Speaker 1: Robert Evans here to tell you about the live show
Speaker 1: for it could happen here that we're doing this October.
Speaker 1: It'll be me and the whole team Chris's and James
Speaker 1: and Garrison and Sophie and other fantastic people. Uh though,
Speaker 1: or it will be a Q and A so you
Speaker 1: can submit questions and you can purchase tickets now at
Speaker 1: moment house dot com slash I h H. Remember it's
Speaker 1: on October at six pm, but the link will be
Speaker 1: good to watch the show for up to a week
Speaker 1: after it airs, and you can purchase tickets now at
Speaker 1: moment house dot com slash i h H, where you
Speaker 1: will also be able to submit questions. Ah, welcome back
Speaker 1: to Behind the Bastards. Um. I am Robert Evans. We're
Speaker 1: talking about m KLT. This is part two of our
Speaker 1: series with Jason Pargeon. Jason, how who what are you?
Speaker 1: What are you? Jason? How much time do we have? Uh? No,
Speaker 1: I am a full time author now who used to
Speaker 1: be Evans boss speck of crack. Although if you're coming
Speaker 1: on our part two of this episode, you know that
Speaker 1: you should circle back and what you listen to part one?
Speaker 1: If you're if you skipped it, Jason. We have a
Speaker 1: whole a whole series of fans. We call him backwards
Speaker 1: these and they wait until the whole series is out,
Speaker 1: and then they listen to everything backwards like Momento. It
Speaker 1: makes it less depressing because then it's the story of
Speaker 1: a terrible person who ends up as a baby. Um. Yeah, Anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm here promoting a book called If this book exists,
Speaker 1: You're in the wrong universe. It is not a book
Speaker 1: about mk ulture or anything we're talking about today. It
Speaker 1: is a work of fiction that is a sequel to
Speaker 1: the film and movie John dies at the end, which
Speaker 1: fans of mine know that. Well, people who have never
Speaker 1: heard of me, Uh, look at that. If you like it,
Speaker 1: I mean, can you can go buy this book and
Speaker 1: it'll it's in the same universe, in the same characters.
Speaker 1: You say, it's not part of m k Ultra, But
Speaker 1: if you were working for the CIA, that's what you'd say.
Speaker 1: So you know, people can make their own People can
Speaker 1: make their own decisions about whether or not they think
Speaker 1: you're part of the CIA. But we should probably talk
Speaker 1: about who the guy who is your boss if you
Speaker 1: are working in the CIA's mk ultrip program, Sydney Gottlieb.
Speaker 1: Actually he's been dead for decades. But now at this
Speaker 1: point it is not yet called MK Ultra, right, Nope,
Speaker 1: it is still it is a Project Artichoke is what
Speaker 1: it's moved on to now, right. So it starts out
Speaker 1: as m K Naomi and then Project Bluebird and now
Speaker 1: Project Artichoke UM and these are all they just kind
Speaker 1: of keep getting more funding and getting a bigger sort
Speaker 1: of purview to go try and do weird mind control shit.
Speaker 1: And by the time Gottlieb takes over the Chemical division
Speaker 1: because he's like running like the CIA's the chunk of
Speaker 1: the CIA that's like fucking with chemical right, pretty obvious.
Speaker 1: So it's everything from like we need a drug for
Speaker 1: if guys get captured that they can like bite down
Speaker 1: on a fucking fake tooth and kill themselves like in
Speaker 1: dune Um, which is like they do stuff like that.
Speaker 1: They actually do stuff like that um Like Sydney for
Speaker 1: for an idea of where his career goes. He's the
Speaker 1: guy who makes the poison cigars they try to kill
Speaker 1: Castro with, like he's that guy for the CIA. But
Speaker 1: also obviously it includes stuff like lsd um and Alan
Speaker 1: Dules by this point has been promoted to the number
Speaker 1: two man at the CIA, so he has steadily risen up.
Speaker 1: And because he's a big believer in mind control, that
Speaker 1: means that Gottlieb is just getting more and more money
Speaker 1: in the early fifties to start pumping into this project
Speaker 1: Artichoke shit Um. New research at the CIA is heavily
Speaker 1: driven by what this blue blooded paranoid egomaniac decided he
Speaker 1: what he wanted researched. And in nineteen fifty two Alan
Speaker 1: adds to his interest in psychedelics an interest in hypnosis,
Speaker 1: so he's he's already like thinks that there's some sort
Speaker 1: of mind control drug that the Soviets have that he's
Speaker 1: putting money into. And in fifty two he also starts
Speaker 1: to become like a fan of hypnosis. And this is
Speaker 1: because he actually like goes to a show in New
Speaker 1: York City and he watches a famous stage hypnotist um
Speaker 1: And the thing that convinces him that hypnotism has military
Speaker 1: or has like applications for the CIA is that he
Speaker 1: goes it winds up hanging out with this stage hypnotist
Speaker 1: after the show, and the guy's like, oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: regularly rape women after putting them into a hypnotic trance.
Speaker 1: It's really easy. You can make hypnotize women and just
Speaker 1: have sex with them. And this is like a thing
Speaker 1: that I do. And you know everything you need to
Speaker 1: know about Alan Dulis by the fact that this guy
Speaker 1: says this and he immediately signs up to take a
Speaker 1: four day course from him. That is that is the
Speaker 1: man Allen d sis Uh. People who have never listened
Speaker 1: to the show before, I realized that it seems like
Speaker 1: Robert and I are laughing at extremely inappropriate moments. The
Speaker 1: please understand, this is a coping mechanism. We do not
Speaker 1: actually think that it is funny. What else do you
Speaker 1: do when you hear about that like that? When you
Speaker 1: hear about a like the the second in command at
Speaker 1: the CIA, that's his fucking thought process? Is this man's like,
Speaker 1: I commit felonies all the time on using hypnosis and
Speaker 1: he's like, oh yeah, let me take I want to
Speaker 1: take a fucking course from you. And your audience knows
Speaker 1: that hypnotism, like that form of hypnotism, like the pop
Speaker 1: culture form where you can make somebody squawk like a chicken,
Speaker 1: like plaining, like that's not a thing, right, Like they
Speaker 1: know that's not a thing. No, this man is just
Speaker 1: assaulting people. Um and fucking sure enough, Alan Dulas takes
Speaker 1: a course from him. We'll talk about actual hypnosis in
Speaker 1: a little bit, but Allendlis takes this course and he
Speaker 1: goes back to work at the CIA and d C,
Speaker 1: and he tries to hypnotize his female co workers. Um.
Speaker 1: He uses CIA secretaries as his guinea pigs. He induces
Speaker 1: trances in them. Stephen Kinser says that he got them
Speaker 1: to quote do things they might not otherwise consider, like
Speaker 1: flirting with strangers or revealing office secrets. And my the
Speaker 1: feeling I get is that they're kind of playing along
Speaker 1: to an extent because this guy is their boss and
Speaker 1: they don't want to make him angry. Hopefully he doesn't
Speaker 1: from kindser doesn't say he actually assaults any of these women.
Speaker 1: So hopefully this doesn't go any further than just you know,
Speaker 1: grossly inappropriate sexual harassment. Um. But we really don't know,
Speaker 1: because it is the c i A. I mean without
Speaker 1: the aid of some sort of a medication or chemical
Speaker 1: or something that probably cannot be done. Like stage hypnosis
Speaker 1: works because you get people up on a stage and
Speaker 1: they like to participate in the show, so you're like
Speaker 1: lowering their inhibitions, basically giving them permission to be part
Speaker 1: of the show. And so like some of it, it
Speaker 1: works in like a subconscious level. But the type again
Speaker 1: that the type that exists has existed in pulp culture
Speaker 1: pop culture for decades where you can like turn somebody
Speaker 1: into a zombie and make them do whatever purely through hypnosis. Again,
Speaker 1: hypnosis paired with whatever drugs they were working with at
Speaker 1: the time may do that put somebody where they're in
Speaker 1: like a half awake state of you know, they're not
Speaker 1: fully making decisions or whatever. The just hypnosis. Uh, that's no,
Speaker 1: that's just a sleazy weirdo. It's a sleazy where And
Speaker 1: probably what is actually to the extent that that hypnotist
Speaker 1: is like hypno quote unquote hypnotizing and then having sex
Speaker 1: with him and like well he gets them alone because
Speaker 1: he's famous, and then they like you know, pretend to
Speaker 1: be hypnotized because it's the safest thing to do, right
Speaker 1: or or none of it ever happened, and he just
Speaker 1: lies he's a liar. That's entirely possible too, that he's
Speaker 1: such a sleezball that he lies about using hypnosis to
Speaker 1: rape women because he thinks that makes him look cool,
Speaker 1: and guess what, back at the time, it did. So
Speaker 1: all of these things are possible. We will not know
Speaker 1: what exactly happens, but we know the result of this
Speaker 1: is that after being a real creep at work and
Speaker 1: Dulus writes a memo to the Project art at Choke
Speaker 1: team quote. If hypnotic control can be established over any
Speaker 1: participant in clandestine operations, the operator will have an extraordinary
Speaker 1: degree of influence, a control in order of magnitude beyond
Speaker 1: anything that we have considered feasible. Now, as you said, Jason,
Speaker 1: hypnosis is like a thing. There's a there's like studies
Speaker 1: that scientists do on people's brains, and hypnotic trance is
Speaker 1: a thing that people experience. There are documented effects of
Speaker 1: being hypnotized, and hypnosis can be effective in conjunction with
Speaker 1: certain therapies. But as you said, hypnotizing does not mean
Speaker 1: that you're putting someone into a state where they will
Speaker 1: take commands and do whatever you can kind of induce
Speaker 1: or affect feelings of anxiety and pain and trauma. Actual
Speaker 1: professionals who use hypnosis will use it to like you,
Speaker 1: can there's some evidence that can be used to reduce
Speaker 1: chronic pain in certain ways. It can be reduced, it
Speaker 1: can be used to reduce the pain of childbirth. Hypnosis
Speaker 1: has been shown to have some efficacy at treating addiction
Speaker 1: and PTSD. I'm not gonna get into it. I don't
Speaker 1: understand hypnosis. Well, I don't think anyone really does. It
Speaker 1: seems like the kind of thing that there's still a
Speaker 1: lot of like debate about, but like it is a thing.
Speaker 1: It's on the same level something like meditation has absolutely
Speaker 1: measurable effects. No one would question that. But that's somewhere
Speaker 1: out there, there's somebody claiming that, you know, you're meditating,
Speaker 1: you're tapping into the energies of the universe or whatever,
Speaker 1: you're leaving your body, and you're not. It's just we
Speaker 1: don't understand a lot about how the brain works. But
Speaker 1: it's just that what he's talking about was like, well,
Speaker 1: if you could do the thing where you wave a
Speaker 1: watch in front of somebody and then now using a
Speaker 1: keyword later, you can make them your slave. The thing
Speaker 1: as it exists in the Manchurion, Canada or whatever. You know,
Speaker 1: all these movies, these throwers that were made in the
Speaker 1: wake of people believing hypnosis was real. That's the thing
Speaker 1: that doesn't exist in terms of using this way to
Speaker 1: like recover memories, that kind of thing, you know, putting
Speaker 1: the brain into a relaxed, susceptible state. There's all sorts
Speaker 1: of ways to do that. Um. But yeah, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: so Alan Dullis, you know again, as hypnosis is a thing,
Speaker 1: but Alan Dullis is mostly interested in using it to
Speaker 1: take over people's brains and get information out of them.
Speaker 1: And potentially the thing that he's most excited about, and
Speaker 1: the thing that everyone of the CIA is kind of
Speaker 1: most excited about, is the potential to turn people into
Speaker 1: sleeper agents who can be sent back home to carry
Speaker 1: out attacks, right, Like that's the the Manchurian candidate thing.
Speaker 1: That's what the CIA actually wants to do, and they
Speaker 1: do believe that this is possible. Um. Gottlieb is certain
Speaker 1: of it. Um. And Gottlieb tells uh Dullus that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, hypnosis can work, and particularly if we mix
Speaker 1: hypnosis with these different hallucinogenic drugs people have started testing.
Speaker 1: Have you heard of LSD? You know, That's kind of
Speaker 1: how the conversation goes although they actually do. They start
Speaker 1: with marijuana. Um. And this is because marijuana was something
Speaker 1: the OSS had tested pretty heavily on themselves back during
Speaker 1: World War Two. Uh. They mixed it into very US
Speaker 1: foods and they've smoked it to try to prove that
Speaker 1: it had potential is a truth drug. Um. This did
Speaker 1: not work, as anyone who's ever had the light of
Speaker 1: the cops while stoned as hell could tell you. Um.
Speaker 1: Next the OS or next the CIA used so that
Speaker 1: under Gottlieb, they do try some marijuana experiments, it does
Speaker 1: not prove effective. They move on to cocaine. Next, Gottlieb
Speaker 1: used CIA cutouts to sponsor medical experiments in which mental
Speaker 1: patients are injected with cocaine. So they are going into
Speaker 1: people who are institutionalized with like schizophrenia, and they are
Speaker 1: injecting them with cocaine to see if it will make
Speaker 1: people want to talk. Now, Jason, you've never done cocaine, right, No,
Speaker 1: But I have been around somebody who was on it
Speaker 1: and they actually did talk quieter they do it does
Speaker 1: it does work? For that? I will say that for cocaine,
Speaker 1: it does make you want to talk now. And also
Speaker 1: if you need to write a Hollywood screenplay and like
Speaker 1: one one hundred hour long writing session. Nothing really beats
Speaker 1: cocaine for that. Apparently, as my my namesake, the other
Speaker 1: Robert Evans could have told you if his heart hadn't
Speaker 1: exploded from seventy years of shooting cocaine straight into his lungs. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, I think you may also note that
Speaker 1: while cocaine does want to make people want to talk,
Speaker 1: it doesn't make them reliably tell the truth. You can
Speaker 1: actually lie really well while on a shipload of cocaine. UM. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: nightclubs probably wouldn't exist in the same form. UM. So
Speaker 1: cocaine not a great truth drug. After this comes heroin, UM,
Speaker 1: which if you were going to me and saying which
Speaker 1: drug is least likely to be an effective truth serum,
Speaker 1: I would probably say heroin. Stephen Kinzer writes that quote.
Speaker 1: Surviving CIA memos note that heroin was frequently used by
Speaker 1: police and intelligence officers, and that it and other addictive
Speaker 1: substances can be useful in reverse because of the stress
Speaker 1: as they produce when they're withdrawn from those who are
Speaker 1: addicted to their use. So, in other words, cops, when
Speaker 1: the CIA is like, hey, you know, let's let's reach
Speaker 1: out to some cops. We know some narcotics guys. Let's
Speaker 1: reach out to like the FBI. Uh. See what they
Speaker 1: say about using heroin as a truth drug. All these
Speaker 1: field agents are like, well, heroin is like great, uh,
Speaker 1: and a bunch of like a bunch of the people
Speaker 1: talk to them are CI agents who are like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can use it as a truth drug for people.
Speaker 1: But like, the way it works is you get them
Speaker 1: addicted to heroin and then they'll do whatever you tell them,
Speaker 1: right like, and then you take it away of yeah,
Speaker 1: withdrawal the promise of getting heroin, they will do whatever
Speaker 1: you ask. But again, as with all interrogation techniques, nothing
Speaker 1: stopping them from just lying to you exactly, and that
Speaker 1: continues to be the problem. Um. One thing I did
Speaker 1: find interesting is that like a lot of their early
Speaker 1: info on heroin comes from narcotics agents and CIA field
Speaker 1: agents who are like, the only reason I haven't killed
Speaker 1: myself from doing this job is that I use heroin. Like,
Speaker 1: those are a lot of their early sources, which tells
Speaker 1: you a lot about these agencies. Um. There's like a
Speaker 1: couple of very funny moments here. My favorite is that
Speaker 1: at one point using like working. As part of this program,
Speaker 1: the Navy sponsors a study where they pay college students
Speaker 1: to take heroin to see if it works as a
Speaker 1: truth drug. Um it does not. Uh So the next
Speaker 1: thing they try is mescal, And the Nazi doctors the
Speaker 1: CIA had hired to help them with their torturing people
Speaker 1: at black sites had all given mescal into prisoners at Dokao.
Speaker 1: And so when they bring these guys in, they tell
Speaker 1: the CIA, Hey, mescalin seems like it might work as
Speaker 1: a truth s here. Maybe you should try that next.
Speaker 1: But of course mescalin does not work that way. No
Speaker 1: drug works that way. I have lied to cops on
Speaker 1: a number of hallucinogens. None of them seem to function
Speaker 1: as a truth serum and my experience. But the assumptions
Speaker 1: they're making here about how the mind works, that's the
Speaker 1: thing is it's almost to imply that when somebody is
Speaker 1: intoxicated that they're becoming more honest. I don't I think
Speaker 1: that's true in almost any way. Like you lawre somebody's inhibitions,
Speaker 1: they may be just as likely to say the most
Speaker 1: outrageous thing they can think of. Like I I don't
Speaker 1: think that being incredibly drunk revealed like Nel Gibson's perfect
Speaker 1: true feelings. I think it made him more racist than
Speaker 1: what he probably is in everyday life, because it just
Speaker 1: unleashed his ability to just say the worst possible thing
Speaker 1: that popped into his into his head. Yeah, And it's
Speaker 1: also like I think the thing that and I think
Speaker 1: they are starting to recognize that at this point because
Speaker 1: the early they keep having these experiments and like they
Speaker 1: never find their truth drug, but they do find. Like
Speaker 1: one thing that is true is that people who are
Speaker 1: really fucked up are easier to manipulate, you know, like
Speaker 1: a drunk person. If you're sober, maybe you'll be it'll
Speaker 1: be easy for you to get them to do something
Speaker 1: that you want them to do, right. And the same
Speaker 1: thing is true within limits to people who are on
Speaker 1: other substances. People are a little bit easier to like
Speaker 1: convince to do things sometimes in certain ways. If those
Speaker 1: things aren't you can't, like somebody's tripping on acid, You're
Speaker 1: probably not going to convince them to commit murder. But
Speaker 1: if they are the kind of person who is inclined
Speaker 1: to like strip naked and one through a party, it
Speaker 1: will be easier to convince than the strip naked and
Speaker 1: run through a party, right they are. It does make
Speaker 1: people suggestible in that way. So one thing that's happening
Speaker 1: in this period is the CIA is moving away from like,
Speaker 1: well maybe this maybe we'll we'll we'll back burner, the
Speaker 1: mind can or the truth serum, but we think this
Speaker 1: stuff will let us program people because it does seem
Speaker 1: to make them more susceptible, right, So that's kind of
Speaker 1: as they're sort of experimenting with this stuff. It's not
Speaker 1: just truth serum. They're also like, is this the drug
Speaker 1: that's gonna let us reprogram Soviet spies and like send
Speaker 1: them back as saboteurs because that is increasingly the thing
Speaker 1: that Dolus thinks is going to be possible. And they're
Speaker 1: they're thinking about like, well, let's try giving them cocaine
Speaker 1: and then we'll hypnotize them. Let's try giving them mescaline
Speaker 1: and then we'll hypno ties them. And obviously none of
Speaker 1: this works great, but they're getting at least enough that
Speaker 1: they're convinced they're just sort of like one drug away
Speaker 1: from making it work. Um. And by the way, that
Speaker 1: the funniest part to me, And it's funny again in
Speaker 1: the context that I mentioned earlier. It's darkly humorous is
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell. They now in two
Speaker 1: by far the most successful examples they have of like
Speaker 1: flipping people or turning people into double agents and all that.
Speaker 1: It's just by giving them a big old suitcase full
Speaker 1: of cash that works really well, and they finally, finally,
Speaker 1: after spending billions or however much money they spent on
Speaker 1: this stuff over the years, it's like, hey, we have
Speaker 1: found a way that can manipulate to make somebody turn
Speaker 1: against their own country, which is if you give them
Speaker 1: like a Lamborghini and a giant suitcase full of cold,
Speaker 1: hard cash, they're actually willing to flip on their own country,
Speaker 1: their friends, their their comrades. Yeah, yeah, people will do
Speaker 1: like I mean, you know, there's also still Heroin is
Speaker 1: actually still a big one. Like when the FBI was
Speaker 1: breaking up the green during the Green Scare, when the
Speaker 1: FBI was like breaking up environmental extremists like organizations, they
Speaker 1: would often target like individuals who they knew were like
Speaker 1: addicted to smack. Because you find somebody who's got that addiction,
Speaker 1: you take it away from them, it's a little easier
Speaker 1: to get them to roll on their friends, or you
Speaker 1: arrest them and you tell them like, hey, we've you've
Speaker 1: got this amount of stuff on you. We have you
Speaker 1: did the rights. It's a twenty five year sentence unless
Speaker 1: you help us out by rolling on your friend. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: all of these things can be used to control people's behavior,
Speaker 1: but none of it works. The two things that work
Speaker 1: best our prison time and money. Yeah, yeah, just threats
Speaker 1: and threats and money, the same thing that worked years ago.
Speaker 1: And the Soviets, by the way, never don't know this. Well,
Speaker 1: they're fucking around with the psychic research. They're just being like, well,
Speaker 1: we either bribe people or we hit them. This works great. Um,
Speaker 1: it's the CIA. It is convinced there's some much more
Speaker 1: esoteric way to do this. Ship. Uh So Gottlieb, as
Speaker 1: they kind of go through this rolodex of drugs and
Speaker 1: none of them work, starts to become convinced that the
Speaker 1: answer to his boss's prayers, to Dulus's prayers might be
Speaker 1: L S D. Because again he's read about this scientists,
Speaker 1: smart people. Especially again, Gottlieb's kind of a proto hippie.
Speaker 1: You know, the hippie movement hasn't exist yet, but he's
Speaker 1: one of the kinds of people who's going to feed
Speaker 1: into it um all of that, those kinds of those seekers,
Speaker 1: that people who are interested in mysticism and stuff. They're
Speaker 1: all starting to talk about hallucinogens, and they're all starting
Speaker 1: to talk about acid. So Gottlieb reaches out to Harold Abramson.
Speaker 1: Abramson is a doctor who had worked with the CIA
Speaker 1: on past mind control and poison experiments. He was also
Speaker 1: a seeker himself, and he'd taken LSD several times and
Speaker 1: given it out to colleagues on multiple occasions. Acting as
Speaker 1: one of the first modern trip sitters. Abramson gave Gottlieb
Speaker 1: l s D and the two hung out. Sidney wrote
Speaker 1: this about his first trip. I happen to experience an
Speaker 1: out of bodiness, a feeling as though I am in
Speaker 1: a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole
Speaker 1: body and it is shimmering, and I have a sense
Speaker 1: of well being and euphoria for most of the next
Speaker 1: hour or two hours, and then it gradually subsides. And
Speaker 1: I think he takes a pretty small dose, because LSD
Speaker 1: a normal dose to LSD if you're like taking a
Speaker 1: solid dose if you're actually tripping, it lasts like eight
Speaker 1: to sometimes twelve hours. You know, like some you can
Speaker 1: you can make it last longer if you take a
Speaker 1: very heavy dose. Longest I've ever tripped is maybe eighteen hours.
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. One reason why I've never experimented with the
Speaker 1: stuff is I absolutely would be the guy who just
Speaker 1: sits there, like my body is a sausage. I'm assigned
Speaker 1: a skin sausage. It's not an unpleasant thing necessarily to
Speaker 1: be a skin sausage. Um LS like LSD is whenever
Speaker 1: I recommend, like if people are curious about hallucinogen, silo
Speaker 1: cybin is by far like the easiest to start with
Speaker 1: because kind of no matter how much you take your
Speaker 1: top out at three or four hours, So it is
Speaker 1: the kind if you have a bad time, it's going
Speaker 1: to be over soon. LSD. If you take too much
Speaker 1: or have a bad time, it can be really unpleasant
Speaker 1: because it lasts a long time. So it's it's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing people shouldn't mess around with unless they've
Speaker 1: like built up to it. That that would be my opinion.
Speaker 1: I'm not telling you to commit illegal acts by taking drugs,
Speaker 1: but maybe I wouldn't start with LSD if if you're
Speaker 1: asking for my advice on this stuff. Um, But the
Speaker 1: other advice is to go to a very reliable source
Speaker 1: where you know how much you're getting. Yeah, because I
Speaker 1: think half the people I've ever talked to have taken
Speaker 1: acid have an experience for one time they took it,
Speaker 1: absolutely nothing happened. Yeah, It's like, well, yeah, because you
Speaker 1: just got it sold to you by a guy and
Speaker 1: he just gave you a piece of paper, like and
Speaker 1: and nowadays a lot another problem is that, like you
Speaker 1: don't usually know you're getting acid, there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: other research chemicals that work similarly that you can also
Speaker 1: that you could just dissolve in water and put on stuff,
Speaker 1: and they're easier to get that acid. Um, which is
Speaker 1: normally fine. A lot of people probably take something that's
Speaker 1: not acid, think it's acid and have a good time.
Speaker 1: But some of that stuff has more healthcare. LSD is
Speaker 1: fairly safe actually, unless you're taking nightmare doses of it,
Speaker 1: like it doesn't. I don't think it even has a
Speaker 1: recorded LD fifty. I'm sure. I'm sure they found enough
Speaker 1: to kill people, but like it's very difficult to have
Speaker 1: like an overdose in the way that is like like
Speaker 1: heroin or something. Um. But there are other research chemicals
Speaker 1: that you can die on that people sometimes just sell
Speaker 1: as acid because it's an illegal, unregulated market, right, which
Speaker 1: is as Jason said, you should always know your dealer
Speaker 1: if you want to start playing around with this stuff.
Speaker 1: There's organizations like Project Dance Safe that sell test kits
Speaker 1: for a number of different substances. If it's possible to
Speaker 1: test and know what you're taking, you always should. Um,
Speaker 1: they're not we're advising illegal acts. Yeah, there's sebredits that
Speaker 1: do nothing but discuss, like share information about this kind
Speaker 1: of thing, which, as much as we criticize Reddit and
Speaker 1: actually having a community like that um to warn you
Speaker 1: about what to lookout for things like that actually matters
Speaker 1: a lot. This has always been an argument for the
Speaker 1: legalization because then you can actually know precisely what you're getting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, Um, but that that is the argument I
Speaker 1: would make. But that's we're we're off the off the
Speaker 1: map below here. So LSD. Gottlieb has his first trip
Speaker 1: and he has a pretty good time with it. Um,
Speaker 1: he starts to get kind of obsessed with it. And
Speaker 1: this is a thing I can't prove this subjectively. I
Speaker 1: haven't even found this written any of the writing about Gottlieb.
Speaker 1: But like a thing that I have noticed in my
Speaker 1: own life as a guy who hangs out and does
Speaker 1: drugs is some people just kind of get obsessed with LSD.
Speaker 1: It is a particular thing to LSD. It had you noticed,
Speaker 1: like Albert Hoffman, right, for whatever reason, before he even
Speaker 1: takes it, he they synthesize this thing and for five
Speaker 1: years he can't get it out of his head until
Speaker 1: he actually tries it. Right. There's just kind of something
Speaker 1: that certain people find really fascinating about this substance. And
Speaker 1: I think as much is everything else. The fact that
Speaker 1: Gottlieb just kind of gets obsessed with acid is a
Speaker 1: big part of why it becomes the drug of m
Speaker 1: K ultra right, because it doesn't work any better than
Speaker 1: these other drugs. It does not, again spoilers, none of
Speaker 1: this creates a perfect mind control drug. Um. Probably we'll
Speaker 1: get to that a bit later. Um, but it is
Speaker 1: It's a thing I've seen happen to more people. And
Speaker 1: this is not usually a bad thing. People just like
Speaker 1: take a lot of acid that can be fine. Um,
Speaker 1: and chemists and neuroscientists are especially likely to find themselves
Speaker 1: fascinated by LSD. You will, this is about to happen
Speaker 1: to a whole generation of very smart people, Folks like
Speaker 1: Kinksey Um, Folks like uh oh, Jesus, Timothy Leary. Goddamn um,
Speaker 1: I can't believe I forgot Timothy Leary's name. Uh. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have this like generation of like all And and
Speaker 1: Leary and uh And and Kinks and whatnot. They're all
Speaker 1: kind of in a lot of ways similar people to Gottlieb.
Speaker 1: They have these similar opinions. Unlike these this grarian back
Speaker 1: to you know, nature sort of stuff. They they're they're
Speaker 1: these they're fascinated by Eastern mysticism and spiritualism. Like the
Speaker 1: degree to which the CIA's head poison guy is kind
Speaker 1: of a hippie is very important to this story. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: at no point did Gottlieb have any hard evidence that
Speaker 1: LSD would make a better truth serum or mind control
Speaker 1: drug than any other narcotic he tested. But he starts
Speaker 1: to become convinced that it holds the secret to all
Speaker 1: of the things he's trying to accomplish for Alan Dullis,
Speaker 1: and so he's going to spend the next ten years
Speaker 1: dosing possibly tens of thousands of people to try and
Speaker 1: improve that. First, he starts by dosing other CIA agents
Speaker 1: and some scientists working in adjacent government spook projects because
Speaker 1: they're testing initially, they're trying to use this as a weapon, right,
Speaker 1: They're still trying to see, like, can this be used
Speaker 1: to like take over somebody's mind. Can this be used
Speaker 1: to at least, like, you know, disable a spy. A
Speaker 1: lot of these guys agree to be dosed by surprise,
Speaker 1: so this is consensual, right, There's nothing wrong with saying, yes,
Speaker 1: you can sneak LSD into my food at a random
Speaker 1: point in time, because we want to see what happens
Speaker 1: when you're surprised by LSD in the middle of like
Speaker 1: a workday. Because nobody has done that, right, they have
Speaker 1: not started like horribly doing things with this yet, but
Speaker 1: you can see kind of where stuff's about to go.
Speaker 1: Because the very next group of people they start to
Speaker 1: drug is army trainees, and these people are have agreed
Speaker 1: to be in studies for the army. They don't know
Speaker 1: that they're going to be dosed with LSD, so they're
Speaker 1: just kind of like drugging eighteen year old boys with
Speaker 1: this mystery substance that nobody's really tested. Um, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people have very terrible experiences, which probably shouldn't
Speaker 1: surprise you. Um, it does seem like a lot of
Speaker 1: these Army guys have great times too, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the CIA guys have a lot of this. Like
Speaker 1: is they're partying right, Like they're not just dosing each
Speaker 1: other and taking diligent notes. They're like having a good time. Um,
Speaker 1: and you know the government's paying for it. In these
Speaker 1: early days, Gottlieben, his fellow Bluebird Artichoke researchers, dosed themselves
Speaker 1: more often than they do to anyone else. They'd carry
Speaker 1: out fake interrogations and try to convince each other to
Speaker 1: give up secrets that they promised before taking drugs not
Speaker 1: to tell um. And they were able to get each
Speaker 1: other and army officers to reveal like secrets. But this
Speaker 1: is like this is not a real test, right, Like
Speaker 1: they're agreeing ahead of time, what's the secret? You're not
Speaker 1: going to give up? Okay, Now we're gonna drug you
Speaker 1: and we'll see if we can get you to give
Speaker 1: up the secret. Jason, can you think of any reason
Speaker 1: why that might not be replicable to actually trying to
Speaker 1: get information out of somebody. Really hard to overstate the
Speaker 1: role of consent in this whole thing. Yes, and they're
Speaker 1: playing a game which even at that, at that early stage,
Speaker 1: they should have. It feels like basic logic should have
Speaker 1: played a role in this. But yeah, I mean, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is all very flawed and everything they're going
Speaker 1: to do is deeply flawed research at like the conceptual
Speaker 1: level in ways that I don't part of it's probably
Speaker 1: just that the concept of hallucinogens um, particular, particularly like
Speaker 1: artificially created hallucinogens, you know, because LSD does not just
Speaker 1: randomly occur in the way that like mushrooms do, is
Speaker 1: much newer than so I think some of it's just
Speaker 1: that people don't understand this stuff as well. But it
Speaker 1: does really seem like they're making basic failures of logic
Speaker 1: here um. But there are some reasons I have to say,
Speaker 1: there are some reasons why you can see people at
Speaker 1: this time would have thought LSD could be a really
Speaker 1: good weapon for like spy ship um acid is colorless
Speaker 1: and odorless. You can put it in basically any liquid
Speaker 1: or other kind of substance, and people can't there's no
Speaker 1: way to tell that you have asset on you. Um,
Speaker 1: so you can transport significant quantities of it without being
Speaker 1: detected in a pretty much infinite number of ways. It's
Speaker 1: once you are able to make it, it's pretty much
Speaker 1: free on a per dose basis, and very small amounts
Speaker 1: of asset have gigantic effects. So there's good reasons why
Speaker 1: the substance is like, well, yeah, if you could make
Speaker 1: this work for us, this would be a great thing.
Speaker 1: We can very easily sneak this on spies and get
Speaker 1: them into anywhere. Okay, But I think I want to
Speaker 1: ask the question that I think a lot of the
Speaker 1: listeners are asking, which is like today, when we hear
Speaker 1: about the experiments done with the stuff, it's experiments on
Speaker 1: like trying to cure people with PTSD, trying to cure depression,
Speaker 1: trying to like if it affects the brain that much,
Speaker 1: if people claim to have had almost a holy experience
Speaker 1: on it, that's like, well could it? You know, it
Speaker 1: feels like it shouldn't have just been the CIA dealing
Speaker 1: with this. It feels like you should have had whatever
Speaker 1: the giant pharmaceutical companies were at the time experimenting with
Speaker 1: it as a therapy, saying, what could this be the
Speaker 1: drug that will make housewives okay with they with staying
Speaker 1: at home and doing nothing but laundry all day. Do
Speaker 1: you see what I'm saying? Was that going on or
Speaker 1: was it just the CIA that was doing that was
Speaker 1: working with this stuff. We're actually going to talk about
Speaker 1: that in a little bit. Yes, this is going on
Speaker 1: to an extent, but it's very limited at this point
Speaker 1: in time. The only people in the world who can
Speaker 1: make LSD are Sandals laboratories, right, they have figured it
Speaker 1: out and they're not sharing the recipe, so they are
Speaker 1: the only source of LSD. They're only making a limited amount,
Speaker 1: and the CIA buys basically all of it. They do
Speaker 1: send a bunch out for research. There are other organizations
Speaker 1: researching this. There's actually in the Soviet Union and all
Speaker 1: over the world there's actual studies therapeutic studies on LSD
Speaker 1: in this period. But the majority of the drug by weight,
Speaker 1: goes to the c I. A okay, yeah, they that's
Speaker 1: that tells you a lot about the state of the
Speaker 1: world at the time that they priorities or whatever, because
Speaker 1: you have everything they think they know about this. It's
Speaker 1: not just oh, this would make a good weapon, Like
Speaker 1: on the list of things you could do with it
Speaker 1: to change the world, that's not even in the top
Speaker 1: one hundred, Like when you're talking about, oh, this totally alters,
Speaker 1: you know, the way people behave, the way they can
Speaker 1: be influenced, the way they think that, you know, like
Speaker 1: we're everybody who takes it becomes obsessed with it. And
Speaker 1: it's like you would think just the pure capitalism of
Speaker 1: the country would come into places like, oh, this is
Speaker 1: we could make a bunch of money. It's cheap to make,
Speaker 1: people will pay a lot of money for it. The
Speaker 1: fact that it's there, I guess it's just a limit
Speaker 1: of the imagination. When you're in like a war footing,
Speaker 1: it's like, no, this could you could get your theory
Speaker 1: like they have these convoluted, almost cartoonish ideas of like, well,
Speaker 1: in theory, if you could inject a spy with it,
Speaker 1: you could make him do this if we also, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's just this. It's it's because like number one, the
Speaker 1: sand DAWs is I think kind of they're looking for
Speaker 1: any kind of use that will make this profitable, right,
Speaker 1: and so the first group that has that puts a
Speaker 1: lot of money down for acid is the c I A.
Speaker 1: So that has an impact from the beginning, like who
Speaker 1: else gets it and how much of it is available?
Speaker 1: And I just don't think. I don't think guys like
Speaker 1: Gottlieb when they hear stuff like because there is early
Speaker 1: research on LSD and alcoholism, and when they hear stuff
Speaker 1: like we can treat alcoholism with LSD, all these guys
Speaker 1: because they are, as you said, they're so focused on
Speaker 1: this war. All they hear is that just that means
Speaker 1: that you can change people with this. You can change there.
Speaker 1: You can alter a person's mindset, you can like control
Speaker 1: their mind. If you can get them to stop being
Speaker 1: an alcoholic, maybe you can stop them from being a communist,
Speaker 1: you know, Like that's that's straight where they go. And
Speaker 1: they have the ability to effectively buy up the world's
Speaker 1: supply of acid, which they do in this period. In fact,
Speaker 1: all of the LSD that gets out in the early
Speaker 1: eras of the hippie movement, and like is the is
Speaker 1: the acid that like fucking dudes like Hunter Thompson and
Speaker 1: the Beatles are taking right that ship all comes from
Speaker 1: the CIA. Oh, I had no idea but it makes sense.
Speaker 1: I mean that's you know, and not all just as
Speaker 1: part as MK ultra. Because guys like Abramson, who gives
Speaker 1: Gottlieba's first dose, he's working with the CIA as a contractor.
Speaker 1: He's also just a guy who's interested in this and
Speaker 1: does it with his friends. And his friends include a
Speaker 1: lot of these like influential intellectuals who are going to
Speaker 1: be big leaders in the sixties. Um. And so they
Speaker 1: all start taking LSD that he gets from the CIA. Together.
Speaker 1: That's like how acid gets out. It's through the agency, um,
Speaker 1: not always in controlled ways, not always as parts of studies.
Speaker 1: But we're building to that. But you know what else
Speaker 1: we're building towards Jason an ad break an ad break, Jason,
Speaker 1: have you ever heard of Blue Apron No. I it's
Speaker 1: weird because I listened to like four hours of podcast today,
Speaker 1: but I've never it's never come up. Well, that's a
Speaker 1: it's a company that makes food boxes, and we used
Speaker 1: to have a running joke here behind the Bastards about
Speaker 1: how they also had an island where people could hunt
Speaker 1: children for sport. And I thought, Jason, I thought that
Speaker 1: was a joke that everyone would recognize as a joke.
Speaker 1: But it turns out a lot of people messaged us
Speaker 1: distraught thinking that there was a real child hunting island. Um,
Speaker 1: so now we're warning people and a couple of different
Speaker 1: episodes of the show there's no child hunting island. It's fine.
Speaker 1: That was a joke. We're not going to make the
Speaker 1: joke anymore. Please please stop being worried that Blue Apron
Speaker 1: has an island where people hunt children for sport. They don't. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's ads possibly including Blue Apron. Ah, we're back, um,
Speaker 1: and we're talking about Sydney, Gottlieb and the CIA. So
Speaker 1: the other reason that Gottlieb is able to kind of
Speaker 1: get the agency to focus on LST there's you know,
Speaker 1: it makes sense, there's reasons why it might be a
Speaker 1: good weapon. Um. But he's able to bring up a
Speaker 1: bunch of Russian scientific journals, which in the early fifties
Speaker 1: start to file the first Soviet Union report on the
Speaker 1: discovery of LSD. Obviously LSD has existed for a while.
Speaker 1: Information does not travel as fast in these days, so
Speaker 1: the Soviets kind of start, you start and this is
Speaker 1: not there's actually nothing sinister here. It's just academics in
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union, who are like, and now there's this
Speaker 1: this thing called acid, and we're getting small amounts of
Speaker 1: it from Sandas and we're testing it in these ways. Um.
Speaker 1: This causes dolus Is analysts to claim that the l
Speaker 1: the U S s R is stockpiling argot as a
Speaker 1: raw material. Um. Now their own assessments admit there's no
Speaker 1: evidence that this is happening. And in fact, here's exactly
Speaker 1: what dollus Is analysts right. Quote. Although no Soviet data
Speaker 1: are available in LSDI, it must be assumed that the
Speaker 1: scientists of the U. S. S are are thoroughly cognizant
Speaker 1: of the strategic importance of this powerful new drug and
Speaker 1: are capable of producing it at any time. That's must
Speaker 1: be assumed that we have to be a key phrase
Speaker 1: that I think is going to get used, that's gonna
Speaker 1: get used a lot. Yeah, that like, yeah, we just
Speaker 1: have to assume that not only do they think the
Speaker 1: same thing about this is us, which is that it
Speaker 1: should be used to destroy people's minds, but they're already
Speaker 1: mass producing it. Obviously they are not. Uh, it is
Speaker 1: hard to make acid. No one knows how to other
Speaker 1: than sand DAWs. Yet and the Soviet Union as far
Speaker 1: as all evidence suggests, the Soviet Union has no capacity
Speaker 1: for manufacturing LSD at this point. Um, it's going to
Speaker 1: take years before a US company with c I A
Speaker 1: help will crack the recipe. Um. But yeah, it is
Speaker 1: worth noting that kind of about it. This is actually
Speaker 1: there's not even l s D as far as we
Speaker 1: can tell in the Soviet Union in this period in
Speaker 1: the early fifties. I think the first evidence that we
Speaker 1: have of acid in the Soviet Union starts in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen sixties when Communist Bulgaria starts carrying out a
Speaker 1: series of LSD experiments, this from sixty two to sixty eight,
Speaker 1: and it's again to kind of as evidence that there's
Speaker 1: not really capacity to make this in the Iron Curtain.
Speaker 1: When Bulgaria starts experimenting with acid, they buy it all
Speaker 1: from sand DAWs Sandas Library sends it to them. Um,
Speaker 1: sand DAWs is selling LSD under the generic name to
Speaker 1: Delhi sid Um and they spend about three million dollars
Speaker 1: giving their new hallucinogen to universities and mental hospitals in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen sixties. So again that's well after the
Speaker 1: period we're up to in the actual and k Ultra story.
Speaker 1: You know, this is all being fucked with by the
Speaker 1: CIA before pretty much anyone is able to study it.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from a write up in Atlas
Speaker 1: Obscurity here. Among the human guinea pigs were doctors, artists, miners,
Speaker 1: truck drivers, and even prisoners and mentally ill patients. These
Speaker 1: research subjects were involved in some hundred and forty trials.
Speaker 1: Their aim for these experiments with LSD was to allow
Speaker 1: scientists to understand psychotic disorders like schizophrenia better by using
Speaker 1: the drug to mimic the effects of a naturally occurring psychosis.
Speaker 1: There were some similarities between drug induced psychosis and natural ones,
Speaker 1: but it was easier to do a controlled study when
Speaker 1: causing psychosis through drugs. So in Czechoslovakia, which is also
Speaker 1: a communist state at this period, LSD is per fickly
Speaker 1: illegal and available over the counter. This is like most
Speaker 1: of the nineteen sixties. If you're living in the Czech
Speaker 1: repoor in Czechoslovakia, you can walk down to like the
Speaker 1: pharmacy and you can just buy some acid. I have
Speaker 1: to ask when did it become illegal in the United States?
Speaker 1: Because it was a brand new substance banned immediately. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's it's legal for most of the period,
Speaker 1: like the hippie period. Um, that's why I thought, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is not banned in the United States until nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight. Um. Yeah, largely as the result of like
Speaker 1: some of the stuff that you know, a bunch of
Speaker 1: you know, that's a story for another day. Um, But
Speaker 1: for most of the nineteen sixties and Czechoslovakia, you know,
Speaker 1: the Bulgarians are doing acid studies with LSD they've bought
Speaker 1: from Sandaz. Czechoslovakia is getting acid from Sandas too, And
Speaker 1: rather than it being like a thing that like is
Speaker 1: being secretly used on people behind like the scenes, people
Speaker 1: are just buying acid from pharmacies in like communist Czechoslovakia.
Speaker 1: Doctors at psychiatric hospitals are taking acid so that they
Speaker 1: can understand what it's like to be schizophrenic. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know how well that actually prepares you to
Speaker 1: treat somebody, but that's how they're using it, right, Like
Speaker 1: it's like we've got all these people who are hearing voices,
Speaker 1: Let's take this drug so that maybe we can understand
Speaker 1: them better. Um. Eventually, a Check pharmaceutical company cracks the
Speaker 1: recipe and millions of doses are produced and given out
Speaker 1: for free across the country. Um Numerous scientists, including Stanislav Groff,
Speaker 1: took LSD and had experiences in this time that impacted
Speaker 1: their future work. Artists dosed themselves to great effect, as
Speaker 1: this piece from an article in PRIs Kros, which is
Speaker 1: a Check news site, makes clear. Among them were well
Speaker 1: known painters such as Evo Medic and Jerry Enderley, as
Speaker 1: well as young intellectual singers and students. According to an
Speaker 1: unverified account, one of them was the current CHECK president
Speaker 1: Milo Simon. A number of years later, Carol Got reluctantly
Speaker 1: admitted that he just once took LSD in the presence
Speaker 1: of doctors. I returned to my earliest childhood memories buried
Speaker 1: deep within my subconsciousness. Many participants of the psychedelic sessions,
Speaker 1: especially artists, recalled their explorations of LSD is unique even
Speaker 1: formative experience. However, others experienced so called bad trips. Suicide
Speaker 1: soon followed, and several main centers, especially the psychiatric hospital
Speaker 1: in Satska near Prague, research was carried out on a
Speaker 1: mass scale. According to unconfirmed reports, one of the provincial
Speaker 1: hospitals carried out tests on children as young as three
Speaker 1: years old who were experiencing mental health issues. In another hospital,
Speaker 1: experiments were supposedly carried out on prisoners. So everybody does
Speaker 1: fucked up ship with this. Every state does when they
Speaker 1: get access to it. Um although they're not trying to
Speaker 1: write like the checks, aren't trying to create a mind
Speaker 1: control drug. They're just like, maybe this will cure kids
Speaker 1: with illnesses we don't understand. Let's give it to that
Speaker 1: three year old, which isn't good behavior, but it's not
Speaker 1: like malicious, right, it's there's a little here responsible. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's a level of ignorance around the substance. But
Speaker 1: the way you the way you become knowledgeable is not well,
Speaker 1: let's see what happens to mentally all three year olds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's certainly not ideal. Yeah, and then we'll know and
Speaker 1: then be ignorant anymore. After all, how else are we
Speaker 1: going to find out? Yeah? We we who knows what else?
Speaker 1: Like I don't know, and they are like, I'd be
Speaker 1: really interested. This is an area where I don't know
Speaker 1: as much. I'd be really interested in, Like what they
Speaker 1: actually found in terms of how this impacted doctors treating patients. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I don't have great context on that, but
Speaker 1: this is a thing that's going on in this period.
Speaker 1: It does eventually, the check security services they're kind of
Speaker 1: KGB or c I a equivalent, start to do some
Speaker 1: early research on whether or not they could weaponize LSD.
Speaker 1: And again this is like a decade after they do
Speaker 1: US in the United States, so they're like, well behind
Speaker 1: the curve here. Um, they do some early kind of experiments,
Speaker 1: there's no record of anything serious. Um, the primary interest,
Speaker 1: like the State Security Service, gets into this and they
Speaker 1: kind of say, oh, maybe we can weaponize this. But
Speaker 1: the thing they actually start doing is using it to
Speaker 1: make a shipload of money because they kind of always
Speaker 1: have a cash flow problem. This is true of all
Speaker 1: of the communist security services, and they recognize that like,
Speaker 1: oh shit, Americans will Europeans will pay a funkload for
Speaker 1: LSD just to party. And so for nearly a decade,
Speaker 1: a huge amount of the LSD and like the early
Speaker 1: like right before it gets banned and right after it
Speaker 1: gets banned, a lot of the LSD that gets into
Speaker 1: Western Europe and the United States and kind of the
Speaker 1: late nineteen sixties, including the famous Summers of sixty eight
Speaker 1: and sixty nine. Comes from the Check Intelligence Services, and
Speaker 1: they're smuggling acid to the West, not to destroy capitalism,
Speaker 1: but because they they want they need money. It's very
Speaker 1: profitable to sell drugs, it turns out. So that's kind
Speaker 1: of a fun story. Um, that's all more than a
Speaker 1: decade in the future from the CIA stuff. But the
Speaker 1: point is there's never as far as I found, there's
Speaker 1: not ever any real Soviet LSD mind control experiments, And
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen fifties, there's no evidence that any
Speaker 1: communist country even saw the drug as having that kind
Speaker 1: of potential. They didn't have a lot of access to it,
Speaker 1: so it would have been hard for them too. After
Speaker 1: a few months of benign experimentation on his friends and colleagues,
Speaker 1: Gottlieb leaves the United States to test LSD on human
Speaker 1: prisoners for the first time. One study later reported quote
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty one, a team of CIA scientists led
Speaker 1: by Dr Gottlieb flew to Tokyo, Japanese suspected of working
Speaker 1: with the Russians were secretly brought to a location where
Speaker 1: the CIA doctors injected them with a variety of depressants
Speaker 1: and stimulants. Under relentless questioning, they confessed to working for
Speaker 1: the Russians. They were taken out into Tokyo Bay, shot
Speaker 1: and dumped overboard. The CIA team flew to Soul in
Speaker 1: South Korea and repeated the experiment on twenty five North
Speaker 1: Korean prisoners of war or They were asked to announce communism.
Speaker 1: They refused and were executed. In nineteen fifty two, Don'tus
Speaker 1: brought Dr Gottlieb in his team to post war Munich
Speaker 1: in southern Germany. They set up a base in a
Speaker 1: safe house. Throughout the winter of nineteen fifty two to
Speaker 1: fifty three, scores of expendables were brought to the safe house.
Speaker 1: They were given massive amounts of drugs, some of which
Speaker 1: Frank Olsen had prepared back at Detric which is where
Speaker 1: they're the camp where they're doing this, to see if
Speaker 1: their minds could be altered. They were given electro convulsive shocks.
Speaker 1: Each experiment failed, the expendables were killed and their bodies burned.
Speaker 1: And even what you're describing there, whenever they what are
Speaker 1: effects they got, it seems like it's just plain old
Speaker 1: subjecting them to extreme discomfort, using the stimulants and the
Speaker 1: presents or whatever to like get their body racing and
Speaker 1: then slowing it down. Like that's just that's just putting
Speaker 1: them through pain. Yes, you can just hit them with
Speaker 1: a stick and do the same thing, like like all
Speaker 1: of their sophisticated talk of a wow, the magic of
Speaker 1: the human mind and mind control he or it still
Speaker 1: seems like it just comes back down to regular brutality
Speaker 1: and then the people still not cooperating, then you just
Speaker 1: shoot them. That's what's so interesting to be Jason, because
Speaker 1: they all all they're doing is using LSD to torture
Speaker 1: people in the way that like the Soviets just hit
Speaker 1: them with sticks until they do what they want. Right.
Speaker 1: But I think what's happening is Gottlieb he keeps he's
Speaker 1: taking acid. He's tripping constantly throughout this period. I think
Speaker 1: he's having really powerful, like spiritual and emotional experiences on it,
Speaker 1: and so he's convinced that like there's something more going
Speaker 1: on with this particular substance, and thus there must be
Speaker 1: a way to like turn it into a tool for
Speaker 1: this purpose. And one of the things I find most
Speaker 1: interesting about him is he's having. He's this educated man,
Speaker 1: he's this thoughtful guy who studies religion and spirituality, and
Speaker 1: he that he's having like experimenting on expanding his consciousness
Speaker 1: with hallucinogens, and then when he actually uses them on people,
Speaker 1: it's the same way you'd use like a fucking razor
Speaker 1: blade on a person you have tied up or whatever.
Speaker 1: Like there's not he's not being subtled. There's no like
Speaker 1: artifice to it. It's just cruelty. And it seems like
Speaker 1: they were so eager to get some kind of a
Speaker 1: result that they're just the way you describe. It's like
Speaker 1: there was no art to what they were doing. It's
Speaker 1: just the same old I don't know, it's like this
Speaker 1: is a part of what I found interesting about this,
Speaker 1: I said in the first episode is separating the reality
Speaker 1: from like the conspiracy stuff, because the conspiracy stuff always
Speaker 1: the differences between what they thought this could do and
Speaker 1: what it actually did. That's the difference between the conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: And because in the world of conspiracy Manchurian candidates absolutely exist,
Speaker 1: whereas the reality as they wanted that, there's no doubt
Speaker 1: they wanted that outcome. It just they couldn't do it,
Speaker 1: and the actual reality on the ground is so much
Speaker 1: more disorganized and stupid and just thuggish than what than
Speaker 1: the the supervillains you imagine. It's almost like you imagine
Speaker 1: a more sophisticated type of when in reality, like a
Speaker 1: lot of it is just bureaucrats trying to get more
Speaker 1: funding to their thing. Um, I don't die. I do
Speaker 1: not doubt that some of the people at this point
Speaker 1: knew it didn't work or had lost faith in it.
Speaker 1: But it's like, well, this is where all the funding
Speaker 1: is going, and you've got to put food on the table,
Speaker 1: and I don't care about the people were killing, so like, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's keep doing it. And yeah, so these experiments got
Speaker 1: leave travels around Europe and Asia to just we don't
Speaker 1: know how many black sites. We don't know how many
Speaker 1: people he doses with LSD and then killed certainly hundreds,
Speaker 1: um potentially over the lifetime of the c I A
Speaker 1: LSD experiments significantly more than that. But we really have
Speaker 1: no idea. We do know that so many people were
Speaker 1: being killed at these sites that it created a body
Speaker 1: disposal problem, even at the black sites that had been
Speaker 1: built as death camps. Stephen Kinzer quotes from an American
Speaker 1: translator at one of these places, camp King, which I
Speaker 1: believe is in Germany. Um. And she writes this home
Speaker 1: in a letter in nineteen fifty two, arrived back in
Speaker 1: Frankfurt from Paris son morning and time to spend all
Speaker 1: day at the Oberseel swimming pool, acquiring a nice tan.
Speaker 1: They dragged a dead man out of the pool at
Speaker 1: tin Am, like this is the pool that they have
Speaker 1: at like the facility, and there's like, yeah, the corpses
Speaker 1: are just kind of like showing up places, um, because
Speaker 1: they're they're just creating so many of them. Gottlieb seems
Speaker 1: to have I don't know, I don't I don't really,
Speaker 1: he's a fascinating character. I don't really have a great
Speaker 1: concept of what's going on in his head because he's
Speaker 1: like every day after doing this, he goes home and
Speaker 1: he milks his goats and he hangs out with his
Speaker 1: wife and kids, and he's this kind of like kindly
Speaker 1: proto hippie nerd who's just very interested in psychedelics. Um. Well,
Speaker 1: this is the thing, because when you told his story
Speaker 1: in the last episode, like his early his upbringing, there's
Speaker 1: a key part of the story that is missing because
Speaker 1: we describe why, Well, he was young, he went off
Speaker 1: to school, he married a preacher's daughter, you know, he
Speaker 1: was kind of a hippie, you know. And then and
Speaker 1: then he was asked to be a part of this
Speaker 1: program because it's like, well, he's interested in these drugs
Speaker 1: and in these chemicals. And then immediately it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: well we we invited you him to go torture this
Speaker 1: guy that we were torturing with with and trying to
Speaker 1: use this It's like, well, and not, hold on, did
Speaker 1: did he have any kind of qualms about that? The
Speaker 1: transition from normal guy who's curious about these chemicals too,
Speaker 1: being at a black site and it's clear what's going on,
Speaker 1: Like the reality of it was certainly not hidden from him,
Speaker 1: and you are torturing another human being who it may
Speaker 1: not be guilty of anything really and it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: you did he object? Was he afraid? Did he? The way?
Speaker 1: So Stephen Kinzer, who writes Poisoner in Chief, which is
Speaker 1: about Gottlieb, is the guy who I think has done
Speaker 1: the most detailed work up on Sydney as a man.
Speaker 1: His angle on it, the way he kind of explains
Speaker 1: it is that Gottlieb is is a patriot. He is
Speaker 1: very sore about the fact that he missed out on
Speaker 1: participating in World War Two, and he has been convinced
Speaker 1: by Dullus and other people in the agency that this
Speaker 1: is a life or death struggle with the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: and that only the most like they have to try this.
Speaker 1: They have to find this out. This is the most
Speaker 1: critical weapon that could possibly exist, and if the Soviets
Speaker 1: have developed it, then it could be the end of
Speaker 1: the world. Right, they could destroy the entire country if
Speaker 1: they get people in the right positions. So we have
Speaker 1: to know how to That's that's what Kinser says. Now
Speaker 1: Kinser is working from information after the fact. He doesn't
Speaker 1: know Gotlieb. I don't to an extent. The man is unknowable, right,
Speaker 1: just like everybody. I don't actually know if I think
Speaker 1: that's what's going on. If I think maybe for all
Speaker 1: of his kindly exterior Gottlieb is like a fucking serial killer,
Speaker 1: because that there's I could see that when you look
Speaker 1: at some of the stuff this guy does, I could
Speaker 1: see there being an element of just sort of like
Speaker 1: joy and hurting people, and maybe we're just missing it.
Speaker 1: Because he didn't talk about it to people, right, And
Speaker 1: maybe Kinzer is trying to fill in a less frightening
Speaker 1: thing than just a man who likes to hurt people
Speaker 1: and gets a job at the CIA where he gets
Speaker 1: to do it. Kind of whatever is going on in
Speaker 1: his head what he's doing is often like serial killer ship.
Speaker 1: For an example, in late nineteen fifty two, Project Artichoke
Speaker 1: researchers decided to conduct a test into whether or not
Speaker 1: people with hepatitis are more vulnerable to lsd UM they are. Apparently,
Speaker 1: it's like a thing if you have hepatitis or have
Speaker 1: had it recently, acid will can have like potentially dangerously
Speaker 1: high effect on you. Um Gottlieb has his people. He
Speaker 1: sets up the CIA, has a deal with the American
Speaker 1: Hospital in Paris, and so he has agents waiting there
Speaker 1: as patients come in for like the right person to dose.
Speaker 1: This turns out to be Stanley Glickman. Now, Glickman is
Speaker 1: an American artist. He'd won prizes for his work and
Speaker 1: had gotten to go to a fancy art academy in Paris.
Speaker 1: So he's like a young man who was just getting
Speaker 1: started in the world. He's gifted, he's gotten this like
Speaker 1: incredible opportunity to study in Paris. Life is going good,
Speaker 1: and then this happens. I'm gonna quote next from Kinser's
Speaker 1: book quote. His studio was nearly select, but after a
Speaker 1: while he came to prefer another, cafe Le Dome, just
Speaker 1: across the Boulevard du Montparnesse. One evening in October nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty two, he was drinking coffee there when an acquaintance
Speaker 1: appeared and invited him over to lay Select. Reluctantly, he agreed.
Speaker 1: At lay Select, the two joined a group of Americans
Speaker 1: whose conservative dress set them apart from the rest of
Speaker 1: the crowd. Talk turned to politics and grew heated. Glickmant
Speaker 1: rose to leave, but one of the men insisted on
Speaker 1: buying him a last drink to show there were no
Speaker 1: hard feelings. Glickman said he'd have a glass of chartrouss
Speaker 1: an herbal liqueur. Rather than call the waiter. The man
Speaker 1: walked to the bar, ordered the chartrous himself, and carried
Speaker 1: it back to their table. He walked with a limp,
Speaker 1: Glickman later recalled the next few minutes were the last
Speaker 1: of Glickman's productive life. After taking a few SIPs from
Speaker 1: his drink. He began to feel what he later called
Speaker 1: a lengthening of distance and a distortion of perception. Soon
Speaker 1: he was hallucinating. Others at the table leaned in fascinated.
Speaker 1: One told Glickman he could perform miracles. Finally, overwhelmed by
Speaker 1: panic and fearing that he had been poisoned, he jumped
Speaker 1: up and fled. And for Glickman, the hallucinations don't stop right,
Speaker 1: he loses his mind. He goes running into the street.
Speaker 1: He's there for hours. He gets taken by an ambulance,
Speaker 1: eventually back to the American hospital who has this secret
Speaker 1: working relationship with the CIA. And at the American hospitals,
Speaker 1: he gets taken in hallucinating and freaking out. They dose
Speaker 1: him with sedatives. They electrocute him repeatedly, like they give
Speaker 1: him electroshock therapy dozens and dozens of times, and they
Speaker 1: dose him with more LSD. They discharge him eventually, but
Speaker 1: he never recovers like because he like at no point
Speaker 1: in his life does he recover. He eventually gets like
Speaker 1: taken back home and he spends the rest of his
Speaker 1: days like hiding alone in an apartment owned by his parents.
Speaker 1: He can only be social like with dogs. He can't
Speaker 1: really be around people ever. Again, he's in a seat,
Speaker 1: He's got a girlfriend, they're about to get married. He
Speaker 1: leaves her, and he never paints or read books or
Speaker 1: has reads books or has a romantic relationship. Again, like
Speaker 1: his mind is destroyed by this, Like he is ended
Speaker 1: as a human being, is effectively because of what gets
Speaker 1: done to him. And kind of based on the reports,
Speaker 1: it's probably Gottlieb who puts the fucking acid in his chartreuse.
Speaker 1: And the thing is, we're probably going to get into it,
Speaker 1: Like do they regard this as a result in their experiment,
Speaker 1: Like see, this is proof that you can Yeah, because
Speaker 1: all it proves is that if you do enough damage
Speaker 1: to somebody's brain, you can ruin their wife. Like again,
Speaker 1: if you if you people, yeah you bashed them in
Speaker 1: the head with a baseball bat, you can also prove
Speaker 1: this like oh yeah, this guy never worked another day
Speaker 1: in his life. But it works. It's like you haven't
Speaker 1: discovered anything. You've just discovered that if you treat someone horrible,
Speaker 1: you can you can permanently mess them up. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think the thing they take out of this is that like, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: people who have hepatitis are more vulnerable to LSD, but
Speaker 1: also like, well, but you also like in terms of
Speaker 1: like it being a bad study, well, you also like
Speaker 1: forced him into like a hospital room and electrocuted him
Speaker 1: and sedated him and gave him more acid, So you
Speaker 1: don't actually know how much of his reaction was due
Speaker 1: to the LSD and the hepatitis, how much of it
Speaker 1: was due to the electro shock, how much of it
Speaker 1: was due to the sedative. Like you've ruined your own
Speaker 1: experimental study by conducting it so shodily, Like just as
Speaker 1: if you're if you were a soulless monster who thinks
Speaker 1: it's okay to test this on people, and you care
Speaker 1: about the science deeply, you still wouldn't do it this way.
Speaker 1: Like maybe you'd kidnaped this guy and give him acid
Speaker 1: and see what would happen, but you wouldn't just start
Speaker 1: adding random shit. It's kind of similar to people that
Speaker 1: kind of have this really high idea of what the
Speaker 1: Nazi scientists accomplished because like, well they didn't have to
Speaker 1: worry about ethics to had all these these human subjects.
Speaker 1: How much of their science was just pure trash. It's yeah,
Speaker 1: their methods, everything about how their record results like you
Speaker 1: look at how sloppy this is in terms of getting
Speaker 1: any kind of a result. There's no control group, Like
Speaker 1: everything about it is these people just they're bad scientists,
Speaker 1: Like this is not the way you find out what
Speaker 1: they're trying to find out. And that's that's the degree
Speaker 1: in terms of like what's going on with Gottlieb. That's
Speaker 1: the part of me that's like maybe he is just
Speaker 1: kind of like a serial killer, Like I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe that's maybe he just this is what he does
Speaker 1: to I don't get off in whatever way, and then
Speaker 1: he's able to go home and be this like normal
Speaker 1: hippie dad. But he's just got this like deep cruelty
Speaker 1: in him that he needs to in the same way
Speaker 1: that like you have all these people who were like
Speaker 1: murdering folks their entire lives and they're married and they
Speaker 1: have kids and stuff like we have. There are examples
Speaker 1: like this. There's like John Wayne Gacy, right, Gaycy I
Speaker 1: think is one of the ones who had like a family. Um,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm wrong, but there's there's like examples of serial
Speaker 1: killers everybody, like they're fairly prominent where there it's like, well,
Speaker 1: he was just a normal man. We all thought he
Speaker 1: was just this you know, he had a wife and
Speaker 1: he had kids, and everyone just assumed he was a
Speaker 1: member of the community. Um, maybe that's what got leave
Speaker 1: is you know, that's the actually the less cynical interpretation,
Speaker 1: because the more cynical interpretation, is it, any is a
Speaker 1: lot of people if you gave them a job and
Speaker 1: it's like your boss just tells you to do it,
Speaker 1: you just do it because your boss told you to
Speaker 1: do it, and it's otherwise I'll get fired, and this
Speaker 1: is my career on the line, and so that if that,
Speaker 1: you know that that's part of the lesson the Holocaust,
Speaker 1: is it. It didn't take it didn't take millions of
Speaker 1: serial killers. It just took a lot of bureaucrats who
Speaker 1: kind of like, what else am I gonna do? It's
Speaker 1: you know, they is my job. This is what I
Speaker 1: was told to guard this building and not let anybody out,
Speaker 1: Like that's that that was my job? What you want
Speaker 1: me to do? Definitely, I mean obviously, like that's most
Speaker 1: of the CIA, right, that's most of the m k
Speaker 1: Ultra people. Gottlieb there is that like that particular story
Speaker 1: where he's just like he's looking at a bar for
Speaker 1: a young kid. He can drug and he does it himself.
Speaker 1: That's the thing that like makes me, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I know we're getting into more satisfying personal curiosity, but no.
Speaker 1: But I think that's what makes a story interesting because again,
Speaker 1: the the conspiracy stuff makes certain assumptions about the type
Speaker 1: of people that work at the CIA, and I think
Speaker 1: it almost imagines him as a different kind of human
Speaker 1: being versus so much of this is people just screwing
Speaker 1: around like this here, like just dosing this the stranger
Speaker 1: to see what happens like this is just this is
Speaker 1: reaching stage where you're just screwing around, like there's it's
Speaker 1: just your there's not enough oversight. There's nobody checking your method,
Speaker 1: there's nobody making your report every single thing you do
Speaker 1: because it's all secrets. So you know, um yeah, and
Speaker 1: I hate that it as mundane as that it's like, well,
Speaker 1: he wasn't reporting to anybody, so it's like, well why
Speaker 1: not see what happens? You know, I think you you
Speaker 1: get so immersed in this stuff where anything can become
Speaker 1: normal if that's just like your day to day job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that is it's to an extent and unknowable question.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I but I don't know. Well, well, we'll
Speaker 1: come back around to this as we get through, um
Speaker 1: like more of this story and you get to know
Speaker 1: a little bit more about Sydney Gottlieb. But kind of
Speaker 1: right around this time, as Gottlieb is dosing Glickman and
Speaker 1: destroying his life, he convinces his boss, Alan Dullis to
Speaker 1: merge all the different government teams working on truth serum
Speaker 1: and mind control research together. Now, most of what this
Speaker 1: means is they're bringing the Army Chemical Corps, who is
Speaker 1: still doing separate research into stuff like this, and the
Speaker 1: CIA teams under one roof. In November of nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: a month after Gottlieb drugs Stanley Glickman, Dwight D. Eisenhower
Speaker 1: wins the presidency. In a nineteen fifty three he makes
Speaker 1: Alan Dullis the new head of the CIA. So, now
Speaker 1: this is the kind of ship Sydney has been able
Speaker 1: to get up too, with his patron being the number
Speaker 1: two man at the CIA. Now is buddies running things,
Speaker 1: and stuff's gonna go off the rails. But you know
Speaker 1: what else goes off the rails? Jason capitalism, I don't.
Speaker 1: I mean, yes at some point, um, but but but
Speaker 1: probably not while we're all alive. Um. So sit back
Speaker 1: and enjoy capitalism and don't think about how it ties
Speaker 1: into what these guys were defending by dosing random people
Speaker 1: in Paris. Ah, we're back, okay. So Jason Alan Dullis
Speaker 1: is now running the CIA. Dwight D. Eisenhower is the president.
Speaker 1: John Foster Dulas is the Secretary of State, and the
Speaker 1: agency gets given the go ahead to open more black
Speaker 1: sites around the world. At this point, Gottlieb is also
Speaker 1: able to expand the scope of his mind control research,
Speaker 1: and for the first time, he brings an outside science
Speaker 1: to conduct torture experiments. One of these scientists is Paul
Speaker 1: Hook of the New York Psychiatric Institute. Gottlieb wanted him
Speaker 1: to inject a patient with mescalin to see what would happen.
Speaker 1: Hawk chose Harold Blower. Now. Blower was depressed after a
Speaker 1: divorce and he had gone to Hawk for help. Hawk
Speaker 1: is a psychiatrist. Blower is a sad man who in
Speaker 1: the fifties is like, you know what, I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: over the macho bullshit that like my culture teaches me
Speaker 1: about seeking help, and I'm going to go to a
Speaker 1: psychiatrist to deal with my divorce. Um. And as a
Speaker 1: reward for being that self aware and responsible and taking
Speaker 1: control of his mental health, Hawk's assistant and secretly injects
Speaker 1: Blower with concentrated mescalin, telling him it's depression medicine. He
Speaker 1: does this five more times over the course of several weeks,
Speaker 1: and and Blower complains, right, he's he's hallucinating. He's having
Speaker 1: nightmarish hallucinations every time they give this depression treatment to him.
Speaker 1: And he's like, I want to stop. This is not
Speaker 1: helping me being sad about my wife leaving. Um, my
Speaker 1: depression has not been cured by these random, horrible hallucinations. Um,
Speaker 1: can we please stop? And Hawk basically tells him, you
Speaker 1: can't quit the treatment midstream. You have to finish the
Speaker 1: course of medications otherwise it will be really bad for you.
Speaker 1: So let's just let's just keep taking this ship. In
Speaker 1: January of nineteen fifty three, just days after Dwight Eisenhower
Speaker 1: is sworn in, Hawk was injected with a dose fourteen
Speaker 1: times higher than what he'd been given previously. He began
Speaker 1: to have seizures. He had a heart attack, and he
Speaker 1: was pronounced dead about three hours after the injection. Hawk
Speaker 1: is one of two Americans who are known to have
Speaker 1: died from the n kal dr experiments. Right, Um, as
Speaker 1: we'll get too later. Most of the there's a lot
Speaker 1: of data about this that's lost. But howk is one
Speaker 1: of the two guys that we know for certain was
Speaker 1: killed as a result of these experiments. Um one of
Speaker 1: doctor or not Hook Blower, one of doctor Hawk's medical
Speaker 1: assistants who had been giving Blower them. Escalin later said, quote,
Speaker 1: we didn't know if it was dog piss or what
Speaker 1: it was that we were giving him. So maybe these
Speaker 1: people were not Maybe there's some medical ethics problems here too,
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. Yeah, And so okay, if you had to
Speaker 1: put money on all right, there's two people we know died.
Speaker 1: If you just had to put down a bet as
Speaker 1: to whether or not there were at least one or
Speaker 1: two more people that we maybe don't know about, would
Speaker 1: you take that bet or would you? Yeah? I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be irresponsible here and the information
Speaker 1: out there, but it just seems it feels implausible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: seeing how fast and loose they were playing. I don't know.
Speaker 1: We will never know because they destroy much of the evidence.
Speaker 1: Well we'll we'll explain that later. But like, I don't
Speaker 1: I don't see how the the death toll. And we're
Speaker 1: talking obviously they've been killing people for a long time.
Speaker 1: But those people are yeah, Americans who die kind of
Speaker 1: accidentally as a result of experiments. I would be shocked
Speaker 1: if it weren't dozens, and it might be more like
Speaker 1: but we'll but we'll never know, right, And so it's
Speaker 1: sometimes it's hard to tell because like a lot of
Speaker 1: people have lifelong problems as a result of this and
Speaker 1: then eventually die as the result of like and maybe like,
Speaker 1: how does the LSD impact the fact that they die
Speaker 1: very young of a heart disease or does it make
Speaker 1: them take other substances that contribute to their right? This
Speaker 1: is all messier. It's usually not as clear as it
Speaker 1: is with blour, where he just gets injected with a
Speaker 1: massive dose of something and has a heart attack. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's it's heart. It's impossible to say exactly,
Speaker 1: but my my, if I'm taking that, bet, I feel
Speaker 1: pretty good about my adds. Um, now are they calling?
Speaker 1: Is this still operating under Artichoke? Or have they started
Speaker 1: calling it m kale. It's it's just about to be
Speaker 1: m kale. So in April of nineteen fifty three, again,
Speaker 1: everything we've talked about has happened over about a four
Speaker 1: year period, right, this is not a long span of
Speaker 1: time that's past. In April of nineteen fifty three, Alan
Speaker 1: Dulas gives that big speech at Princeton where he says
Speaker 1: that communist spies are about to play the American mind
Speaker 1: like a phonograph. A few days later, on April nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty three, he like officially bundles up all of the
Speaker 1: research the US government is going doing into mind control,
Speaker 1: and he called launches mk Ultra at Gottlieb's insistence as
Speaker 1: the final iteration of the secret mind control research project. Now,
Speaker 1: under the terms of the agreement that Gottlieb had made
Speaker 1: with Dullus, mk Ultra is granted six percent of the
Speaker 1: entire CIA operating budget. There are no no requirements for
Speaker 1: accounting and no oversight. Alan Dulls is not told what
Speaker 1: they're doing. The President of the United States does not
Speaker 1: know about this program in anything but the broadest terms.
Speaker 1: Like every now and then someone will be like, you know,
Speaker 1: we're we're continuing our work on like mind control research
Speaker 1: because the Soviets have something right, but like um, no
Speaker 1: one is being looped in. Gottlieb has six percent of
Speaker 1: the CIA budget and zero oversight. And again we can
Speaker 1: criticize it in you know, in hindsight, but hindsight at
Speaker 1: the time, they had no way of knowing that I
Speaker 1: could turn into a carnival of horror. Yeah, so many
Speaker 1: things go well when you give a man effectively a
Speaker 1: license to kill in drug whoever he wants, millions of
Speaker 1: dollars and say, no one's watching him? Who himself is
Speaker 1: tripping balls much of the day? Who is? Who is? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it must be said, is hallucinating an unknown but significant
Speaker 1: percentage of the time. Now, maybe this is not something
Speaker 1: that made into the records. Did they know that mk
Speaker 1: Ultra was an awesome name for a project. Yes, it
Speaker 1: was randomly generated. They actually kind of break their own
Speaker 1: rules to call it him k Ultra. So with cryptonym,
Speaker 1: the MK part is normal, right, that just means it's
Speaker 1: part of the technical division. The second part of the name,
Speaker 1: like we had M k Naomi earlier, it's supposed to
Speaker 1: be completely random because if somebody, if if some spy
Speaker 1: like leaks a document to the Soviets that mentions MK ultra.
Speaker 1: You don't want anyone to be able to tell what
Speaker 1: it is, Gottly make sure it's called ultra because it's
Speaker 1: the most secret thing in the US government, right, Like
Speaker 1: that's why he calls it that because he and I
Speaker 1: think it's just because he thinks it's cool that that's
Speaker 1: his project. Like the most secret thing anyone's doing is
Speaker 1: his project, and so it's it's ultra. Yeah. If you
Speaker 1: sneak into an office at the Pentagon or somewhere and
Speaker 1: you see a folder called Project Artichoke, you're probably not
Speaker 1: even going to open it, right If you stumble across
Speaker 1: a big fat red folder marked MK ultra, Oh yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: you're stealing that thing. It's like, this is either aliens
Speaker 1: or to doomsday weapon, Like you would almost be disappointed
Speaker 1: at what it actually is. Yeah, it's but it's certainly
Speaker 1: like it is actually a pretty bad cryptonym because it
Speaker 1: immediately you're like, well, this has to be something pretty
Speaker 1: fucking serious, right Yeah. Um, So Adney Gottlieb gets his
Speaker 1: blank check and his license to do whatever, and over
Speaker 1: the next decade he makes full use of the resources
Speaker 1: that have been made available to him under mk ULTRA,
Speaker 1: and increasing share of the workload gets farmed out to
Speaker 1: independent scientists. One of these is Dr Ewen Cameron, a
Speaker 1: former head of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations as
Speaker 1: well as the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron had been born
Speaker 1: in Scotland, but he worked mostly in Canada. He was
Speaker 1: one of the top couple of psychiatrists on the planet
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen fifties. Again, he is the former
Speaker 1: head of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations. He is like,
Speaker 1: you don't get much more prestigious than that in this period.
Speaker 1: And I want to quote now to talk about what
Speaker 1: this motherfucker did. I want to quote from a write
Speaker 1: up from the CBCS long form series Brainwashed. Quote. Three
Speaker 1: years after the CIA launched mk ultra IF, they approached
Speaker 1: Cameron through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology,
Speaker 1: a research foundation and one of their front organizations through
Speaker 1: which they funneled money. They encouraged him to apply for
Speaker 1: a grant, which he did and quickly received. From January
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven to September of nineteen sixty, the CIA
Speaker 1: gave Cameron sixty dollars US equivalent to slightly more than
Speaker 1: half a million today. Now, in nineteen fifty five, a
Speaker 1: Canadian woman named Esther Schreier marries the love of her
Speaker 1: life after a blind date. The two of them have
Speaker 1: a child three years later, but the baby dies of
Speaker 1: a staff infection a three weeks old. Esther is obviously
Speaker 1: very sad about this, and she blames herself for the death.
Speaker 1: Her life up to this point has been pretty difficult.
Speaker 1: Her father had died when she was young, then her
Speaker 1: mother had died like right after him. She and her
Speaker 1: brother has been a lot of time in foster home.
Speaker 1: So this is a woman with a lot of trauma.
Speaker 1: And when she gets pregnant two years later, she finds
Speaker 1: herself kind of so consumed with anxiety that she's worried
Speaker 1: that it's going to harm the baby's health. So Esther
Speaker 1: and her husband do the responsible thing. They go to
Speaker 1: the best psychiatrists that they can afford to try to
Speaker 1: get help. And the psychiatrists they go to is Dr
Speaker 1: Ewan Cameron. Uh. They had been told that he is
Speaker 1: quote godlike when it came to treating issues of anxiety
Speaker 1: and depression. And I'm going to continue from quoting from
Speaker 1: that CBC right up now. Esther Schreier entered the hospital
Speaker 1: in February nineteen sixty to receive what her family thought
Speaker 1: was the best care money could buy, but her medical
Speaker 1: notes showed disregard for her well being and that of
Speaker 1: her unborn child right from the start. She spent thirty
Speaker 1: days in what was called the sleep room, a place
Speaker 1: where patients were put in a drug induced coma and
Speaker 1: roused only for three feedings in bathroom breaks per day.
Speaker 1: She lost thirteen pounds that month. Her records showed that
Speaker 1: she couldn't stand up because she was too weak. She
Speaker 1: also underwent a treatment called deep patterning. Cameron believed that
Speaker 1: breaking down patients minds to a childlike state through drugs
Speaker 1: and electroshock therapy would allow him to work from a
Speaker 1: clean slate, whereby he could then reprogram the patients. Part
Speaker 1: of his reprogramming regime would involve what he dubbed psychic driving,
Speaker 1: which meant playing recorded messages to the patients for up
Speaker 1: to twenty hours a day, whether they were asleep or awake.
Speaker 1: These voices were played through headphones, helmets, or speakers, sometimes
Speaker 1: installed right inside a patient's pillow. Records show that some
Speaker 1: patients would hear these messages up to half a million times. Um, okay,
Speaker 1: very very briefly, just yeah, got a question there, Jason.
Speaker 1: People who follow me on social media and follow me
Speaker 1: on my many many podcast appearances know that I have
Speaker 1: this drum beat that I come back to, which is
Speaker 1: how much the past sucked. And I get that there
Speaker 1: are lots of things about the modern world that are terrible,
Speaker 1: and that it feels like things going in the wrong direction.
Speaker 1: The world's becoming just everything is anxiety and stress. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, in inequality, all of the problems. You did
Speaker 1: not want to live in the nineteen fifties, a fucking
Speaker 1: lutly not and whatever you've seen where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, back my my dad or my grandpa when
Speaker 1: he got married, they on just one income, you know,
Speaker 1: at a coal mind they were able to afford a
Speaker 1: house in a car and his wife could stay home
Speaker 1: and take care of the kids. What happened to that?
Speaker 1: That's that's perfectly valid. Like everything you're saying there, you
Speaker 1: didn't want to live in the nineteen anyone out there
Speaker 1: listening to this, who is getting any kind of mental
Speaker 1: health care? Like in many many ways. We are still
Speaker 1: in the dark ages of mental health care. Like anybody
Speaker 1: who's taken any depressants or anti anxiety medication knows how
Speaker 1: the effectiveness is all over the map. The dosage is
Speaker 1: getting it right, the withdrawals are terrible, side effects are terrible.
Speaker 1: Like our treatments are not great now. The treatments, God,
Speaker 1: the treatments back then, they were just experimenting with different
Speaker 1: ways to torture people. And like everything he described, if
Speaker 1: you were trying to inflict the worst like mental suffering
Speaker 1: on somebody, these are all the things you would come
Speaker 1: up with. It's sadistic, it's it's it's bug fuck, and
Speaker 1: it's made worse by like there's stuff going on that's
Speaker 1: like in this realm that them like potentially attempting to
Speaker 1: test treatments. Cameron isn't just trying to help her, He's
Speaker 1: also he's also trying to experiment with the destruction of
Speaker 1: human thoughts and memories. Right, He's trying to change like
Speaker 1: people's personalities through medical torture, right, Like that's part of
Speaker 1: the goal here. She doesn't know that that's what she's
Speaker 1: agreed to do, but that's what happens. And by March
Speaker 1: twelfth of nineteen sixty Esther Esther Schreier is quote considered
Speaker 1: completely depatterned. According to Cameron's medical records. The bad news
Speaker 1: is that being deep pattern means that she had forgotten
Speaker 1: the face, name, and existence of her husband. She could
Speaker 1: not control her bladder or bowels, She could not speak,
Speaker 1: She had trouble even swallowing. Her son later told journalists that,
Speaker 1: according to Esther, she could not remember how to boil water.
Speaker 1: Despite being deep patterned. The torture continued. Dr Cameron would
Speaker 1: give her four or five days of rest at a time,
Speaker 1: and then he would take her in and subject her
Speaker 1: to hundreds of electro shock treatments. These continued until the
Speaker 1: eighth month of her pregnancy. In two thousand four, Esther
Speaker 1: told BBC Scotland what it was like when she actually
Speaker 1: had her baby, completely stripped of her understanding of how
Speaker 1: to be a person. I had a new baby and
Speaker 1: I didn't know what to do with the baby. I
Speaker 1: had help a baby nurse, but she had to have
Speaker 1: a day off and she left me a book. And
Speaker 1: I'll just give you a little example from you book.
Speaker 1: From the book, when you hear the baby cry, go
Speaker 1: to the room, pick up baby, and step by step
Speaker 1: how to feed the baby. And that was very frightening,
Speaker 1: Like she she had to have it explained to her,
Speaker 1: like how to feed, like that a baby needed feeding,
Speaker 1: all of this stuff like it had just And I
Speaker 1: think what's happening here is not that because she recovers
Speaker 1: eventually she it's not that he's obliterated these memories. It's
Speaker 1: that he's done so much damage to her ability to
Speaker 1: like focus and function and think by blasting her with
Speaker 1: noise basically ceaselessly. Um that she's discovered depending at all,
Speaker 1: that's all garbage nonsense. It's if you if you just
Speaker 1: relentlessly attacks someone in many different ways for a long
Speaker 1: enough period, Yeah, their whole sense of their whole function
Speaker 1: will break down. There's nothing magical and mysterious about it.
Speaker 1: If you torture somebody enough long enough, their ability to
Speaker 1: function in all sorts of ways. Like you said, she
Speaker 1: also lost a bladder control. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you
Speaker 1: ruin this person's brain temporarily through sheer harm you were
Speaker 1: doing to them. Again, you could get the same effect
Speaker 1: by bashing them in the head with a pipe. It's
Speaker 1: there's nothing like these these people think they're playing god.
Speaker 1: It's like, no, you're just brutalizing people. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: that's all that's happening. Um. So again, esther does recover,
Speaker 1: she does get to live a full life, unlike some
Speaker 1: of these people. She comes back to herself. Obviously, she
Speaker 1: and her son suffered trauma because he's in the womb
Speaker 1: while a lot of this is happening, Like, none of
Speaker 1: this is good for anybody. Um, and his early childhood
Speaker 1: is not ideal as a result of his mom going
Speaker 1: through a lot of this stuff. Still, he and his mom,
Speaker 1: you have to say, are kind of the better case
Speaker 1: scenarios for Dr Cameron's patients. McGill University, where he taught
Speaker 1: and conducted his research, later published a Mia copple where
Speaker 1: they noted that quote. In addition to LSD, Cameron also
Speaker 1: experimented with various paralytic drugs, as well as electro convulsive
Speaker 1: therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. His
Speaker 1: driving experiments consisted of putting subjects in a drug induced
Speaker 1: coma for weeks at a time up to three months
Speaker 1: in one case, while playing tape loops of noise or
Speaker 1: simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on
Speaker 1: patients who had entered the institute from minor problems such
Speaker 1: as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered
Speaker 1: permanently from this action. Now I wanted to provide a
Speaker 1: little more context as to just how medieval these fucking
Speaker 1: experiments were, and so I'd like to quote from one
Speaker 1: more passage of Kinser's book here before we close out
Speaker 1: for the day. There, he or she was fed LSD
Speaker 1: and given only minimal amounts of food, water in oxygen.
Speaker 1: Cameron fitted patients with helmets equipped with ear phones into
Speaker 1: which he piped phrases or messages like my mother hates me,
Speaker 1: repeated hundreds of thousands of times. In professional papers and
Speaker 1: lab reports, Cameron reported that he had succeeded in destroying minds,
Speaker 1: but he had not found a way to replace them
Speaker 1: with new ones. After completing the treatment of one patient,
Speaker 1: he he wrote with evident pride that the shock treatment
Speaker 1: turned the then nineteen year old Honors student into a
Speaker 1: woman who sucked her thumb, talked like a baby, demanded
Speaker 1: to be fed from a bottle, and urinated on the floor. Now, again,
Speaker 1: that's important. His goal is to destroy their minds. This
Speaker 1: is part one of what God lead wants, right. They
Speaker 1: want to destroy people's personalities so that they can put
Speaker 1: new ones in their place. Right. And they never figure
Speaker 1: out that second part as far as we know, but
Speaker 1: they do figure out how to destroy people for a while. Um.
Speaker 1: The Canadian government has provided no list of the experiments
Speaker 1: that Dr Cameron carried out with their approval. This is
Speaker 1: not something the CIA is doing, and the Canadian government
Speaker 1: is unaware. The Canadian government is enthusiastically a proving of this,
Speaker 1: and when the CIA stops funding Cameron, the Canadian government
Speaker 1: gives him money to continue his research. Um. So again,
Speaker 1: not just the US involved here. Nine of Cameron's patients
Speaker 1: sued the CIA in the nineteen eighties for their treatment
Speaker 1: under m k Ultra. It was settled out of court
Speaker 1: in nineteen under the condition that the agency was not
Speaker 1: accepting liability. Esther was too embarrassed to sign onto the
Speaker 1: case at that point in time, but she eventually signed
Speaker 1: on when the Canadian government in nineteen ninety four offered
Speaker 1: compensation for people who had experienced full or substantial deep patterning.
Speaker 1: Seventy four patients received hundred thousand dollar payments under the
Speaker 1: condition that the Canadian government was not admitting culpability. So
Speaker 1: even when adjusting for inflation, that is nothing, not not
Speaker 1: enough money for this. Um, you could not pay me
Speaker 1: to have this, As someone who has done quite a
Speaker 1: bit of messing with my own head on chemicals, there's nothing.
Speaker 1: There's not an amount of money you could pay to
Speaker 1: go through this. This is the worst thing I can
Speaker 1: literally imagine. Um, Like, yeah, I'd rather go to prison
Speaker 1: than absolutely. There's like there's like fucking labor camps that
Speaker 1: would be a less traumatic experience than this. At least
Speaker 1: you're like a person in that right m hm. Anyway, Jason,
Speaker 1: you got to think you want to plug. How are
Speaker 1: we only halfway through this story? How bad does it get? Um?
Speaker 1: It gets a lot worse. I mean it's I'd say
Speaker 1: it's kind of just stays at this level. Um, so
Speaker 1: false exectations with the listeners. Anyways, the novel is called
Speaker 1: if this book exists, you're in the wrong universe. I
Speaker 1: am Jason Parson. I used to be one of the
Speaker 1: head guys that cracked when Evans first started posting there
Speaker 1: as a literal child, I'm on this is a sequel
Speaker 1: to the book slash film John Dyes at the end
Speaker 1: it exists as both of those things. If you're fan
Speaker 1: of that, Seriousest is the latest book. Otherwise, if you
Speaker 1: just want to see me posting things on TikTok or
Speaker 1: on Twitter or on any of the other ones, my
Speaker 1: name is Jason Pargein p A R. G. I In.
Speaker 1: I used to write on the Internet as David Wong
Speaker 1: back in the day. Um, and we will. We'll be
Speaker 1: back for parts three and four. We share well. Um,
Speaker 1: you can find my book after the Revolution if you
Speaker 1: just type it into anything that will let you buy
Speaker 1: a book. You know how to use Google. We're done,
Speaker 1: Go Home. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
Speaker 1: website cool zone media dot com, or check us out
Speaker 1: on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts.