely the bad side. And one person died, isn't that correct? Yeah? Dr Frank Olsen, Yeah, his son really has taken up the charge of trying to get the truth exposed. His father is definitely documented as having been tested on at one of those parties.

And now imagine like his father was an army scientists, a research scientists whose specialty was in delivering poisons through aerosols. He was a lab orate. He probably, I imagine if social skills weren't as quite refined as maybe whites or anybody else's. Uh, he goes to this party and um, they they give him a shot of dost quantroux and he does not handle it well. Now and this is it Thanksgiving to He's around things. These guys clearly had no qualms about. You know this one lady had a baby.

This guy so the holidays and he skipped Thanksgiving with his family because he was so freaked out. Hey, they actually contacted the closest CIA approved doctor who was I think a pediatrist or something like that, and but he was the closest physician. I think the guy was in Virginia, which is close by to where this this c I A army conference took place. And so Dr Olsen's just

freaking out and he's doing it very loudly. I think he kind of took everybody off guard with his reaction to the l s T. They bring this doctor, and the doctors like, this guy needs some serious care and basically we need to kidnap him. And he has corns on his feet. Write a boots is always notices those things. Yeah, well yeah, how it's his training. So um, they basically sequester this guy. They call his family and say, your husband isn't going to be home for Thanksgiving. He can't

make it. Basically, don't ask any questions or any Thanksgiving. As it turns out, right, eight days after his bad trip, he goes out the tenth story window of a hotel in New York and um, it was apparently suicide. That's how it was ruled. But years later, I think in or four, his son who actually started a website, the Frank Olsen Project, very interesting stuff. He um he had his father's body exhumed and there was evidence of pre mortem blunt forest trauma to the head, which kind of suggests,

you know, this guy was probably murdered. And a couple of years after the body was exhumed, Mike Feldman, who posed as the pimp, will get to him in a second. In an interview with Spin magazine, he said, you know, George Hunter White was doing the asset tests in New York at the time. This guy went out of the hotel window in New York. So you know, you don't

have to put you put two and two together. No one ever has definitively, but you know, it kind of seems like the kind of guy White was, he didn't seem to have qualms about stuff like, so, okay, New York's over, Yeah, this is this is where it gets good. And it was sort of predictable when you look back. But they moved the operation to an actually a funded place in San Francisco of the the apartment called the Path,

that's literally it was called the Pad. And basically I get the impression that White left his swinging social scene and his wife behind in New York and he goes and takes the show on the road by himself in San Francisco. And at first, UM, let me describe the pad real quick. It's this little apartment with the kind of bohemian art on the walls and yeah, yeah, yeah, but it was probably pretty close. Um. One of the one of the main features is a two way mirror

with a little hollowed out room behind it. Um, and that looked out onto the main living room. Okay, So basically White used to take a bunch of acid and he would pose as either a merchant, seaman or like some sort of starving artists, and he'd go into San Francisco and basically find the prostitutes and the john's and um, the drug dealers, and he'd round them up and bring them back to his place and just dose him with acids. And they didn't feel bad because they consider these people

just the dregs of society. They figured they are degenerates anyway. But you know, I think that there's probably a pretty wide threshold of you know, who was fair game and he wasn't. Like I'm sure if you were caught with a Nudi mag under your mattress and you were married, they would have considered you fair game degenerator. Here's some and here's some acid. Yeah all right, So, um, at first, White surrounding all these people up right, and he's basically

just partying with him in San Francisco on acids. Right. Eventually he recruits Ike Feldman, that guy that we mentioned who did that Sin magazine interview. And Ike Feldman is just a badass. He is a tough, grit old old the fringe of the law cop right. He does whatever. He's like the model for Vic Mackie from the Shield. Whatever has to be done to get the job done. Whatever, it doesn't matter how many times you break the law, if at the end you're bringing in the bad guy

or whatever. So he gets recruited by White, who basically um goes and takes his rightful place behind the two way mirror to watch how Feldman brings in the prostitutes and the John's and it got a little freaky from there. Yeah, and you know, it kind of made me wonder if the whole uh culture of San Francisco was kind of known in the sixties as you know, the counterculture, the revolution, the free love, the Summer of Love, if the c I actually kind of helped create this in the nineteen fifties.

I can tell you most decidedly it did. Uh. And the reason why, here's the punch line of the whole thing. This, this is just this makes this whole thing beautiful and elegant, as a mathematician would put it. One of the people who signed up for the legitimate experiments, actually, I think it was at a v A hospital or something was a fellow by the name of ken Kesey. Ken kezi U was an orderly at a mental hospital at the time. He was basically researching Um for his later book One

Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Casey's other came claim to fame was he was the founder of the Mary Pranksters, and the Mary Pranksters hung out with the Hell's Angels, the Grateful Dead, wrote around in a in a colorful bus and basically we're the establishment of the hippie movement. And the Tom Wolf book Electric Kolait Asset test Is

is a great read. Yeah, and it really gets into this period in our history and it's about Kesi and the and the Mary Pranksters UM and Kesi was one of these willing participants in a test subject by the CIA on LSD. He was given it a couple of times, realized, holy cow, I love this stuff. Uh, found out that Sandos was the company that was making it, got a bunch,

shared it with his friends once it went illegal. He also befriended Stanley Owsley, who was like the premier underground acid chemists in the sixties, and it all just kind of went from there. So directly, the c i A led to the birth of the hippie counterculture and any remnants and traces of it still alive today that they later would condemn and uh, you know, cops will put the beat down on the hippies and the Beatnicks, and just kind of funny that it was kind of created

by the government. It's amazing, it is. It's beautiful. So I that's the story of the CIA and LSD and the gingerbread man. Wow. Okay, so stick around because this seems almost unimportant. We're gonna tell you what article makes Chuck want to go out and even mc river to LSD, to the mcribe round for that right after this. Okay, it's for sticking around. Um, Chuck, Yes, what makes you

want to eat a mcribb. But man, Well, what doesn't make me want to eat a mcgrib, joshin The mcgrib is a a temporary menu item, a featured menu item that you see a McDonald's occasionally, and as you know, it's some sort of pork product, uh, compressed into the shape of ribs bones at home. Yeah, but there are no bones. It's just part of the pork product that represents and they put it on an oblong bun, slather it with some sauce and it's deltch. You're preaching of

the choir. Friend had those and I'm hooked on them. But this isn't a mcdonald' scrimmerteal No, so you should tell them the article well, it's I think top five McDonald's menu items that didn't make it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a bit of silliness, but it's it's kind of a fun real it is. It's very interesting. It's actually I took it. It's written by our esteem colleague, Jane McGrath, who did a heck of a job with it. Um. It's it's almost this gland into the corporate culture of

McDonald's and marketing and how it goes wrong, terribly wrong. Yeah, there are two things on there that I would like to have seen. Shamrocks shank. Yeah, I love the Shamrocks shake. I've never had one, Oh do They're great? Um. And the other was the what was the one that keeps the hot side hot in the cool side cool? The lt Yes, that's right, that's right. Um. I would have liked to have seen those on there because I just loved the packaging for the McDLT right. The thing was cool.

I think that in the green movement in these days that wouldn't go over because it's twice the packaging quickly. Yeah. Yeah, Well you can read all sorts of stuff about the green movement and plenty of menu items that didn't really make it for McDonald's, and don't forget to read about the C, I, A and L S D. All of them can be found by typing in some clever words in the search bar on how stuff works dot Com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is

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