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18. Psychedelic Nightmare Pt 2.: So Evil, Bro
8 Plays2 years ago
DARK HISTORY: MKULTRA continued
In part two of this series on MKUltra, you’ll learn more about the roll out of these LSD-fueled experiments and how they came to a close. We take a deeper look at its intersections with racism and criminalization as well as the stark contrast between the trauma and dehumanization experienced by unknowing “test subjects,” the most impacted being incarcerated Black folks, and the bohemian counter-culture cultivated by white beat writers who were willing participants of MK Ultra experiments at their universities. You’ll also learn more about popular conspiracies tied to these experiments and the psychology behind conspiracy-based beliefs.
content warning: violence, torture, anti-black racism, mention of drugs
Check out Akshi's Interview on All Humans Are Human here
Outro last updated April 2023
FYI: we've recently unpublished older episodes as we are in process of re-editing for a smoother flow & audio experience. they will be available again as we finish.
Thank you for listening to our passion project <3 You can find us on social media here! We're a team of 2 people & have always been ad-free. If you are enjoying, please consider supporting our sustainability on Patreon or by making a one-time contribution via CashApp $unpacktheeerie.
- your grateful hosts
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Transcript
Introduction: 'Unpacking the Eerie' and Content Warning
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A security memo was sent out in December 1954 that recommended that punch bowls at office parties not be spiked.
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Hi, I'm Akshi.
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And I'm Shayna.
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And you're listening to Unpacking the Eerie.
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A podcast that explores the intersections of our dark and morbid curiosities through a social justice lens.
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You're welcome.
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Just a brief content warning, this episode will contain mentions of violence, torture, anti-black racism, and drugs.
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Hello!
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That's kind of harmonized.
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Yeah.
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Well, welcome to part two of our MKUltra
MKUltra Overview and Merchandise Announcements
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series.
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Yeah.
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We have some announcements to make before we jump back in.
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Mm-hmm.
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Merch is coming soon.
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Merch is coming very soon.
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They're all designed.
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Very soon.
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We just ordered them first to make sure.
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It's working out.
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Yeah.
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And yeah, so keep an eye out.
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Mm-hmm.
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And Patreon patrons are going to have a discount on all items.
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So.
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Yay.
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If you want to become a patron.
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Not already.
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Not already.
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Please
Reproductive Justice and Ghostly Giver Beneficiary
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join us.
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Speaking of Patreon, I wanted to share our Spring 2022 Ghostly Giver Beneficiary.
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So we're donating to Sister Song.
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a reproductive justice org.
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They're based in Georgia, and they define reproductive justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, to have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe, sustainable communities.
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As our episodes routinely cover stories that highlight the violation of marginalized bodies and explorations of community safety, reproductive justice is a guiding principle of ours.
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Given the real-time onslaught of gun violence, hate violence, and draconian moves to restrict reproductive care, our next Ghosty Giver funds will be directed towards SisterSong's efforts to build an effective network of individuals and organizations to improve institutional policies and systems that impact the reproductive lives of marginalized communities.
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So thank you so much to our Ghosty Givers for making that possible as per usual, and if you would like to
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help us continue to make these contributions and expand the amount we're able to give, I invite you to join the ghosty giver tier.
00:02:38
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Yes.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Also, I just want to say like, if you're someone with financial privilege, yes.
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And or a white person and you you're listening to this and you're enjoying the content and you're learning a lot of stuff.
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Our first Patreon tier is $2 a month.
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So
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Yeah.
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And you know, there's this concept of an energy exchange.
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So if you're learning a lot, but not contributing anything back, it's kind of imbalanced.
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Just saying, there's small ways to balance that out.
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That's true.
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I mean, I also want to validate, like, it's not just about money, right?
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Like, there's, like, sharing.
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Yes, exactly.
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And citing where you learned information from.
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Yeah, yes.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, energy exchange is not just about money.
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But if you have financial privilege and, you know, have the privilege of benefiting from generational wealth, then you have the capacity to use your money as part of that energy exchange more than others do.
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And if you don't, then, yeah, there's other ways that you can, you know, support through sharing and chatting about it with your friends and that kind
MKUltra: Context and Origins
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of thing.
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Yeah, totally.
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And I guess one last thing, if you're an occasional listener or if this is your first time, just in general, we collect all of our beneficiaries and we save them on the website.
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So if you're looking for a place to give your money to and you're not really sure where to direct it because there's so much going on, all of those places are chosen really intentionally.
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And I encourage you to support their work.
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Any who's.
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So...
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We're back to talking about MKUltra today.
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So last time we kind of just gave you a lot of context on like what was going on in the world when this project began.
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And today we're going to kind of go more deeply into...
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What was going on there?
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Are you ready?
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I think so.
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And also if like, you know, you're starting here, don't start here.
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Yes.
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Go to part one.
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Yes.
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And then come back.
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Yeah.
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Or else you're, you might be a little confused.
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So yes.
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So at the end of the last episode, I gave a very general brief overview of the experiments that happened.
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To remind you, MKUltra was started in April of 1953, and it had over 149 known subprojects across 80 different institutions, universities, prisons, and hospitals.
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There was a book that was written by Stephen Kinzer that we mentioned in the last episode.
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And in his book, he gives a list of more than 30 universities, institutions, and hospitals, many of which were actually very, you know, quote unquote, renowned in America that received funding to carry out our Poisoner in Chief, Sidney Gottlieb's program.
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Yeah.
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So today I'm going to kind of go a little deeper into some of these sub projects.
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As mentioned last time, CIA officials have admitted that the first people that were targeted were vulnerable groups, quote, those who could not fight back.
Exploitation in Early Psychedelic Studies
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An example, sub project three.
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happened in New York.
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And it was, there was a CIA agent was recruited to go around Greenwich Village posing as a merchant seaman or a bohemian artist.
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And he lured drug users and, quote, petty criminals and others who, quote, could be relied on not to complain about what happened to them.
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Pretty much preying on the vulnerable and traumatized.
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I found this article that was actually just very recently published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
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It was published last year by authors Dana Strauss, Sarah de LaSalle, Jordan Slosh-Schauer, and Monica T. Williams, all researchers, the University of Ottawa.
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This article was titled Research Abuses Against People of Color and Other Vulnerable Groups in Early Psychedelic Research.
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And they...
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pretty much examined and looked at early psychedelic research that was conducted in the U.S. between 1950 and 1980 to understand to what extent people of color and other vulnerable groups were exploited during this first wave of psychedelic research.
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So a lot of this article actually talks about experiments that were conducted through Project MKUltra.
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So a lot of the victims of MKUltra in the U.S. were Black Americans,
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mostly because they were drawn from prisons, hospitals, and mental health facilities.
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And a large proportion of the people at these facilities were Black Americans.
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So there was this research center in Lexington, Kentucky, known as the Addiction Research Center.
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It was actually the National Institute of Mental Health's official Addiction Research Center.
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It was also known as CIDD.
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the Narcotic Farm.
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It was a site that functioned both as a prison and a research center.
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And here they tested LSD and 800 other psychoactive drugs on a population that was almost exclusively Black.
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The facility marketed itself as a hybrid hospital and addiction science lab that was, quote, making waves in the drug rehabilitation world, whereas in practice it was really more functioned like a prison.
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The director of research there's name was Dr. Harris Isbell.
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And he was born June 7th, 1910, a Gemini.
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When I went to his Wikipedia page, it really doesn't paint him out to be...
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like a horrible person or anything close to that.
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He was actually awarded a U.S. Public Health Service meritorious in 1962.
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He was described by the attorney general Robert F. Kennedy as an outstanding investigator whose work in clinical pharmacology has exerted far-reaching influences on medical practice.
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Most of his research was investigating aspects of physical dependence as it relates to drugs, but his later work was part of the MKUltra project.
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And the research that was conducted through MKUltra project by Dr. Harris Isbell was
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resulted in several papers being published in academic journals, such as the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Psychopharmacologia, and AMA Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry.
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There's over 125 publications, including ones that talk about the benefits of Narcan and methadone to alleviate opiate symptoms.
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So...
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This dude actually had a pretty liberal view when it came to drug policy because of the research that he did on drugs.
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He is quoted to have said that the drug laws of the time in the 1970s were excessively rigid and extremely punitive.
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So that's this doctor, right?
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As part of the MKUltra project, Isbol's patients were fed increasing doses of LSD.
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As we noted last time, LSD is a substance that you build tolerance to really quickly.
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So they just kept giving higher and higher doses, some of them for days and weeks on end.
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Oh my god.
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Yeah.
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In some of these studies, the Black patients were given more than two times the amount of LSD as white patients.
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The paper that I mentioned earlier that came out last year observed that white participants endured only eight days of LSD administration, while Black participants endured chronic administration for up to 85 days.
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So there was a clear difference in which the Black patients were treated.
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Yeah.
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Compared to the white patients.
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85 days.
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What does that do to you?
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Yeah.
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Three months straight.
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I don't know.
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And these are people who already have like substance use disorders.
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Yeah.
Unethical Practices and Racial Disparities in MKUltra
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Isbo stated that in one experiment, he gave seven black patients daily doses of LSD, which he would double, triple or quadruple to keep them from building a tolerance all without their knowledge.
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This dude has been awarded a U.S. Public Health Service meritorious.
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I can't.
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Like, what the fuck, you know?
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Yeah.
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There's a documentation that one patient was given LSD for 174 days straight.
00:12:14
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What the fuck?
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In increasingly higher doses.
00:12:18
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Okay, I'm just thinking about, remember Orly Cow?
00:12:21
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Yes.
00:12:23
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And I mean, I don't remember exactly how long she was in there, but I feel like it was very brief and not this intensive.
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Like LSD was like an occasional thing.
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Yeah.
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And they were able to like reduce her back to a childlike state.
00:12:38
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Yeah.
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And she never recovered.
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Yeah.
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So what the fuck happened to these people?
00:12:42
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Yeah, there isn't a record of it.
00:12:44
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Oh my god, I hate it here.
00:12:49
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He also told the Senate subcommittee when they were investigating MKUltra that the ethical codes were not so highly developed at the time and there was a great need to know in order to protect the public in assessing the potential use of narcotics.
00:13:07
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Yeah.
00:13:08
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So it was very necessary and I personally think that we did a very excellent job.
00:13:15
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No one cares about your personal opinion, dude.
00:13:20
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So, um, yeah, one really fucked up thing about what was happening at this, um, addiction research center is that black research participants who were there because they were incarcerated on drug charges were given heroin or their drugs of choice as payment for participation that they could redeem immediately or save for later.
00:13:52
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so coercive what the fuck yeah this is reminding me a lot of like um how people get like stuck in survival sex work yeah yeah you know yeah and abusive relationships too i definitely like have yeah seen that before also yeah
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And this is at a place that was the National Institute of Mental Health's Addiction Research Center that was known to be somewhere that was, like, making waves in drug rehabilitation.
00:14:24
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Which is similar to the place that you talked about with Dr. Yuan Cameron.
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Totally.
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I mean, he was really world-renowned.
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People thought he was, like, amazing.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And I mean, people thought this dude was amazing too.
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Nothing happened to him.
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I mean, he just continued to live his life and then he passed away.
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classic so Dominic Streetfield author of the book brainwash the secret history of mind control wrote about the addiction research center the CIA needed a place to test dangerous and possibly addictive drugs Isbell had a large number of drug users in no position to complain he referred to these participants as quote volunteers what the fuck yeah yeah
00:15:15
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The people who signed up for his drug trials were never actually told which narcotics they've been given and what their potential effects were.
00:15:22
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They were compensated in heroin and morphine, the same drugs for which they were supposedly receiving addiction treatment.
00:15:29
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So unethical in so many different ways, you know, and so harmful.
00:15:36
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So harmful.
00:15:37
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Like, I don't know.
00:15:38
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We don't know what happened to these people.
00:15:40
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We don't know.
00:15:42
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Wow.
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No stories, nothing.
00:15:44
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Just lost?
00:15:46
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Mm-hmm.
00:15:47
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Wow.
00:15:48
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Mm-hmm.
00:15:49
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That's really fucked up.
00:15:50
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Yeah.
00:15:52
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I didn't hear any of this in any of my research on MKUltra at all.
00:15:58
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Yeah.
00:15:59
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No podcasts, no articles, nothing.
00:16:01
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Yeah.
00:16:02
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I mean, I read this in the research paper that came out last year.
00:16:09
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Oh my God.
00:16:11
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Which was written by those researchers in Ottawa.
00:16:14
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I actually have met one of them.
00:16:15
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Really?
00:16:16
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Monica T. Williams.
00:16:17
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She actually does a lot of research as it relates to the therapeutic use of psychedelics and people of color.
00:16:25
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And also has written a lot of research papers on the exclusion of people of color from psychedelic research, which put a pin in that.
00:16:34
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I'll come back to it later.
00:16:35
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Oh, and it reminds me of... This is a loose connection.
00:16:41
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I don't think it's loose.
00:16:42
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I just don't know if it'll be clear as it is in my head.
00:16:46
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But, like, I feel like there's a lot of benefits to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, right?
00:16:51
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Mm-hmm.
00:16:52
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And I just feel like...
00:16:54
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most of the people who are willing and wanting to try it are white people.
00:16:58
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Yeah.
00:16:58
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Which I'll talk about it later.
00:17:00
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Yeah.
00:17:00
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I'm going to talk about that later.
00:17:02
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Cause like, because there is a resistance from people of color to want to even be part of this research.
00:17:08
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Exactly.
00:17:09
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Exactly.
00:17:10
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Because you know, it's history is like really, really fucked up.
00:17:14
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The thing with palliative care.
00:17:17
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Yeah, I listened to this whole talk on... Someone came to the UW.
00:17:21
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Yeah.
00:17:21
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Did research around... It was in the intersections of economics and social work.
00:17:28
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Was his PhD stuff.
00:17:31
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And he did work around palliative care and how end-of-life care has been commodified and part of the medical-industrial complex when initially it wasn't intended to do that.
00:17:42
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But in order to make it more commonplace in hospitals, that's the direction that they took it.
00:17:48
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But research shows that palliative care extends your life, increases quality of life, all this shit.
00:17:55
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And overwhelmingly, when they ask people of color versus...
00:18:00
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white people how willing they were to try, the numbers were just so vastly different.
00:18:06
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White people were super down to try it out and BIPOC communities were extremely resistant.
00:18:12
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And it makes sense because usually palliative care is offered to white people as an alternative to aggressive cancer treatment.
00:18:21
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And palliative care is then offered to BIPOC communities as an option before other things have been exhausted.
00:18:29
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And so the problem of too much care is only a thing for white people.
00:18:34
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Yeah.
00:18:34
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So...
00:18:40
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trauma from medical systems in specifically black communities.
CIA's Reckless Drug Experiments
00:18:45
Speaker
So it makes sense that there is a lack of trust when it comes to these like, ooh, like new modalities or like, you know, things that are seen to be maybe like really helpful because the history of medical research is in the trauma of their community.
00:19:05
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communities yeah yeah yeah and that's what they like when they did the qualitative stuff like that was the sentiment of like um what i'm hearing from that is you're giving up on me yeah and you're not giving me access to the medication that i need sure sure um so it's just like really yeah yeah well back back to this sub project 47
00:19:29
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was at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, and the research there was conducted by Carl Pfeiffer, who was at Emory University at the time.
00:19:39
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He administered LSD to 20 incarcerated folks at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary nearly every day for over a year.
00:19:49
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15 months, to be exact.
00:19:52
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Interestingly, there was a Boston mobster who was a prisoner at this penitentiary at the time, Whitey Bueller.
00:20:02
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He was a white person.
00:20:05
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which is probably why his name was Whitey Bueller.
00:20:10
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But he was reportedly given, and also I just find it interesting that there's like specific stories about white people, but we don't have any specific stories about the probably hundreds of black folks that were, you know.
00:20:22
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Like most impacted?
00:20:23
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:20:25
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But Y.D.
00:20:26
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Buehler was reportedly given 50 doses of LSD along with a handful of other incarcerated folks.
00:20:32
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And they were all told that they were helping to find a cure for schizophrenia.
00:20:37
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They, again, weren't told what they were being injected with.
00:20:40
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Before Buehler passed away, he wrote about the experience and
00:20:44
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And he said, quote, the room would change shape, hours of paranoia and feeling violent, guys turning into skeletons in front of me.
00:20:53
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I saw a camera change to the head of a dog.
00:20:56
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I felt like I was going insane.
00:20:59
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Oh my god.
00:21:00
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Yeah.
00:21:01
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Like, just imagine linking back to what we were talking about, like, LSD and how it works last time, and think about what it would be like to be an incarcerated person doing that, being dosed with it, not knowing what it is, like, in a prison setting.
00:21:18
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Can't imagine.
00:21:19
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In the 50s.
00:21:20
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Can't imagine.
00:21:21
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I mean, set and setting, as we've learned, is very important.
00:21:26
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Yeah.
00:21:27
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So Louisiana State Penitentiary.
00:21:31
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1955, the CIA made a deal with Dr. Robert Heath at Tulane University, who was a chair of psychology.
00:21:38
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Using CIA funds, him and his assistant, Harry Bailey, conducted non-consensual experiments on, again, black incarcerated folks, giving them LSD and bulbocapnine, which is a drug that induces catatonia or stupor when it's, uh,
00:21:56
Speaker
given in high doses.
00:21:58
Speaker
What the fuck?
00:21:59
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The purpose of this was that the CIA wanted to learn whether certain drugs would result in loss of speech, loss of sensitivity to pain, loss of memory, loss of willpower, and increased toxicity in persons with weak type central nervous system.
00:22:16
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So again, trying to just like induce childlike states in people.
00:22:25
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Goddamn, like, just between this and, like, forced sterilization and all this shit.
00:22:32
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This is a really fucked up quote, but Bailey, who is the assistant, reportedly later stated as thinking about the experiments and who they did it on, that it had been cheaper to use, and he uses the N-word to describe them, cheaper to use experiments.
00:22:52
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than cats because they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals.
00:22:56
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What the fuck?
00:22:58
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What the actual fuck?
00:23:01
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Yeah.
00:23:01
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Oh my god.
00:23:03
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I mean, I shouldn't be surprised.
00:23:05
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Yeah.
00:23:05
Speaker
But I am continuously just like so disgusted.
00:23:10
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Yeah, maybe it's not surprise, but it's more just like anger, you know, of like the...
00:23:18
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severe dehumanization of people for the... for what purpose?
00:23:23
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For what purpose?
00:23:24
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And the... how it was so normal for him to say that.
00:23:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:27
Speaker
He didn't feel anything about it.
00:23:28
Speaker
And he didn't think there was anything wrong with it.
00:23:29
Speaker
And then this other dude was just like, we did an excellent job.
00:23:33
Speaker
It was like, what the fuck are you talking about?
00:23:36
Speaker
Oh my god.
00:23:36
Speaker
They live in another fucking planet.
00:23:37
Speaker
You traumatized all of these people and like, you... you have...
00:23:43
Speaker
So much like of an ego and like narcissism that you think that you're like some kind of God.
00:23:48
Speaker
Something's wrong with them.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:50
Speaker
Something's wrong with all of them.
00:23:51
Speaker
All of these people.
00:23:51
Speaker
They really think that they are God and that they can do whatever the fuck they want.
00:23:55
Speaker
You know what?
00:23:55
Speaker
Who are your ancestors?
00:23:58
Speaker
I bet you they were some fucked up shit.
00:24:00
Speaker
There's no way people are just like this.
00:24:02
Speaker
You inherit that shit.
00:24:03
Speaker
You inherit it.
00:24:04
Speaker
You inherit the entitlement.
00:24:05
Speaker
You're enabled by like, like your environments.
00:24:09
Speaker
I'm just thinking about like so many of the things that we've covered.
00:24:15
Speaker
Also.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:16
Speaker
Like Lake Lanier and the list is like really long.
00:24:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:21
Speaker
Goes on and on.
00:24:25
Speaker
What the fuck?
00:24:26
Speaker
Really, really fuck.
00:24:28
Speaker
So I have a little more to say about stuff that I learned from this specific research article, which is like, you know, thanks to all these authors for this research article for like really digging deep and bringing all of this to light in 2021.
00:24:39
Speaker
You know, thank you.
00:24:43
Speaker
So there was another operation.
00:24:44
Speaker
It was called Operation Third Chance, which was drug experiments that were actually primarily conducted against unknowing Europeans.
00:24:53
Speaker
But the only American who was dosed with LSD in these experiments was James Thornwell, the only black soldier at his station in France.
00:25:03
Speaker
So I actually have his specific story.
00:25:05
Speaker
It's like one of the only specific stories that I have that comes from him directly.
00:25:08
Speaker
Okay.
00:25:10
Speaker
So he was accused of stealing classified documents and was subjected for more than three months to an interrogation during which he was physically abused, received...
00:25:22
Speaker
Debt threats degraded by streams of verbal abuse, including racial slurs and accusations of sexual impropriety by members of the Army Counterintelligence Corps.
00:25:36
Speaker
According to and this is according to his legal complaint that he made after this.
00:25:41
Speaker
After 99 days of this, so over three months, a team from Operation Third Chance showed up and without his consent gave Thornwell LSD and then continued humiliation and, like, torment.
00:25:57
Speaker
The army notes that Thornwell was described to have an extreme paranoic reaction.
00:26:04
Speaker
Okay.
00:26:06
Speaker
No shit.
00:26:06
Speaker
Okay.
00:26:09
Speaker
Because he didn't know that he had been dosed with LSD and was also completely unfamiliar with what it was, since it wasn't really a well-known thing at the time.
00:26:16
Speaker
He thought he was losing his mind.
00:26:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:18
Speaker
Thornwell's army abusers told him they had the power to extend this state indefinitely, even to a permanent condition of insanity.
00:26:28
Speaker
He fainted from, like, this constant trauma, and he was finally sent home after this.
00:26:35
Speaker
And then after this, an officer on the intelligence team of the army concluded they had satisfactory evidence of the subject's claims of innocence.
00:26:44
Speaker
So they supposedly did all of this to him because he was, quote, accused of stealing classified documents.
00:26:50
Speaker
And then at the end of it, they said, oh, well, we don't think he actually did that.
00:26:56
Speaker
Four months later, Thornwall was given a general, though not honorable, discharge from the army.
00:27:02
Speaker
What?
00:27:04
Speaker
How many fuckers got honorably discharged from the military after killing a hell of people?
00:27:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:11
Speaker
And I mean, we've talked about, I think we talked about in the Queen Mary episode about black soldiers who are like part of the army and the kind of racism they faced.
00:27:21
Speaker
That's like, you know, after they decided to join the army, after everything that has happened to them, you know?
00:27:27
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:27:29
Speaker
It took Thornwell 16 years before he learned what actually had happened to him, and he filed a lawsuit in 1979 stating that the experience turned him into isolated social and emotional cripple.
00:27:46
Speaker
He described a life of headaches, depression, and nightmares.
00:27:50
Speaker
During the trial, evaluating psychiatrists unanimously concluded he suffered from severe psychiatric disorders.
00:27:57
Speaker
In 1980, Congress publicly apologized to Thornwall and granted him a $625,000 payment.
00:28:06
Speaker
Four years later, he drowned after a suspected epileptic seizure.
00:28:14
Speaker
That's one story.
00:28:15
Speaker
And that's the only specific story I could find.
00:28:18
Speaker
But, like, this is just, like, so fucked up.
00:28:20
Speaker
I don't understand.
00:28:21
Speaker
I don't understand.
00:28:23
Speaker
You do understand.
00:28:24
Speaker
I do understand, but I don't understand.
00:28:26
Speaker
Yeah, I don't understand because you must be so fucked up in the head to be able to do these things and then still not think that you did anything wrong, you know?
00:28:36
Speaker
Yeah, how do you sleep at night?
00:28:38
Speaker
They clearly slept fine and then just like, you know, died by natural causes, all of these fucking doctors.
00:28:45
Speaker
I hate that.
00:28:46
Speaker
Did you ever watch that?
00:28:47
Speaker
It's like in 2020, around the time of the uprisings, and there's this video that Kimberly Jones released, and she said, like, you know, you're really lucky that Black folks are just looking for justice when they could be looking for revenge.
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:04
Speaker
Like... Yeah.
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:06
Speaker
I mean...
00:29:08
Speaker
They're lucky that a lot of people, like the whole world is not looking for revenge against white people because y'all are really outnumbered there.
00:29:20
Speaker
I mean, that's what they're scared of, right?
00:29:21
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:29:23
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the whole thing behind trying to create conflict between marginalized groups so that we don't band together in order to fight our real enemies.
00:29:41
Speaker
That's white supremacy.
00:29:42
Speaker
Right.
00:29:44
Speaker
Yeah, and great replacement theory makes a lot of sense in this context just because...
00:29:51
Speaker
I feel like their only version of just, Oh, the great replacement theory is a white supremacist theory that Jewish people are in collusion with like communities of color and that people are conspiring to wipe out the white race.
00:30:07
Speaker
Oh, got it.
00:30:08
Speaker
And so I think like a lot of the anti-abortion people, um, a lot of them have like undertones of this great replacement theory, um,
00:30:18
Speaker
And people theorize that like part of this whole thing is not just about, you know, obviously like criminalizing women and people you perceive to be women's bodies, but also to make more space to keep producing white people as people are slowly not having as many children anymore.
00:30:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:42
Speaker
So it's all fucked up.
00:30:42
Speaker
But like, you know,
00:30:46
Speaker
If you are operating under the premise that people are going to seek justice like you do, like in your retributive way, then it would make sense that you assume people are going to enact revenge.
00:30:58
Speaker
Because on some level, you know that if you were on the other end, you would think that that's what people deserve.
00:31:05
Speaker
Before I move on to talking a little bit about other kinds of experiments that happened under MKUltra, I'm just going to end this part with a quote by Dana Strauss, who's a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Ottawa.
00:31:19
Speaker
She says in the 1950s and 60s, researchers weren't thinking about the need to take extra precautions with vulnerable populations, whether or not those researchers were explicitly targeting Black Americans.
00:31:30
Speaker
They drew their participants most frequently from prisons where Black Americans were overrepresented because of racism and arrest charges, incarceration and sentencing.
00:31:39
Speaker
But we also know based on this one quote that that dude said that they truly knew what the fuck they were doing, you know, and it was intentional.
00:31:46
Speaker
Yep.
00:31:47
Speaker
So fucked.
00:31:49
Speaker
Super fucked.
00:31:50
Speaker
Part of the experiments that were happening under MKUltra, I couldn't find a lot of specifics about this, but were happening with students at universities.
00:31:59
Speaker
One thing that I found was that the Boston Psychopathic Hospital paid hundreds of students from Emerson, Harvard, and MIT $15 to $20 each to drink a vial of liquid that might induce an altered state.
00:32:15
Speaker
So we can just see the difference in which these students are treated.
00:32:19
Speaker
They're like, oh, you're a paid research study and we're going to inform you that this might change the way you perceive your reality.
00:32:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:27
Speaker
And they're agreeing to be part of this.
00:32:30
Speaker
Well, these are young people with access to... Yeah.
00:32:33
Speaker
Still, though, these students, which included, you know, people of all genders, were asked to drink a tall glass of water, which was said to have a mind-altering drug added to it.
00:32:44
Speaker
And then they participated for 10 to 12 hours in various psychological tests.
00:32:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:49
Speaker
They were told that they were giving LSD and that they would have variable reactions.
00:32:53
Speaker
It was later found, though, that none of the people that were involved in the experiment, so the people conducting them, had any kind of proper training or understanding on how to guide the participants.
00:33:03
Speaker
And several people had really negative reactions to it.
00:33:06
Speaker
And one person actually hanged herself in a clinic bathroom.
00:33:10
Speaker
I couldn't find any more details about that.
00:33:12
Speaker
It was just kind of like mentioned and it's in a book.
00:33:16
Speaker
But experiments like this also happened at the University of Maryland and George Washington University, Georgetown University, Stanford, Columbia, and Harvard.
00:33:25
Speaker
I just didn't dig deep into what those experiments actually looked like.
00:33:29
Speaker
But...
00:33:30
Speaker
Still super irresponsible, even though people were given informed consent.
00:33:38
Speaker
Interestingly, MKUltra's experiments also included dosing CIA agents with LSD because they just wild and really just not even do it.
00:33:51
Speaker
Like, they're just clearly not even thinking about it.
00:33:54
Speaker
So it started slowly with agents self-administering LSD and then taking notes on how this went.
00:34:02
Speaker
Then once they were like, okay, we kind of get what this was going to be like, they agreed to dose each other unexpectedly, anytime and anywhere.
00:34:13
Speaker
And after a dosing happened, agents were given the rest of the day off.
00:34:18
Speaker
And then later on, they started dosing other people in the CIA who had never even tried it and hadn't agreed to being dosed unexpectedly.
00:34:26
Speaker
Martin Lee, who's the author of Acid Dreams, a book about the history of LSD and the CIA, says, surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives.
00:34:37
Speaker
No shit.
00:34:39
Speaker
They're really just out here being wild as fuck.
00:34:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:34:43
Speaker
In what world?
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah, and they have so much money and so much power.
00:34:49
Speaker
And they're just acting so irresponsibly and truly nothing has changed.
00:34:53
Speaker
You know...
00:34:55
Speaker
It makes sense that, I mean, I'm going to get into this later about conspiracy theories, but this whole thing sounds like a fucking conspiracy theory.
00:35:04
Speaker
And they did that shit.
00:35:05
Speaker
Yeah, this is real.
00:35:06
Speaker
This is not a conspiracy theory.
00:35:08
Speaker
Like all of these things are like verified information by people who are like in the CIA and, you know, 20,000 documents.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:18
Speaker
Because they're bad at organizing themselves.
00:35:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:22
Speaker
Clearly.
00:35:23
Speaker
Obviously not everyone at the CIA was down for this shit.
00:35:27
Speaker
Sure.
00:35:27
Speaker
Who the fuck, you know, you know, a special kind of person to be down for this shit.
00:35:32
Speaker
There was a rumor that circulated that there were plans to use a party as the scene of a mass dosing.
00:35:38
Speaker
And after this rumor was spread spread.
00:35:40
Speaker
A security memo was sent out in December 1954 that recommended that punch bowls at office parties not be spiked.
00:35:50
Speaker
And then one employee would bring his own wine, which he guarded, to office functions because he was nervous of being dosed.
00:36:01
Speaker
What the fuck?
00:36:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:05
Speaker
In one...
00:36:06
Speaker
Incident of this, an agent ran out into the street after being dosed unexpectedly with LSD.
00:36:13
Speaker
And apparently each time a car passed, he would huddle and was terribly frightened.
00:36:19
Speaker
A colleague was explaining the story.
00:36:22
Speaker
And every car seemed to be a monster out to kill him.
00:36:25
Speaker
Oh my god!
00:36:26
Speaker
Yes!
00:36:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:29
Speaker
I'm just like, how many experiments need to happen?
00:36:33
Speaker
You know what it does.
00:36:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:36:36
Speaker
So, I mean, I think now's a good time to pass to you to tell us about how MKUltra kind of fizzled out.
00:36:44
Speaker
Okay.
00:36:45
Speaker
Well, some people think it didn't, but I'll get into that later.
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:48
Speaker
I mean, that doesn't surprise me.
00:36:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:53
Speaker
So...
00:36:55
Speaker
We're going to talk about a man named Frank Olson.
Frank Olson's Suspicious Death
00:37:01
Speaker
This information is pulled by a Guardian article written by good old Stephen Kinzer, who clearly spent a lot of time hyperfixating on this whole thing.
00:37:14
Speaker
True.
00:37:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:15
Speaker
So Frank Olson was one of the first scientists assigned to the secret U.S. biological warfare laboratories at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland during the Second World War.
00:37:31
Speaker
And there he began working with a handful of colleagues who would accompany him throughout his career.
00:37:39
Speaker
One of them was Harold Abramson.
00:37:41
Speaker
Others included ex-Nazi scientists who had been brought to work on secret missions in the U.S., I think, via Operation Paperclip.
00:37:50
Speaker
Yes.
00:37:53
Speaker
So for a time, they worked on aerosol technologies, ways to spray germs or other toxins on enemies and defend against such attacks to the U.S. And then later, Olson met with U.S. intelligence officers who had experimented with, quote unquote, truth drugs in Europe, which is, you know, what we've been talking about.
00:38:21
Speaker
So this was the period when the senior army and CIA were becoming really alarmed when they thought that the Soviets were getting mind control drugs and mind control tactics and using it against US soldiers.
00:38:41
Speaker
So this like fear led to the creation of the special operations division and then rumors about its work spread through offices and labs.
00:38:53
Speaker
Olsen learned about it over an evening game of cards with a colleague, John Schwab, who he had been named the division's first chief.
00:39:03
Speaker
And so Schwab invited him to join.
00:39:05
Speaker
Olsen accepted.
00:39:07
Speaker
And less than a year later, Olsen succeeded Schwab as the chief of the special operations division.
00:39:15
Speaker
There, Olsen's specialty was, quote unquote, the airborne distribution of biological germs.
00:39:21
Speaker
And there was a study that said Dr. Olson had developed a range of lethal aerosols in handy-sized containers.
00:39:29
Speaker
Yeah, they were disguised as shaving cream and insect repellents.
00:39:33
Speaker
They contained a variety of poisonous chemicals, one of them being anthrax.
00:39:38
Speaker
Yes, the birthplace of anthrax.
00:39:41
Speaker
Further weapons he was working on included a cigarette lighter, which gave out an almost instant lethal gas, a lipstick that would kill on contact with skin, and a neat pocket spray for asthma sufferers that induced pneumonia.
00:39:54
Speaker
Oh my god, that's wild.
00:39:57
Speaker
This man was really out here and his whole job was to figure out how to kill people.
00:40:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:02
Speaker
Right?
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:06
Speaker
So by the time Olsen stepped down as the chief of the special operations division in early 1953, um, he was complaining that the pressure of the job aggravated his ulcers.
00:40:18
Speaker
And then he joined the CIA.
00:40:21
Speaker
It's like, ah, I'm too stressed out.
00:40:23
Speaker
I'm too stressed out.
00:40:25
Speaker
All of this murder stuff.
00:40:27
Speaker
It's not sitting well with me.
00:40:29
Speaker
It's upsetting my tummy.
00:40:31
Speaker
Um, yeah.
00:40:37
Speaker
um okay so in his lab at fort dietrich olsen directed experiments that involved gassing or poisoning laboratory animals i don't know how much he's shifting from his original yeah as you'll come to see yeah i mean yeah so this article says these experiences disturbed him uh
00:41:00
Speaker
I mean, you know, he's clearly fucked up, but is the first person to be like, oh, this is bothering me.
00:41:08
Speaker
That's true.
00:41:08
Speaker
Because everyone else is like, we're doing a great job.
00:41:11
Speaker
Oh, the bar's in a weird place.
00:41:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:13
Speaker
He's like, hmm.
00:41:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:14
Speaker
He's like, this hurts my tummy.
00:41:17
Speaker
Yes.
00:41:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:19
Speaker
His son, Eric, recalled that he'd come to work in the morning and see piles of dead monkeys and
00:41:25
Speaker
And then he goes, that messes with you.
00:41:27
Speaker
He wasn't the right guy for that.
00:41:29
Speaker
Clearly not.
00:41:32
Speaker
It's just wild that there's so many guys who would have been... Fine for it.
00:41:37
Speaker
Fine for that.
00:41:37
Speaker
Fine with it.
00:41:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:39
Speaker
I mean, they did much worse.
00:41:42
Speaker
Olsen also saw human beings suffer.
00:41:45
Speaker
Although not a torturer himself, he observed and monitored torture sessions in several countries...
00:41:50
Speaker
Another study said that in CIA safe houses in Germany, Olson witnessed horrific, brutal interrogations on a regular basis.
00:41:57
Speaker
Detainees who were deemed expendable, quote-unquote suspected spies or moles, security leaks, etc., were literally interrogated to death in experimental methods combining drugs, hypnosis, and torture to attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing.
00:42:13
Speaker
Right.
00:42:13
Speaker
Yes.
00:42:14
Speaker
Right, right.
00:42:14
Speaker
Yes.
00:42:15
Speaker
As Thanksgiving approached in 1953, Olsen received an invitation to gather on Wednesday, November 18th for a retreat at a cabin in Deep Creek Lake, Western Maryland.
00:42:30
Speaker
This retreat was won in a series that Sidney Gottlieb convened every few months.
00:42:35
Speaker
They just went on a retreat, chat about their, their stuff, their experiments.
00:42:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:41
Speaker
Um,
00:42:42
Speaker
Officially, it was the coming together of two groups.
00:42:45
Speaker
There were four CIA scientists from the technical services staff, the folks who ran MKUltra, and then the five army scientists from the Special Operations Division of the Chemical Corps, the place that was too fucked up for Olsen, apparently.
00:43:06
Speaker
These are the worst people.
00:43:08
Speaker
These are literally the worst people.
00:43:13
Speaker
On Thursday evening, the group gathered for dinner and then settled back for a round of drinks.
00:43:19
Speaker
Gottlieb's deputy, his last name's Lashbrook, produced a bottle.
00:43:23
Speaker
Produced a bottle.
00:43:24
Speaker
They got it a bottle of Cointreau and poured glasses for the company.
00:43:30
Speaker
And several, including Olsen, they drank it.
00:43:33
Speaker
And then after 20 minutes, Sidney was like, anyone feeling weird?
00:43:38
Speaker
And several said that they were.
00:43:40
Speaker
And then he told them their drinks had been spiked with LSD.
00:43:43
Speaker
Is this a game?
00:43:44
Speaker
This is just a game to him.
00:43:46
Speaker
Guess what?
00:43:51
Speaker
This article was the news was not well received.
00:43:55
Speaker
Oh, no shit.
00:43:57
Speaker
Even in their altered state, the subjects could understand what had been done to them, obviously.
00:44:04
Speaker
And the next morning, Olsen was very upset.
00:44:07
Speaker
He went
00:44:09
Speaker
back to Friedrich.
00:44:11
Speaker
And by the time he got home, people said he was a changed man.
00:44:15
Speaker
The next morning, Olsen showed up early at Fort Dietrich.
00:44:21
Speaker
His boss, Vincent Ruit, arrived shortly after, and both of them were like, not doing well.
00:44:31
Speaker
Was this dude also there?
00:44:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:32
Speaker
Okay, okay.
00:44:33
Speaker
They were just, like, kind of fucked up.
00:44:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:36
Speaker
More than four days had passed since they had been given LSD without their knowledge.
00:44:40
Speaker
Ruet later called it the most frightening experience he had ever hoped to have.
00:44:46
Speaker
You know, I don't feel bad for these men.
00:44:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:49
Speaker
Me neither.
00:44:52
Speaker
I don't.
00:44:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:54
Speaker
Olsen began pouring out his doubts and fears.
00:44:58
Speaker
Ruit said that he appeared to be agitated and asked if he would fire him or if he should quit.
00:45:07
Speaker
Well, I just imagine clearly this man is like...
00:45:10
Speaker
So it's not the correct job for him.
00:45:12
Speaker
He's, like, sensitive.
00:45:14
Speaker
And he's already kind of in a place of, like, oh, I feel morally questionable about what I'm doing.
00:45:20
Speaker
And then he gets a dose of LSD, and then all of his moral questions are probably, like, majorly enhanced, and he feels physically so uncomfortable.
00:45:29
Speaker
His stomach ulcers are just like...
00:45:32
Speaker
Yeah, the stomach ulcers are back.
00:45:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:35
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:45:35
Speaker
And then he's just like, oh, I can't do this anymore.
00:45:37
Speaker
I mean, I don't even know if I'd call him especially sensitive.
00:45:41
Speaker
I just think he has, like, a basic... Yeah, he's not a sociopath like everyone else clearly is.
00:45:46
Speaker
Right, right.
00:45:47
Speaker
He's not dissociated from emotions.
00:45:49
Speaker
He's got some type of, like, moral something in there.
00:45:52
Speaker
A conscience.
00:45:53
Speaker
Maybe he's not as sensitive, but he is more sensitive than everyone else present, clearly.
00:46:00
Speaker
His conscience is not muted.
00:46:01
Speaker
It's present.
00:46:02
Speaker
It's present.
00:46:03
Speaker
Like, hey!
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:05
Speaker
This stuff's kind of fucked up, right?
00:46:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:12
Speaker
So Olsen had spent 10 years at Fort Dietrich.
00:46:15
Speaker
It's a long time to be like, this is all fucked up and I'm still working here.
00:46:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:21
Speaker
And he had, so he had a lot of information about the Operation Division secrets.
00:46:26
Speaker
He held a lot of, like,
00:46:28
Speaker
classified info and stuff that obviously they wouldn't want people to know.
00:46:35
Speaker
I mean, he's working with a former Nazi scientist.
00:46:38
Speaker
Yes.
00:46:39
Speaker
That in and of itself, they wouldn't want the public to know.
00:46:42
Speaker
Right.
00:46:43
Speaker
Yes.
00:46:46
Speaker
Yes.
00:46:48
Speaker
During this time, he repeatedly visited Germany and brought home pictures from Heidelberg and Berlin, where U.S. military maintained interrogation centers.
00:46:59
Speaker
And he was one of several special ops division scientists who was in France on the 16th of August in 1951 when an entire French village...
00:47:10
Speaker
was mysteriously seized by mass hysteria and violent delirium that afflicted more than 200 residents and caused several deaths.
00:47:19
Speaker
Airborne something, really?
00:47:21
Speaker
Uh-huh.
00:47:22
Speaker
The cause was later determined to be poisoning by ergot.
00:47:25
Speaker
There we go.
00:47:26
Speaker
Yes.
00:47:27
Speaker
The fungus from which LSD was derived.
00:47:31
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:47:32
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:47:33
Speaker
Yes.
00:47:34
Speaker
Wow.
00:47:34
Speaker
Damn.
00:47:35
Speaker
They're really out here.
00:47:36
Speaker
Yes.
00:47:36
Speaker
Okay.
00:47:38
Speaker
Okay.
00:47:38
Speaker
So it says that this article says, perhaps most threatening of all, if US forces did indeed use biological weapons during the Korean War, for which there was circumstantial evidence, but no proof, Olson would have known the prospect that he might reveal any of what he'd seen or done was terrifying to them.
00:47:58
Speaker
Go figure.
00:48:00
Speaker
Wow.
00:48:00
Speaker
We're just, like, fucking evil.
00:48:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:02
Speaker
U.S. is so evil, bro.
00:48:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:04
Speaker
I mean, this is, like, we were talking earlier about just, like, people being able to act with impunity.
00:48:11
Speaker
And the U.S. government forever has just been impunity.
00:48:14
Speaker
It acts with impunity.
00:48:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:16
Speaker
And I mean, no one ever faces consequences for this, really.
00:48:21
Speaker
Like, at most, there'll be, like, a settlement and, like, someone pays money for it.
00:48:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:26
Speaker
And it really doesn't affect their life any more than that.
00:48:29
Speaker
But it's just really wild how, like, they're out here being so violent in, like, the most creative ways.
00:48:38
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:48:39
Speaker
in the most creative way, is just so fucked up.
00:48:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:42
Speaker
What a waste of time and money.
00:48:44
Speaker
Can you just, like, think about, like, what if this money and time and energy was directed elsewhere and that these, like, scientists were, like, focusing on things like, like, hmm, climate change?
00:48:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:59
Speaker
Like... I mean, the whole, like, the whole United States was born out of just continuously putting a lot of
00:49:09
Speaker
ugly creative energy into fucking with other people.
00:49:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:15
Speaker
Violence.
00:49:16
Speaker
Violence.
00:49:16
Speaker
Domination.
00:49:17
Speaker
Genocide.
00:49:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:19
Speaker
Theft.
00:49:20
Speaker
All the things.
00:49:20
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:49:21
Speaker
God.
00:49:24
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:49:26
Speaker
So, you know, leading up to the LSD, like, the surprise LSD trip.
00:49:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:32
Speaker
He was holding all of this.
00:49:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:34
Speaker
He's probably, like, having a trip thinking about all this stuff, like,
00:49:39
Speaker
As he should.
00:49:40
Speaker
As he should.
00:49:40
Speaker
As he should.
00:49:41
Speaker
That's the whole point.
00:49:42
Speaker
LSD is out here being like, ha ha, making you face all of your demons.
00:49:50
Speaker
Yes.
00:49:51
Speaker
I'm personifying it.
00:49:52
Speaker
You are.
00:49:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:54
Speaker
So in the spring of 1953, he visited a top secret microbiological research establishment in Portendown, Wiltshire.
00:50:06
Speaker
Where the heck is that?
00:50:07
Speaker
Horton down in Wiltshire?
00:50:08
Speaker
I don't know where Wiltshire is.
00:50:10
Speaker
Sounds very English.
00:50:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:12
Speaker
I think it's actually in the UK.
00:50:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:17
Speaker
In Wiltshire, there were government scientists studying the effects of sarin and other nerve gases.
00:50:25
Speaker
Sarin's scary.
00:50:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:27
Speaker
You know about the sarin gas attacks in Japan?
00:50:30
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:50:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:32
Speaker
That was by a cult, a Hindu cult, orchestrated by Hindu cult.
00:50:37
Speaker
You should cover that at one point.
00:50:38
Speaker
We should.
00:50:40
Speaker
Well, arguably, I wonder, like, how much of this plays a role in making it accessible and, like, on people's requires, you know?
00:50:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:50:52
Speaker
On May 6th, a volunteer subject, a 20-year-old soldier, was dosed with sarin there, and he began foaming at the mouth, collapsed into convulsions, and died an hour later.
00:51:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's really poisonous gas.
00:51:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:07
Speaker
Wow.
00:51:07
Speaker
What did they say to him to make him be like, I'll do this?
00:51:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:51:11
Speaker
Wow.
00:51:12
Speaker
Afterward, Olsen spoke about his discomfort with a psychiatrist who helped direct the research, Williams Sargent, which, I mean, there's a conflict of interest there.
00:51:25
Speaker
They're, like, directing the research, and now he's, like, what, the psychiatrist that he goes and, like, gets support from?
00:51:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:51:33
Speaker
And I'm just like, his discomfort.
00:51:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:35
Speaker
That's it?
00:51:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:37
Speaker
I don't know.
00:51:38
Speaker
It was like, this dude died.
00:51:40
Speaker
I'm uncomfortable.
00:51:42
Speaker
I mean, maybe it was more than that, but this article is just like, he spoke about his discomfort with the whole thing.
00:51:49
Speaker
His tummy is really not okay.
00:51:51
Speaker
No, his tummy is fucked up.
00:51:55
Speaker
A month later, Olsen was back in Germany, and on that trip, according to a later reconstruction of his travels, he visited a CIA safe house near Stuttgart, where he saw...
00:52:08
Speaker
Men dying often in agony from the weapons that he had made.
00:52:12
Speaker
I mean, yeah.
00:52:13
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:52:16
Speaker
Back to the time he was dosed.
00:52:18
Speaker
Five days later, he's still disoriented.
00:52:22
Speaker
His boss at the special ops division called Sidney Gottlieb to report this.
00:52:29
Speaker
And Gottlieb asked him to bring in Olsen for a little chat.
00:52:34
Speaker
And at their meeting, Gottlieb later testified Olsen seemed quote-unquote confused in certain areas of his thinking.
00:52:43
Speaker
And then he decided Olsen needed to go to New York City and be delivered to a physician who was most intimately tied to MKUltra.
00:52:52
Speaker
His name was Harold Abramson.
00:52:55
Speaker
Alice, Olsen's wife, was told that he...
00:52:59
Speaker
had to see the physician who had the equal security clearance so he could talk freely, which is why he had to go there.
00:53:06
Speaker
Because I'm sure she was like, why does he have to go to New York for this physician?
00:53:11
Speaker
And this article was like, this was partly true.
00:53:15
Speaker
Abramson was not a psychiatrist.
00:53:17
Speaker
He was an MKUltra initiate.
00:53:21
Speaker
Gottlieb knew that Abramson's first loyalty was MKUltra, or as he would have put it, to the security of the United States.
00:53:30
Speaker
That made him the ideal person to probe Olsen.
00:53:33
Speaker
So they really weren't sending him to get care.
00:53:37
Speaker
They were sending him to, like, see where his head was at.
00:53:41
Speaker
See how much, you know?
00:53:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:43
Speaker
Like, how likely was it that this man was going to drop out and, like, spill everything, basically?
00:53:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:49
Speaker
So the next morning, Abramson, Lashbrook, Olsen, they drove back to Manhattan and
00:53:56
Speaker
During the next session, Abramson persuaded Olson to be hospitalized as a voluntary patient at a sanatorium in Maryland, and Olson and Lashbrook left.
00:54:10
Speaker
They registered at Statler Hotel and they were given room 1018A.
00:54:16
Speaker
Over dinner at the Statler, Olsen was telling Lashbrook he was looking forward to his hospitalization.
00:54:23
Speaker
He was talking about his books that he would read.
00:54:26
Speaker
And Lashbrook later said he was almost the Dr. Olsen I knew before the experiment.
00:54:32
Speaker
Both of them went back to the room.
00:54:34
Speaker
Olsen washed his socks in the sink and watched TV for a while and then just went to sleep.
00:54:41
Speaker
At 2.25 a.m., he went out the window.
00:54:45
Speaker
He died?
00:54:46
Speaker
He died.
00:54:48
Speaker
They were like, I don't remember who found it first, but apparently there was like, you know, they found him on the ground.
00:54:56
Speaker
Outside.
00:54:57
Speaker
Outside, not alive.
00:54:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:59
Speaker
And then made two and two together.
00:55:00
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:55:01
Speaker
That he had...
00:55:03
Speaker
Gone out the window.
00:55:03
Speaker
Gone out the window.
00:55:06
Speaker
They would say he jumped out the window, but others would say he was killed.
00:55:12
Speaker
And the night manager said, in all my years at the hotel business, I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn.
00:55:24
Speaker
Pushed.
00:55:30
Speaker
Pushed.
00:55:31
Speaker
For sure.
00:55:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:32
Speaker
For sure.
00:55:34
Speaker
He knew too much and he was contemplating leaving.
00:55:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:38
Speaker
So after the police left, the night manager returned to the lobby and on a hunch asked the telephone operator if any calls had been made to 1018A.
00:55:47
Speaker
And the operator said yes and that she had eavesdropped.
00:55:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:51
Speaker
I was like, wow.
00:55:53
Speaker
Which apparently was not an uncommon practice in an era where hotel phone calls were routed through a switchboard.
00:55:59
Speaker
I mean, people are friggin' bored.
00:56:00
Speaker
Yeah, all these operators.
00:56:02
Speaker
Yeah, they're like, what's going on?
00:56:04
Speaker
I'm sure they heard some wild shit.
00:56:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:07
Speaker
I probably would.
00:56:07
Speaker
It's entertaining.
00:56:10
Speaker
It's true.
00:56:12
Speaker
Someone in the room, 1018A, had called a number on Long Island, which was listed to belong to Dr. Harold Abramson.
00:56:25
Speaker
who was, quote unquote, a distinguished physician.
00:56:27
Speaker
You know?
00:56:29
Speaker
Yep.
00:56:30
Speaker
He was less well known for his LSD expertise and one of the CIA's medical people.
00:56:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:56:37
Speaker
And on the phone, the person said, well, he's gone.
00:56:42
Speaker
And Abramson replied, well, that's too bad, which is a little weird.
00:56:46
Speaker
Yep, yep, yep.
00:56:48
Speaker
It's a little odd.
00:56:49
Speaker
So fast forward June, 1975, Olson's wife actually moves forward with a lawsuit and insists that Frank did not die by suicide.
00:56:58
Speaker
And the white house lawyers offered the Olson family $750,000 in exchange for dropping the, the lawsuit and the family accepted.
00:57:09
Speaker
They hesitated a bit, but I think they were figured like, you know, we're not going to win this.
00:57:13
Speaker
And then Congress passed a special bill to approve the payment.
00:57:17
Speaker
Okay.
00:57:17
Speaker
And then the assumption is that the case was closed.
00:57:20
Speaker
But Eric, his son, waited another decade after his mother died before taking the next step.
00:57:28
Speaker
They wanted to exhume his father's body.
00:57:30
Speaker
And they did that.
00:57:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:35
Speaker
Uh, at Linden Hill Cemetery in Frederick, Maryland on June 2nd, 1994.
00:57:41
Speaker
And a forensic pathologist, James Starrs, uh, spent a month studying Olson's body.
00:57:49
Speaker
And when he finished, he called a news conference.
00:57:52
Speaker
His tests for toxins in the body had turned up nothing.
00:57:56
Speaker
The wound pattern, though, was weird.
00:57:59
Speaker
Stars had found that no glass shards were on his head or neck, which was what you would expect if he dived out the window.
00:58:08
Speaker
And most intriguingly, this article says, although Olsen had reportedly landed on his back, the skull above his left eye was disfigured.
00:58:17
Speaker
Hmm.
00:58:19
Speaker
Like he was like hit.
00:58:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's what it sounds like.
00:58:22
Speaker
So Star says, I would venture to say that this hematoma is a singular evidence of the possibility that Dr. Olsen was struck a stunning blow to the head by some person or instrument prior to his exiting the window.
00:58:34
Speaker
Yes.
00:58:34
Speaker
Trucks.
00:58:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:58
Speaker
So because his family signed away their right to legal relief when they accepted the compensation in 1975, they couldn't sue the CIA anymore.
00:59:08
Speaker
However, Starr's report and other discoveries really enhanced Eric's suspicion that he was murdered.
00:59:18
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:59:19
Speaker
Yeah, so he was like, my father was murdered, but he couldn't prove it, and he couldn't open up a lawsuit.
00:59:23
Speaker
So he and his brother decided it was finally time to just put his dad's body back.
00:59:29
Speaker
And then on August 8th, 2002, this is such a long time that they had his body out and were like, looking.
00:59:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:38
Speaker
Wow.
00:59:39
Speaker
The day before the reburial, he called reporters to his home and announced that he had reached a new conclusion about what had happened to his father.
00:59:46
Speaker
He says, the death of Frank Olson on the 28th of November, 1953 was a murder, not a suicide.
00:59:52
Speaker
Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a bad trip.
00:59:57
Speaker
He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program in the early 1950s and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.
01:00:09
Speaker
Wow.
01:00:09
Speaker
Which...
01:00:10
Speaker
Yeah, that tracks.
01:00:12
Speaker
That does track.
01:00:12
Speaker
I mean, you know, this also happened way in the beginning of MKUltra, because 1953 was when the experiment started.
01:00:22
Speaker
So.
01:00:23
Speaker
He was like.
01:00:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:25
Speaker
Just the fact that that could happen, and they were like, let's just keep moving.
01:00:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:29
Speaker
Business as usual.
01:00:30
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:30
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:31
Speaker
I'm like, where was their line?
01:00:33
Speaker
Nowhere.
01:00:33
Speaker
Nowhere.
01:00:33
Speaker
Their line was nowhere.
01:00:35
Speaker
There's no line.
01:00:35
Speaker
They were like, we're working with Nazis.
01:00:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:00:39
Speaker
Okay.
01:00:41
Speaker
Okay.
01:00:41
Speaker
So back to MKUltra as a whole.
01:00:44
Speaker
No longer in 2002.
01:00:44
Speaker
Back to 1973.
01:00:47
Speaker
Also, can I just say that I'm just like, wow, they exhumed his father's body, did all that work for a really long time.
01:00:54
Speaker
And how many people have family members that have died really unjustly and nothing ever happens at all?
01:01:00
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:01
Speaker
Probably through these experiments, too.
01:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
01:01:05
Speaker
Well, absolutely.
01:01:05
Speaker
We don't even know these stories.
01:01:07
Speaker
Yeah, they're stories about people who were incarcerated.
01:01:10
Speaker
So I'm sure, you know, those documents are all just gone.
01:01:15
Speaker
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
01:01:20
Speaker
And, like, there's so much information and, like, spotlight on this man who, you know.
01:01:27
Speaker
Objectively was doing a lot of fucked up shit.
01:01:29
Speaker
Yes.
01:01:29
Speaker
For himself, you know.
01:01:30
Speaker
Yes.
01:01:31
Speaker
Someone with a lot of privilege and power.
01:01:33
Speaker
And someone who, for a living, created deadly weapons.
01:01:39
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:39
Speaker
That are now used by, still used.
01:01:42
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:43
Speaker
To this day.
01:01:44
Speaker
To this day.
MKUltra's Legacy and Senate Investigations
01:01:46
Speaker
So, 1973, amid a government-wide panic caused by Watergate.
01:01:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:50
Speaker
The CIA director, Richard Helms, ordered all MKUltra files destroyed.
01:01:55
Speaker
It's like, uh-oh.
01:02:00
Speaker
Most of the CIA documents regarding the project were destroyed, which made a full investigation of MKUltra impossible, but some 20,000 documents survived the purge because they were stored incorrectly in a financial records building.
01:02:18
Speaker
And were discovered following FOIA request in 1977.
01:02:22
Speaker
And then these documents were fully investigated during the Senate hearing of 1977.
01:02:29
Speaker
History.com says that throughout the hearings, Congress kept hitting roadblocks.
01:02:33
Speaker
CIA staffers claim that they quote unquote couldn't remember details about how, about how many that they couldn't remember details about many of the human experimentation projects or even the number of people involved.
01:02:46
Speaker
Bullshit.
01:02:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:48
Speaker
And then the Congressional Committee investigating the CIA research chaired by Senator Frank Church concluded that prior consent was obviously not obtained from any of the subjects.
01:02:59
Speaker
The committee noted that the experiments sponsored by these researchers call into question the decision made by it.
01:03:06
Speaker
the agencies not to fix guidelines for the experiments.
01:03:10
Speaker
And then following recommendations from the church committee, Gerald Ford, who was president at the time in 1976, issued the first executive order on intelligence activities, which among other things prohibited experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with informed consent in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party.
01:03:31
Speaker
of each such human subject and i'm just like wasn't that discussed during the nuremberg trials i'm like yeah yeah yeah i mean just related to that also mk ultra experiments with lsd apparently were happening till 1963 and i think this is yeah also from history.com
01:03:48
Speaker
John Vance, who is a member of the CIA Inspector General staff, learned about the project.
01:03:55
Speaker
And though the MKUltra directors tried to convince the CIA's audit board that the research should continue, the Inspector General insisted the agency follow the new research ethics guidelines and bring all the programs on non-consuming volunteers to an end.
01:04:11
Speaker
So they supposedly ended around that time.
01:04:14
Speaker
And also they, you know, never actually learned anything through this.
01:04:20
Speaker
So what the heck was the point of everything?
01:04:23
Speaker
Just to torment and torture people and create tons of trauma.
01:04:26
Speaker
Yes.
01:04:27
Speaker
I think this is a good place to, I was like, when I was doing this research, I was like thinking about...
01:04:32
Speaker
Whenever I've taken like research classes on psychology and whenever I have new jobs that are related to psychology research, you always have to do the training that's about like ethics and you always have to like read the freaking Belmont report, which is like super boring.
01:04:47
Speaker
But Belmont report was written by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research.
01:04:54
Speaker
And it was created as a result of the National Research Act of 1974.
01:04:58
Speaker
So around this time,
01:05:00
Speaker
And it was actually created as a response to the syphilis research studies.
01:05:06
Speaker
Oh.
01:05:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:07
Speaker
But pretty much the Belmont report has like ethical guidelines about human subjects research that like everyone has to follow these days when it comes to that.
01:05:19
Speaker
It's very long, but basically they have to assess the role of a risk-benefit, and the benefit must be more than the risk of participating in the research.
01:05:30
Speaker
They have to have informed consent, which was already there in the Nuremberg trials, which was years before.
01:05:37
Speaker
The basic ethical principles are respect for persons, which includes informed consent, beneficence, which is risk-benefit, and justice.
01:05:47
Speaker
Like, who is going to receive the benefits of this research and bear its burdens?
01:05:53
Speaker
Pretty much.
01:05:54
Speaker
So that's what the Belmont Report is about.
01:05:57
Speaker
And that was decided upon and written around the same time.
01:06:01
Speaker
I mean, this also follows, like, a lot of really wild-ass psych studies.
01:06:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:06
Speaker
Like, the psych studies that we use as, like, foundational...
01:06:12
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:12
Speaker
Examples in psych classes were all pretty fucked up.
01:06:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:16
Speaker
Pavlov was fucked up.
01:06:18
Speaker
We didn't even learn about how he treated those dogs.
01:06:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:21
Speaker
And the only reason we know about learned helplessness is because we, like, shocked the shit out of these dogs.
01:06:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:27
Speaker
For doggos.
01:06:28
Speaker
Yeah, and then the Stanford Prison Experiment.
01:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, Stanford Prison Experiment.
01:06:32
Speaker
Stanley Milgram.
01:06:33
Speaker
Those people thought that they killed somebody.
01:06:35
Speaker
But the way that people kept going just because some dude in a white coat.
01:06:39
Speaker
If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should go look it up.
01:06:41
Speaker
Yeah, look those up.
01:06:42
Speaker
Because we don't have time.
01:06:43
Speaker
No, we don't have time.
01:06:44
Speaker
But.
01:06:45
Speaker
We don't have time.
01:06:45
Speaker
It's all fucked up.
01:06:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:06:48
Speaker
Oh, and then, like, the wire monkey experiment with Henry Harlow.
01:06:52
Speaker
Which we do talk about in, I think, The Certified Freak.
01:06:55
Speaker
Anyways.
01:06:56
Speaker
Anyways.
01:06:59
Speaker
MK Holdra has a handful of conspiracy theories tied to it.
01:07:03
Speaker
One is...
01:07:05
Speaker
I don't really think this is a conspiracy.
01:07:06
Speaker
I think this really did happen.
01:07:08
Speaker
I think Frank Olsen was murdered.
01:07:10
Speaker
But it's listed as a conspiracy just because there isn't sufficient evidence to prove that somebody pushed him out the window.
01:07:17
Speaker
Minus this whole body exhume thing.
01:07:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:21
Speaker
Another conspiracy is that there was a subcut project of MKUltra and Project Artichoke called Project Monarch, and the claim is that they used children as guinea pigs for their experiments on mind control.
01:07:37
Speaker
Trigger warning?
01:07:38
Speaker
Sexual assault?
01:07:39
Speaker
So...
01:07:40
Speaker
The claim is that they were kidnapping traumatized children who were already prone to disassociative identity disorder, that they tortured them, they administered LSD, included sensory deprivation, in an attempt to split their identities and train them to become different people while suppressing their memory.
01:08:00
Speaker
So some examples were betas, and betas were trained on the art of seduction, and their whole thing was supposed to be to service world leaders on command.
01:08:10
Speaker
Disgusting.
01:08:11
Speaker
Gammas were trained for assassination, omega, suicide missions.
01:08:17
Speaker
Personalities would be triggered by certain words, imagery, or music.
01:08:21
Speaker
Hypnosis, kind of.
01:08:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:08:23
Speaker
So this conspiracy...
01:08:26
Speaker
was mostly came out of a book that was written by Kathy O'Brien, who claims that she was one of these children.
01:08:36
Speaker
It's a pretty outlandish, it's pretty outlandish.
01:08:39
Speaker
Like, there are elements of this where I'm like, I could totally see them doing that shit.
01:08:43
Speaker
If they were willing to do all that other shit, I could see them kidnapping children, doing some weird stuff.
01:08:48
Speaker
And if this sounds familiar, it makes sense because there's so much media that was based off of, like,
01:08:55
Speaker
these conspiracy theories like stranger things I think was inspired by this.
01:09:00
Speaker
So Kathy O'Brien wrote a book about this called transform transformation of America.
01:09:07
Speaker
And she claims that when she was a kid, she was sexually abused by her father as well as a network of child pornographers and that he would sell her pornography to them.
01:09:21
Speaker
And she says that she was forced by the CIA to participate in Project Monarch, which she claims is a subsection of Project MKUltra and Project Artichoke.
01:09:31
Speaker
And so she says that when she was under hypnosis, she was able to recall memories of sexual abuse.
01:09:41
Speaker
And then her dad got caught selling the child porn and was allegedly – and she was –
01:09:49
Speaker
already allegedly showing signs of a DID.
01:09:54
Speaker
And, uh, she says that the government approached him and offered him a deal to take Kathy in and they'd overlook what, what he had done.
01:10:02
Speaker
And she says that he was sent to Harvard for a crash course to prepare her for the experiments.
Project Monarch and Mind Control Claims
01:10:09
Speaker
And in these experiments, they've re forced her to relive her abuse and trained her to be quote unquote, sexually enhanced, whatever, whatever that means.
01:10:20
Speaker
And this conspiracy also incorporates, like, international pedophile rings, drug barons, Satanists, who allegedly used a form of quote-unquote trauma-based mind control programming to make her a sex slave, is what it says.
01:10:37
Speaker
Jeez.
01:10:38
Speaker
So, yeah, this is, like, a wild claim.
01:10:41
Speaker
I'm just like, this is, like, some shit.
01:10:45
Speaker
You know?
01:10:46
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:46
Speaker
And back to the Satanists, they said that there was like a mix of like, trauma based mind control with satanic rituals.
01:10:53
Speaker
Like this is what her story is incorporating.
01:10:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:56
Speaker
And she says that by age 16, which is in 1974, she was sent out to be a sex worker in black ops and Pentagon operations to seduce the world's leaders.
01:11:06
Speaker
In her book, she accuses a wide range of prominent people from American, Canadian, Mexican, and Saudi Arabian government officials to stars of country music of being a part of Project Monarch to operate sex slave rings and commit
01:11:21
Speaker
child abuse.
01:11:22
Speaker
She has, like, a story about how George Bush and Miguel de la Madrid used holograms to appear in her altered form, saying that Bush apparently activated a hologram of the lizard-like alien, which provided the illusion of Bush transforming like a chameleon before my eyes.
01:11:42
Speaker
In retrospect, I understand that
01:11:44
Speaker
That Bush had been painstakingly careful in positioning our seats in order that the hologram's effectiveness would be maximized.
01:11:52
Speaker
What the heck?
01:11:53
Speaker
She also says that Project Monarch caused her to develop multiple personality disorder or DID, but during an alternate personality episodes, she has photographic recalls.
01:12:03
Speaker
Her book, Transformation of America, has been credited as originating one of the most significant and extreme mind control conspiracy theories, and her claim of links between satanic ritual abuse and MKUltra have influenced popular conspiracy culture.
01:12:19
Speaker
And I'm just, like, all of this really echoes, like, QAnon, Pizzagay, all of those things that have similar, like, patterns of, like, reptilian people are controlling politicians and are celebrities.
01:12:34
Speaker
And this is all, like, the work of...
01:12:38
Speaker
satan and there's like yeah the the same child abuse shit which is just like um and i remember like during satanic panic that was a similar those were similar narratives that were going on and on and so i think you know one of the like mk ultra is not direct like can't be directly tied to all the things but i think is a catalyst for a great deal of like
01:13:07
Speaker
cult and conspiracy behaviors and beliefs that have persisted from its inception to now.
01:13:15
Speaker
I wanted to take some time to talk about what DID is because I think it's wrongfully categorized and shown out in like the public.
01:13:27
Speaker
And we talked about it a little bit in the Catherine episode, but we didn't really go into it.
01:13:31
Speaker
And I think the only times we ever hear about this associative identity disorder are these really
01:13:36
Speaker
extreme situations where like I don't know like this or where a murder happens or you know what have you well yeah and then it's in like a lot of movies too like split yeah memento I think yeah but there is that really amazing video of the person who's an artist who like yeah uses her painting to connect with her different identities and
01:14:06
Speaker
Yeah, honestly, maybe we can include a link because it really is amazing.
01:14:10
Speaker
She has like, I think six or seven personalities and yeah, uses art to channel through them.
01:14:17
Speaker
And all like all of her art pieces are distinctly different.
01:14:20
Speaker
You can tell who's painting, which is really wild.
01:14:24
Speaker
And people, I guess, have told her that she's not technically consistent enough.
01:14:28
Speaker
So they won't take her on as like a, I don't know.
01:14:30
Speaker
I don't know how the art world works.
01:14:32
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:14:33
Speaker
So she does her own thing.
01:14:34
Speaker
So the National Alliance for Mental Health characterizes dissociative disorders broadly as an involuntary escape from reality characterized by disconnection between thoughts, identity, consciousness, and memory.
01:14:46
Speaker
It impacts people from all age groups and racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds and isn't limited to...
01:14:55
Speaker
Any one gender, but generally speaking, women are more diagnosed than men.
01:15:00
Speaker
That could be for a variety of reasons, which I don't need to go down that rabbit hole, but yeah.
01:15:07
Speaker
So dissociative experiences, depersonalization experiences are really common.
01:15:14
Speaker
Up to 75% of people experience at least one in their lifetimes, but around 2% meet the full criteria for chronic episodes.
01:15:24
Speaker
Usually this is a response to trauma.
01:15:26
Speaker
The common traumas that they are listing here is abuse or military combat, and it's a way your body responds to protect yourself to keep your memories under control.
01:15:36
Speaker
And then continuous stressful situations can exacerbate the symptoms and it can impact your day-to-day living.
01:15:44
Speaker
So there are three types of dissociative disorders that are defined in the DSM.
01:15:49
Speaker
There's dissociative amnesia, which is difficulty remembering important information.
01:15:55
Speaker
Or sometimes people will experience really traumatic events and have no memory of it, and it's your body's way of protecting you because it's too hard to integrate.
01:16:07
Speaker
There's depersonalization disorder, which involves an ongoing feelings of detachment from your actions, feelings, thoughts, and sensations as if you were watching a movie.
01:16:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:17
Speaker
Sometimes other people and things may feel like people and things in the world around them are not real.
01:16:21
Speaker
You can experience depersonalization or derealization or both in this category.
01:16:29
Speaker
And the average onset is age 16, although episodes can happen before that.
01:16:34
Speaker
But typically, people don't really start experiencing episodes after the age of 20.
01:16:40
Speaker
So if they haven't started by 20, they're not likely to
01:16:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:00
Speaker
People may feel like one or more voices are trying to take control in their head, and they often have unique names, characteristics, mannerisms, and voices.
01:17:09
Speaker
People with DID experience gaps in memory of everyday events, personal information, and the traumas that cause their personalities to split in the first place.
01:17:19
Speaker
And again, women are more likely to be diagnosed as it's more common that they present with acute dissociative symptoms.
01:17:26
Speaker
The way men are socialized is
01:17:28
Speaker
They're more likely to deny symptoms and trauma histories, and they're more likely to exhibit more violent behavior rather than amnesia or fugue states.
01:17:36
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:17:37
Speaker
So it can lead to, like, false negative diagnoses just because it shows up differently.
01:17:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:46
Speaker
Well, you know, interestingly, there's a select group of people who identify as plural.
01:17:54
Speaker
And it's like they have multiple identities inside of them, but it's integrated more in a way where they don't experience the amnesia that comes with it.
01:18:04
Speaker
And I've had clients who have plural identities, and they have
01:18:08
Speaker
described instances of their different identities kind of like interacting with one another and a lot of people who are gender fluid or trans or a lot of people who are plural identify as gender fluid or trans because they have multiple identities inside of them that hold different genders.
01:18:28
Speaker
Yeah, so I'd encourage people to look into, like, plurality as well, because it was not something that I was familiar with.
01:18:34
Speaker
And it is a little bit different than DID because of, I guess, the more integrated part of it.
01:18:43
Speaker
Integrated part of the identities versus, like, the amnesia that comes with not being able to recall when different identities are, like, fronting, I guess.
01:18:52
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:18:53
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking about that.
01:18:54
Speaker
And then I was also thinking about this Reply All episode that I watched, which was a podcast from Gimlet.
01:18:59
Speaker
I listened to it several years ago.
01:19:01
Speaker
And it was about this thing called tulpas, which is like people who have these voices in their heads, which I also found like really like interesting.
01:19:10
Speaker
They're kind of like imaginary friends, but like in adults.
01:19:16
Speaker
So people are curious.
01:19:18
Speaker
They'll look those things up.
01:19:19
Speaker
Wow.
01:19:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:21
Speaker
Thanks for sharing.
01:19:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:24
Speaker
DID is really wild too, because like there's, well, for a long time, people, like some psychologists were like, it's not real.
01:19:33
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:34
Speaker
Which I think largely has to do with the way that we just simply don't believe women when they're presenting with things.
01:19:39
Speaker
There's a great show actually on Netflix that has Toni Collette in it.
01:19:43
Speaker
Oh, I love that show!
01:19:45
Speaker
The United States of Terra.
01:19:46
Speaker
Yes, The United States of Terra, which, yeah, she has DID.
01:19:49
Speaker
And that's actually one of the okay representations of DID in the media.
01:19:56
Speaker
So check it out.
01:19:56
Speaker
They canceled it.
01:19:58
Speaker
I really enjoyed it.
01:19:59
Speaker
I mean, Netflix always cancels their good shows and, you know, continues to make like 100 Kissing Booth movies.
01:20:05
Speaker
What is up with that, bro?
01:20:09
Speaker
They care more about quantity than quality is what is up with that.
01:20:12
Speaker
Yes.
01:20:14
Speaker
And like, I think they would probably consider Kissing Booth to be less controversial.
01:20:19
Speaker
So it's probably easier to maintain like viewership.
01:20:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:20:22
Speaker
I mean, they canceled Hasan Minhaj's show too.
01:20:24
Speaker
Did they?
01:20:25
Speaker
Because he was always covering controversial subjects, so they probably were getting shit from China, Saudi Arabian government, US government.
01:20:35
Speaker
They were probably getting a lot of pressure to cancel his show.
01:20:39
Speaker
And so they did.
01:20:39
Speaker
Hopefully someone else picks up his stuff.
01:20:42
Speaker
What the fuck?
01:20:44
Speaker
That's DID.
01:20:45
Speaker
Just wanted to expand on that a little bit because I didn't want to just say she's talking about having DID and leave it there because it's complex and, you know, doesn't necessarily connotate someone who has violent tendencies or what have you.
01:21:07
Speaker
Actually, I would probably say that most of the time that's not the case at all.
01:21:11
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:12
Speaker
I mean, similarly with people who have schizophrenia, I think oftentimes they're characterized to be violent when that's, like, a really small, small number of people.
01:21:21
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:22
Speaker
So, back to conspiracy theory.
01:21:25
Speaker
It's likely that, you know, her story really, like, is, like, the birthplace of the QAnon people and the satanic panic people.
01:21:37
Speaker
I could see it.
01:21:38
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:21:39
Speaker
And, um, also there were people that were trying to say that Jonestown was actually a mass mind control experiment conducted by the CIA.
01:21:51
Speaker
And this was said by Joseph Hollinger, who was a former aide to the Congressman Leo Ryan.
01:21:58
Speaker
And so in 1979, he was like, this is the CIA's doing.
01:22:02
Speaker
I mean, we did talk about in the last episode how, like, Jim Jones was using tactics that were used in MKUltra.
01:22:10
Speaker
100%.
01:22:10
Speaker
So, like, I see where people are connecting the two things.
01:22:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:22:15
Speaker
Like, obviously, I mean, there's always a possibility, but I don't, yeah, I don't know.
01:22:20
Speaker
I feel like, I feel like it was just Jim Jones being a
01:22:24
Speaker
A fucker.
01:22:25
Speaker
Just being gay.
01:22:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:22:27
Speaker
Yeah.
01:22:28
Speaker
They also published this in a newspaper column claiming that the CIA was involved in the Jonestown Massacre.
01:22:34
Speaker
Not out of the realm of possibility, just another way for them to commit genocide against black Americans.
01:22:41
Speaker
That's true.
01:22:42
Speaker
And MKUltra was...
01:22:44
Speaker
doing similar shit that's true that's true i mean that's the thing right like mk ultra feels like a conspiracy and it was a real thing so how do you know yeah what's really happening out here yeah yeah anyways yeah i see how people are making those ties yeah as like conjecture
01:23:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:07
Speaker
And the same newspaper guy, Jack Anderson, speculated that the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy to Guyana, Richard Dwyer, had ties to the CIA.
01:23:19
Speaker
And in 1918, an investigation by the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, they did an investigation.
01:23:27
Speaker
They found no evidence of CIA activity in Jonestown, which –
01:23:34
Speaker
knows.
01:23:34
Speaker
Yep.
01:23:36
Speaker
Truly.
01:23:36
Speaker
Who knows?
01:23:38
Speaker
And like echoes of this kind of like
01:23:42
Speaker
I don't know, this paranoia that, that, and like distrust of the, of the state, like the way that it has influenced culture to this day.
01:23:52
Speaker
Like I was reading that, like some people are saying that MKUltra is still active and controlling celebrities.
01:23:59
Speaker
There are people who said after the shooting in Uvalde, some, some people on social media were like,
01:24:07
Speaker
MKUltra is accountable for the gunman's violence.
01:24:10
Speaker
So it's just wild.
01:24:11
Speaker
It's just wild.
01:24:13
Speaker
The way that this, like, weeps through all the things.
01:24:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:17
Speaker
It's like a ways for people to make meaning out of really fucked up events, like Jonestown.
01:24:24
Speaker
Yes.
01:24:24
Speaker
But I mean, you know, we explain why Jonestown happened, and it has explanations that are not rooted in conspiracy theory.
01:24:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:34
Speaker
That I think it's just hard for people to digest the real...
01:24:39
Speaker
Like that, oh, this person totally had the capacity without being a part of a mind control experiment to walk into a school and shoot a bunch of children.
01:24:49
Speaker
Yes.
01:24:50
Speaker
You know?
01:24:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:52
Speaker
And I don't know.
01:24:53
Speaker
I feel like, I feel like the way we're socialized, we're really prone to be like, oh, this entity is bad.
01:25:00
Speaker
Therefore they're responsible for like, yeah,
01:25:04
Speaker
x y and z like you know how we talk about like serial killers not being inherently born in particular like it's not as simple as being like this person was a bad person who did bad things and we just need to be careful for evil people it feels like the same line of logic that's like the ca is just evil and bad and therefore all of these things that happen are somehow connected to them as if you know this kind of pattern isn't intrinsic to just like
01:25:32
Speaker
the white supremacist origin of the United States, you know, like as if we don't socialize people to embrace white supremacy and dynamics of power and control.
01:25:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:45
Speaker
And like reward it.
01:25:47
Speaker
So, I mean, I think, yeah, to your point, I think it's easier for people to
01:25:53
Speaker
Make that A plus B equals C connection rather than acknowledge the conditions that allow for it.
01:26:00
Speaker
Yeah, because then the A plus B equals C means, okay, well, if we take down MKUltra, then none of this will ever happen again.
01:26:11
Speaker
Right, right, right.
01:26:11
Speaker
Whereas if you are...
01:26:13
Speaker
have to sit with the fact that these events are results of the social conditions we live in, then you also have to sit with the fact that it takes a lot more complicated solutions and a lot more complex solutions and a really just like a shift of our society as a whole, which is really hard for your brain to imagine.
01:26:33
Speaker
What could that even look like?
01:26:34
Speaker
You know?
01:26:35
Speaker
So it's easier to just be like, oh, well, that's the bad guy.
01:26:39
Speaker
So let's just like blame it on the MKUltra.
01:26:43
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:26:43
Speaker
Because if we blame it on white supremacy and patriarchy, who are we blaming?
01:26:48
Speaker
Right.
01:26:48
Speaker
And what's my role in it?
01:26:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:26:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:26:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:26:51
Speaker
Or what's my own capacity for that kind of violence?
01:26:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:26:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:26:55
Speaker
Or is it, like, you know... Yeah, it makes you, like...
01:26:59
Speaker
It makes, it distances you from it if you're like, oh, it's MKUltra.
01:27:03
Speaker
Whereas if you are to admit that it's like part of white supremacy culture, then it's much closer to you.
01:27:12
Speaker
And then you do have to kind of interrogate like how you might be reinforcing some of those values or ignoring some of those impacts.
01:27:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:27:26
Speaker
I feel like it's the same, like,
01:27:30
Speaker
I feel like it's the same attitude that allowed people like Gary Ridgway and Ted Bundy and all these like fucking serial killers, like allowed for them to just keep going.
01:27:41
Speaker
And like the, the amount of times that people said that's the person and they're just unwilling to believe that that was the person because they probably saw this man and was like, no, that's like my neighbor.
01:27:53
Speaker
That's like my coworker.
01:27:54
Speaker
That's like my uncle.
01:27:55
Speaker
That's like my brother, you know?
01:27:56
Speaker
Yeah.
01:27:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:27:58
Speaker
Yeah.
Conspiracy Theories and Human Behavior
01:28:04
Speaker
So this brings me to an academic article about conspiracy theories.
01:28:12
Speaker
There's a lot to the psychology of the conspiracy theories, and I'm not going to go all the directions, but I did find this article written in the Australasian Journal of Psychiatry.
01:28:24
Speaker
It's a peer-reviewed journal from scholars from both Australia and New Zealand.
01:28:28
Speaker
Okay.
01:28:30
Speaker
And I'm just going to read snippets.
01:28:34
Speaker
that I found.
01:28:35
Speaker
So this is an article about how conspiracy theories are conceptualized via a spectrum of trust versus distrust.
01:28:46
Speaker
And they say humans are not born to trust unreservedly.
01:28:50
Speaker
In fact, epistemic vigilance was suggested to denote a natural tendency to be cautious and guard against misinformation as a way of protecting oneself and thereby gaining an evolutionary advantage in a world that is characterized by hostility from others more than benevolence, which does make sense.
01:29:08
Speaker
And I think I would add that I don't think we are inherently unreservedly
01:29:14
Speaker
mostly hostile.
01:29:15
Speaker
I think colonization and imperialism has shifted the way that we relate to one another.
01:29:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:29:21
Speaker
So they say, in other words, humans may be quote unquote prime to be mistrustful to ensure survival.
01:29:27
Speaker
It is only through secure attachment, sensitive, caring, attuned communication and benign social context that epistemic trust can develop so that humans are able to appraise information and knowledge as accurate, reliable, and useful.
01:29:40
Speaker
Okay.
01:29:40
Speaker
Okay.
01:29:41
Speaker
Because, like, this made me think a lot about developmental trauma and how the balance of mistrust and trust is, like, really unequal when you have developmental trauma because it's, like, really hard to maintain and regain trust when your primary caregivers who are supposed to inherently be trustworthy betray you or hurt you.
01:30:03
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:30:05
Speaker
you know, I was thinking about the way we're able to set healthy boundaries and develop secure attachment to self and others.
01:30:12
Speaker
Oh, yes.
01:30:12
Speaker
I recently was invited to go on another podcast.
01:30:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's the All Humans Are Human podcast slash the Annie Allman show, which I recently went on.
01:30:24
Speaker
It's episode 136, and I talked about the creation of secure attachment to self and others.
01:30:32
Speaker
And
01:30:32
Speaker
We do talk a little bit about how like serial killers and stuff are related to that.
01:30:37
Speaker
So check it out.
01:30:39
Speaker
Similar, but you know, different vibe.
01:30:42
Speaker
Yes, we'll put it in the info.
01:30:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:30:44
Speaker
And I also, when they talk about benign social context, that also stood out to me because I think that benign social context is a privilege afforded to people closest to the dominating class, you know?
01:30:57
Speaker
And then I was thinking about like, wow, this is why CBT, for example, has its limitations.
01:31:02
Speaker
Like not only is it considered an evidence-based practice for predominantly like white, straight, cis men and women, I feel like people get gaslighted into being like,
01:31:13
Speaker
into thinking that what they have, what they're concerned about isn't a real concern.
01:31:17
Speaker
But like, if you've, if you're like a person from a marginalized community who has regularly received like harm via, you know, the intersections of race, class, gender, it's not unreasonable for you to, um,
01:31:39
Speaker
be cautious that that's going to come up again.
01:31:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:31:43
Speaker
Because it is regularly shown itself as a threat.
01:31:46
Speaker
Yeah, for sure.
01:31:47
Speaker
CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and it's, like, one of the, like, top... Yeah....quote-unquote, like, interventions.
01:31:57
Speaker
Like, insurance is most likely to pay for CBT.
01:32:00
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:01
Speaker
Or CBT, like, stuff.
01:32:03
Speaker
And it pretty much says that, like, if you change your thoughts, you can change your behavior.
01:32:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:09
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:10
Speaker
And, like, I think, I mean... Which is... That's not untrue.
01:32:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:15
Speaker
It's just incomplete.
01:32:15
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:16
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:32:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:17
Speaker
It is incomplete.
01:32:18
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:32:19
Speaker
And it's, like, not a... Not for everything.
01:32:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:23
Speaker
I feel like they just throw CBT at everything.
01:32:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:25
Speaker
I mean, you can't CBT your way out of oppression, you know?
01:32:27
Speaker
No.
01:32:28
Speaker
Like, bro, what the fuck?
01:32:29
Speaker
No.
01:32:29
Speaker
I mean, you can't therapy your way out of oppression, but you certainly can't CBT your way out of oppression.
01:32:34
Speaker
Definitely not.
01:32:34
Speaker
Definitely not.
01:32:35
Speaker
And the impacts of that.
01:32:36
Speaker
Yeah.
01:32:36
Speaker
Okay.
01:32:37
Speaker
So...
01:32:38
Speaker
Moving on.
01:32:39
Speaker
This article then says, an optimal balance between epistemic vigilance and epistemic trust is one of the hallmarks of healthy development.
01:32:47
Speaker
If this balance is achieved and maintained, the person is unlikely to become too naive and therefore more easily exploited or too mistrustful or even paranoid and therefore unable to benefit from genuine, enriching human connection.
01:33:01
Speaker
Okay.
01:33:02
Speaker
The article goes on to say,
01:33:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:33:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:33:51
Speaker
which is usually associated with personality disturbance, which I imagine they're talking about personality disorders, which we've talked about as personality structures as a response to trauma.
01:34:00
Speaker
See the Catherine episode.
01:34:01
Speaker
Yeah.
01:34:03
Speaker
A tendency to relate to others with mistrust and rigidly adhere to certain beliefs also characterizes many people with conspiracy beliefs.
01:34:11
Speaker
So...
01:34:14
Speaker
Getting to the conspiracy part.
01:34:16
Speaker
While most authors use the term conspiracy beliefs and conspiracy theories interchangeably, some make a distinction between the two.
01:34:23
Speaker
Conspiracy beliefs is the term preferred in this article because conspiracy theories ultimately refer to one or more beliefs.
01:34:30
Speaker
Furthermore, the term conspiracy theories is often misused, especially when the aim is to disqualify the opponents on the grounds that they espouse such theories and that these theories are inherently wrong.
01:34:41
Speaker
Yeah, like, people are like, aliens is a conspiracy theory when obviously it's not.
01:34:47
Speaker
See all of our episodes about aliens.
01:34:52
Speaker
And all the government, you know, trials that they're doing and hearings they're doing right now about it.
01:34:59
Speaker
I mean, sometimes it's a conspiracy theory.
01:35:01
Speaker
Sometimes it's a conspiracy theory, but, you know.
01:35:04
Speaker
We still don't have real proof.
01:35:06
Speaker
Hey, I tend to disagree with that.
01:35:09
Speaker
That's true.
01:35:10
Speaker
see the episode about cattle mutilations.
01:35:13
Speaker
That's true.
01:35:13
Speaker
What happened to them?
01:35:15
Speaker
Also Stefan!
01:35:17
Speaker
Shoutouts to Stefan.
01:35:22
Speaker
Yeah, we have one, like, full episode about a UFO.
01:35:28
Speaker
Experience.
01:35:29
Speaker
Encounter.
01:35:29
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:35:30
Speaker
It's called Okay, Yankee Boys, I'll Help You.
01:35:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:35:33
Speaker
And it's compelling.
01:35:34
Speaker
I was like, wow.
01:35:36
Speaker
What is this but a UFO from another place?
01:35:41
Speaker
Yeah.
01:35:41
Speaker
Because the technology is wild as fuck.
01:35:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:35:43
Speaker
Anyways.
01:35:44
Speaker
There's also a documentary series called UFO that came out last year.
01:35:50
Speaker
Goes through all of the evidence of UFO in history.
01:35:54
Speaker
Yeah.
01:35:55
Speaker
I saw that.
01:35:56
Speaker
I saw.
01:35:57
Speaker
Did I see that or is he another one?
01:35:58
Speaker
I don't know.
01:35:58
Speaker
There's another one that was pretty compelling too.
01:36:00
Speaker
Yeah.
01:36:00
Speaker
Okay.
01:36:02
Speaker
Whatever.
01:36:04
Speaker
Anyways.
01:36:05
Speaker
They're probably out here.
01:36:06
Speaker
They are.
01:36:07
Speaker
They're probably.
01:36:08
Speaker
Maybe they're listening to podcasts.
01:36:09
Speaker
Hello.
01:36:15
Speaker
So several components are common to most definitions of conspiracy beliefs and theories as follows.
01:36:23
Speaker
One, conspiracy beliefs purport to provide a causal explanation.
01:36:27
Speaker
X is caused by Y with an underlying and often unapparent causal pattern.
01:36:33
Speaker
which is what we were just talking about.
01:36:34
Speaker
Yeah.
01:36:35
Speaker
Two, the causal explanation assumes a plan developed in secrecy, hence the notions of a plot and conspiracy.
01:36:42
Speaker
Due to their presumed secrecy and the associated imperviousness to any testing of their veracity, it may be difficult to either prove or disprove the accuracy of many conspiracy beliefs, which contributes to their persistence.
01:36:56
Speaker
Which reminds me a lot of like what we talked about with urban legends and how urban legends thrive because we can't really find the origin.
01:37:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:37:03
Speaker
And it's like, you know, where did it come from?
01:37:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:37:07
Speaker
Three, more than one person is involved in the underlying activities because the very notion of conspiracy rules out actions of a single person.
01:37:15
Speaker
Certain powerful groups are usually presumed to take part in conspiracies.
01:37:19
Speaker
Four, there's usually an assumption of malevolent intentions by the conspirators with the goal of causing harm or at least disruption.
01:37:28
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:37:30
Speaker
Not all conspiracy beliefs are false in the sense that some conspiracies subsequently turn out to be true, e.g.
01:37:36
Speaker
a notion that the CIA financed covertly or indirectly some modern artists to gain advantage during the Cold War, or... Okay, Ultra!
01:37:46
Speaker
However, the focus in this article is on the conspiracy beliefs that are cross-sectionally unfounded to most people.
01:37:52
Speaker
The spectrum of mistrust-related phenomena was characterized with the degree of mistrust increasing from healthy doubt and skepticism all the way out to persecutory delusions, which they have a table on here that I'm going to try to convey.
01:38:08
Speaker
Healthy doubt and skepticism is said to be an acceptance of information or assumption if it can be proven to be correct, foundation of much of the human knowledge and basis of all scientific inquiries, accountability of institutions, and a democracy—
01:38:22
Speaker
And the requirement to prove guilt in the court of law are influenced by a healthy doubt and skepticism as described by this, by, by these psychiatry people, which, you know, take that as you're going to take that.
01:38:35
Speaker
And then they move forward to conspiracy sympathy, which is the tendency to have an understanding for people's conspiracy beliefs and even to validate them without agreeing about their beliefs.
01:38:45
Speaker
So, you know, I don't believe in that, but I can see how you do.
01:38:49
Speaker
And I respect your beliefs.
01:38:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:38:51
Speaker
Then there's excessive doubt and skepticism, suspiciousness.
01:38:56
Speaker
They say interference as a result of doubt and skepticism outweighs the benefit, general tendency to be mistrustful and a feature of paranoid personality disorder.
01:39:04
Speaker
And then they move on to conspiracy belief, which is an unfounded, fixed belief held with strong conviction about harm, usually inflicted by powerful groups on the community or other group of people, with preserved insight that belief differs from the belief
01:39:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:39:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:39:50
Speaker
And then the last one they list is conspiracy mentality, general conspiracy mindset, conspiracy worldview, persecutory delusion.
01:40:00
Speaker
So this is like beyond the...
01:40:02
Speaker
like a singular belief and more like this is how you live your life.
01:40:06
Speaker
This is your worldview.
01:40:08
Speaker
Tendency to espouse multiple conspiracy beliefs, regardless of whether or not they are related.
01:40:13
Speaker
And even when they are mutually incompatible, false and fixed belief held with strong conviction about being singled out for harm by one or more persons with little to little or no insight that the belief differs from the belief that most people have about the same matter.
01:40:27
Speaker
And with reasons for having the belief usually being implausible.
01:40:32
Speaker
This reminds me a lot.
01:40:33
Speaker
I listened to this podcast.
01:40:35
Speaker
I don't remember what it's called, but it's about, it's a podcast about ordinary people becoming radicalized and doing wild shit.
01:40:43
Speaker
And they covered this lady who ended up like becoming the head of some like hyper religious Christian cult.
01:40:51
Speaker
And it like included like reptilian shit and like,
01:40:56
Speaker
She was foraging for these crystals that she insisted were going to fend off these reptilian alien people, and Jesus and God were somewhere weaved in there.
01:41:10
Speaker
It's wild.
01:41:12
Speaker
But, like, there were so many times where there would be contradictions.
01:41:16
Speaker
Like, she would predict a thing and it wouldn't happen.
01:41:18
Speaker
And she'd find a way to explain a way why it didn't happen.
01:41:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:41:22
Speaker
And there was just really no telling her to go any other way.
01:41:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:41:27
Speaker
So this article goes on and says, while the threat or harm in conspiracy beliefs usually comes from a powerful mistrusted group and relates to the community or another group of people, threat or harm in persecutory delusions originates from one or more individuals.
01:41:41
Speaker
And the target is usually the person with the delusions who then feel singled out.
01:41:47
Speaker
People with conspiracy beliefs usually share their belief with others and have a need for the beliefs to be validated, especially by a disempowered, silent minority.
01:41:56
Speaker
It reminds me a lot of Trumpy QAnon people who I think are mostly middle class slash, like, poor white people who keep on saying, like, we're oppressed.
01:42:09
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:42:10
Speaker
feels very tied in with that.
01:42:12
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:13
Speaker
This search or need for quote-unquote like-minded people generally does not characterize individuals with persecutory delusions, with a notable exception of those with folie abduo.
01:42:24
Speaker
Back to shared psychosis.
01:42:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:27
Speaker
Thunderman episode.
01:42:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:29
Speaker
Which nobody cares about.
01:42:30
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:33
Speaker
People with conspiracy beliefs know that they are a minority, whereas those with persecutory delusions are either unaware that others do not have the same or similar beliefs or are indifferent about the beliefs of other people.
01:42:46
Speaker
Okay.
01:42:48
Speaker
Okay.
01:42:49
Speaker
Yeah.
01:43:13
Speaker
An evolution from non-delusional conspiracy belief to a delusion of persecution by conspirators is possible, suggesting that a boundary between non-psychosis and psychosis might be fluid longitudinally, if not cross-sectionally.
01:43:26
Speaker
Finally, conspiracy beliefs may appear on a continuum of plausibility from those that are more plausible, relatively common in the general population, and very unlikely to be associated with mental illness, to those that are highly implausible, relatively rare in the general population, and suggestive of a mental disturbance such as psychosis.
01:43:48
Speaker
So this is like, you know, a psychiatric journal.
01:43:51
Speaker
So the language is highly pathologizing and incomplete around like social conditions, right?
01:43:57
Speaker
They're not really talking about that.
01:43:59
Speaker
They're just like noting what they've found in a really like, I don't know, I feel, it feels very individual to me.
01:44:05
Speaker
But it gave me a lot of information around, I don't know, to help me wrap my head around like conspiracy theories and like how people...
01:44:28
Speaker
That makes sense.
01:44:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:44:29
Speaker
And how a lot of these are like overlapped with like the pathologizing of, um, you know, magical thinking.
01:44:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:44:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:44:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:44:35
Speaker
Um, schizophrenia and what have you.
01:44:39
Speaker
All of those things.
01:44:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:44:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:44:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:44:41
Speaker
I mean, and also, you know, when you're, when they were talking about, um, when explanations are given that are like inconsistent, um,
01:44:49
Speaker
And I'm like, the government does shit like that all the time.
01:44:52
Speaker
So it really does create an environment of uncertainty, especially over the past few years with the pandemic.
01:44:58
Speaker
People are really – government's really been fucking with people's heads so much.
01:45:02
Speaker
So it makes sense that, like, Bull's response to it are these, like, really intense and implausible conspiracy theories because –
01:45:11
Speaker
There's such a culture of uncertainty that has been developed by the government giving so much mixed messaging.
01:45:20
Speaker
And they oftentimes do that.
01:45:24
Speaker
Yeah, they do.
01:45:25
Speaker
They also talked about how the internet just makes it a lot easier to find the like-minded people that you want to find.
01:45:33
Speaker
Yeah, because what is it called?
01:45:35
Speaker
Confirmation bias.
01:45:36
Speaker
You just search for things to confirm what you believe in, and it's really easy to do that with the internet.
01:45:41
Speaker
Yes, yes.
01:45:43
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a bit on conspiracy.
01:45:47
Speaker
Hmm.
01:45:50
Speaker
I'm going to keep talking.
01:45:54
Speaker
This is just how it worked out this time around.
01:45:57
Speaker
So I'm sorry if you're tired of listening to me, but it's going to be a little longer.
LSD's Impact on Culture and Counterculture
01:46:03
Speaker
So the result of MKUltra obviously expanded way beyond the experiments themselves.
01:46:13
Speaker
And in reality, we will never really know all of the ways it has permeated itself.
01:46:18
Speaker
so many people's lives and like what families inherited that shit.
01:46:23
Speaker
But another unintended consequence of MK ultra is that they introduce LSD to the public.
01:46:29
Speaker
And so they were, it was, and LSD was really instrumental in developing the counterculture in the 60s.
01:46:36
Speaker
And, like, the people who volunteered in these experiments, like, at the universities, a lot of them did find it very pleasurable.
01:46:44
Speaker
And then they told their buddies about it.
01:46:46
Speaker
Some of those people included Ken Kahneman.
01:46:49
Speaker
Ken Kesey, who is the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
01:46:53
Speaker
He also is known for his hippie-dippie cross-country school bus trip.
01:46:59
Speaker
I read a book about that.
01:47:00
Speaker
Did you?
01:47:01
Speaker
What is the book?
01:47:02
Speaker
Ken Kesey and his band of merry pranksters was what they called.
01:47:07
Speaker
And there's a book.
01:47:09
Speaker
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the book written by this journalist who was with them during this trip.
01:47:16
Speaker
It's a wild book.
01:47:18
Speaker
I bet.
01:47:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:47:19
Speaker
Just wild.
01:47:20
Speaker
I found an interview from Terry Gross, who does Fresh Air, but like a long time ago, which was interesting.
01:47:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:47:27
Speaker
She's really been out here.
01:47:29
Speaker
But yeah, she was talking to him.
01:47:30
Speaker
He's on another planet.
01:47:32
Speaker
Yeah, he actually, that story is wild.
01:47:35
Speaker
But then at a certain point, he was in prison and he got his friends to send him LSD in prison.
01:47:42
Speaker
And then he had, he did trips in prison, but you know, he wanted to do that.
01:47:46
Speaker
So a lot of this is just about choice.
01:47:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, clearly choice and race.
01:47:53
Speaker
That too.
01:47:54
Speaker
Also, another one of those people's Robert Hunter, who was the lyricist for the Grateful Dead.
01:48:01
Speaker
And then he, you know, this article called him a great purveyor of LSD culture.
01:48:06
Speaker
Another like well-known person was Allen Ginsberg, who was a poet who,
01:48:11
Speaker
who was also very into LSD and told his buddies about it.
01:48:15
Speaker
And him and his friends are really responsible for starting the beatnik movement.
01:48:22
Speaker
He was a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, and he wrote a lot about opposing militarism, economic materialism, sexual repression, and
01:48:33
Speaker
And then he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drug, sex, multiculturalism, hostility, bureaucracy, and the openness to Eastern religions.
01:48:44
Speaker
Wikipedia says.
01:48:45
Speaker
Classic.
01:48:45
Speaker
Yes.
01:48:46
Speaker
Always.
01:48:47
Speaker
These men always really love the Eastern religions.
01:48:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:48:50
Speaker
Okay.
01:48:52
Speaker
He's best known for his poem, Howell, in which he denounced what he saw, the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States.
01:49:01
Speaker
And there was like a whole thing where they, where the SF police and U.S. customs seized Howell, his book,
01:49:08
Speaker
in 1956 they seized it and then it attracted a lot of publicity in 1957 when it became subject of an obscenity trial because it described like gay sex at a time where sodomy laws made that illegal which kind of like overlaps with the lavender scare stuff we shared in the last one yeah yeah but uh judge clayton w horn ruled that howl was not obscene
01:49:33
Speaker
saying, would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid, innocuous euphemisms?
01:49:41
Speaker
Which, you know, speaks to his privilege as a white man.
01:49:44
Speaker
I'm like, wow, this really just worked out for him.
01:49:47
Speaker
Not that that wasn't traumatic to have to, you know, many things can be true at the same time.
01:49:53
Speaker
LSD being, like, available to the public also, like, created some subgroups
01:50:02
Speaker
of people.
01:50:03
Speaker
So there was like camps of people who like were all about seeking self-awareness.
01:50:08
Speaker
I'm thinking about the guy who was like, tune in to turn on, tune in, drop out.
01:50:17
Speaker
Um, which I took a class on theories of personality and learned a lot about how it was just a bunch of white people who became extremely like egotistical, just spending their whole, all their time, just like,
01:50:29
Speaker
tripping out and trying to find themselves.
01:50:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:50:32
Speaker
Totally.
01:50:32
Speaker
During a time where there's so much fucking shit happening.
01:50:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:50:35
Speaker
What the hell?
01:50:36
Speaker
Yeah.
01:50:37
Speaker
You mean tune out.
01:50:38
Speaker
Yeah.
01:50:39
Speaker
Tune out out.
01:50:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:50:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:50:41
Speaker
There was subgroups that were all about being like, like a...
01:50:45
Speaker
that embodied expressivity, and then also a group of people who were trying to understand life through use of drugs.
01:50:54
Speaker
So there was, like, all of these subgroups in the counterculture that were super prominent and shaped, like, the summer of love time in the 1960s.
01:51:04
Speaker
It influenced music, but it also...
01:51:09
Speaker
some cults and new religions in this medium article by neurotech at berkeley so like over the course of 35 years doctors psychiatrists and government and military officials administered administered drugs like lsd to unsuspecting civilians in order to plant messages in their brain carry out extreme behaviors and in some cases kill on specific cues and
01:51:33
Speaker
This ties in specifically to one aspect of the definition of cults, inducing powerful subjective experiences in order to open the mind to extreme beliefs.
01:51:43
Speaker
So it's like interesting.
01:51:45
Speaker
They're like, I want to use this for mind control, but they're using something that's like designed to be expansive.
01:51:52
Speaker
Right?
01:51:52
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:51:54
Speaker
It's like the opposite.
01:51:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:51:56
Speaker
It's no surprise, coincidentally, that the rise of cults and the new religious movements in the 1960s accompanied the rise of psychedelics.
01:52:03
Speaker
In the midst of the counterculture and the summer of love in San Francisco, Charles Manson, who would later become the murderous cult leader of the Manson family, would move drugs and distribute LSD at gatherings, which gained him a number of followers.
01:52:16
Speaker
In Australia, around the same time, Anne Hamilton Byrne, a yoga instructor and wealthy suburbanite,
01:52:23
Speaker
Oh, he's these white lady yoga instructors.
01:52:25
Speaker
What's up with that?
01:52:28
Speaker
Operated a New Age cult in secrecy for over two decades.
01:52:31
Speaker
She claimed she was a reincarnation of Jesus Christ and preached a hodgepodge of the world's religions and miscellaneous esoterica, including UFOs.
01:52:41
Speaker
A disciple...
01:52:42
Speaker
Psychiatrist Howard Whitaker helped her take over a private psychiatric hospital in Kew where he and other members recruited patients to join the cult and administered LSD to cult members.
01:52:55
Speaker
Oh my goodness gracious.
01:52:57
Speaker
LSD played a pivotal role in the cult in both recruitment and maintenance.
01:53:02
Speaker
Jesus.
01:53:03
Speaker
Yes.
01:53:04
Speaker
And also there's some like rumors about how some people believe that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was subject to MKUltra experiments during his time at Harvard.
01:53:13
Speaker
Wow.
01:53:13
Speaker
Yeah.
01:53:14
Speaker
So, you know, a lot of unintended consequences.
01:53:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:53:18
Speaker
Tended consequences.
01:53:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:53:19
Speaker
Like what happens when you like mix all of these things together?
01:53:25
Speaker
Some fucked up shit.
01:53:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:53:26
Speaker
Clearly.
01:53:27
Speaker
So that's what I got.
01:53:29
Speaker
Well, you know, this was all happening at a time where LSD was new.
01:53:36
Speaker
and not illegal.
01:53:38
Speaker
So how did it get to a point where, you know, it was illegal?
01:53:41
Speaker
Clearly, all of this contributed to it.
01:53:45
Speaker
Interestingly, controversy around LSD began in the early 1960s when people like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert began conducting their own experiments at Harvard, which were like not very professional.
01:53:58
Speaker
But I just find that interesting because I'm like, you think that their experiments weren't professional and you think what MKUltra was?
Drug Policies and Racial Disparities
01:54:06
Speaker
like hello um but they received heavy criticism for the experiments um and he stated they did not believe that the experiences were beneficial to the participants but the cia did a great job right the hypocrisy is wild it's like oh we're allowed to do that i mean we we talked about this the cia is heavily hypocritical they're like the nazis are bad but we're gonna hire them
01:54:32
Speaker
But we're taking notes.
01:54:33
Speaker
Right.
01:54:34
Speaker
Anyways, after... They were both, like, dismissed from Harvard because of this.
01:54:38
Speaker
And then Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out was happening.
01:54:42
Speaker
And there was, like, a lot of negative publicity.
01:54:45
Speaker
And then, like...
01:54:47
Speaker
Basically, in 1961, which was before all this was happening, the U.S. signed and ratified the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which regulated cannabis, opium, and cocaine, but not the classic psychedelics.
01:55:02
Speaker
There was an interview later on in the late 60s when, like, the Controlled Substances Act was being written.
01:55:11
Speaker
And this was during Nixon administration.
01:55:13
Speaker
And one of Nixon's top advisors, John Ehrlichman, admitted that the Nixon administration's motive for starting the entire drug war was both...
01:55:23
Speaker
racist and culturist, quoting, what's his name?
01:55:26
Speaker
John Ehrlichman.
01:55:27
Speaker
He says, you want to know what the war on drugs was really about?
01:55:31
Speaker
The Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people.
01:55:38
Speaker
You understand what I'm saying.
01:55:39
Speaker
We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana, the Blacks, quote, with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
01:55:54
Speaker
We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
01:56:00
Speaker
Did we know we were lying about the drugs?
01:56:02
Speaker
Of course we did.
01:56:04
Speaker
So...
01:56:04
Speaker
my god they fucking knew that they were using like the war on drugs as a way to basically just incarcerate people who were
01:56:14
Speaker
speaking out so then in 1970 the controlled substances act which exists to this day was created and it made psychedelics schedule one drugs categorizing them as having no currently accepted medical use um and this effectively shut down research into lsd until the late 90s um when public interest in it was kind of reignited
01:56:40
Speaker
And basically, the Control Substances Act resulted in severe punishments for the use, possession, and distribution of psychedelics with sentences similar to those of violent crimes, which, again, like, is so hypocritical because the harm that MKUltra, like, committed upon, like, probably thousands and thousands of people and probably the impacts of it are still felt today.
01:57:02
Speaker
And we don't even know what those impacts are.
01:57:05
Speaker
And no one faced any consequences for that.
01:57:08
Speaker
Whereas the Control Substances Act was like, you know, became a thing.
01:57:13
Speaker
And then tons of individuals who were like using this probably not in a harmful way were being incarcerated and like traumatized through incarceration.
01:57:24
Speaker
The hypocrisy is really wild and aggravating.
01:57:27
Speaker
I hate it here.
01:57:28
Speaker
It also resulted in research on these substances becoming very expensive, so most people just stopped doing it.
01:57:35
Speaker
And then in 1971, the UN Convention on Psychotropic Drugs was updated and the US exported its ideology globally, which is why drug laws are so similar worldwide.
01:57:47
Speaker
It's because the Control Substances Act was basically taken to the UN and then turned into the UN Convention on Psychotropic Drugs and all of these different countries signed it.
01:57:56
Speaker
LSD is still currently Schedule 1 on the Control Substances Act, which is the most heavily criminalized category of drugs.
01:58:04
Speaker
Schedule 1 drugs are considered to have high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use.
01:58:09
Speaker
Though when it comes to LSD, as we talked about in the previous episode, there's literally no toxicity level for it.
01:58:15
Speaker
There's significant evidence that contrary to both of those facts, even though like
01:58:22
Speaker
You know, it's a both end of like LSD is the substance that can be really used to torture and abuse individuals.
01:58:28
Speaker
And at the same time, there's drugs that are like way more harmful than LSD that are scheduled lower or not scheduled at all.
01:58:35
Speaker
For example, alcohol, you know.
Resurgence in Psychedelic Research and Inclusivity
01:58:38
Speaker
So that like brings me to kind of the last thing I'm going to talk about today, which is kind of the resurgence of like psychedelic research in the past sort of like 10 years, 20 years that maybe a lot of people have heard of because especially in the past few years, it's been in the media a lot.
01:58:57
Speaker
So currently there's a lot of research being done in more ethical ways, obviously, but
01:59:02
Speaker
The therapeutic potential of psychedelics like mostly MDMA, ketamine, and psilocybin are kind of at the forefront of that.
01:59:12
Speaker
And in 2019, Denver became the first city in the U.S. to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms.
01:59:17
Speaker
And Oakland, Santa Cruz, Seattle, and four cities in Massachusetts have also done the same.
01:59:23
Speaker
Oregon actually decriminalized psilocybin and legalized its use in psychotherapy in 2020.
01:59:29
Speaker
And ayahuasca, mescaline, and psychedelic mushrooms were decriminalized in Washington, D.C.
01:59:33
Speaker
last year.
01:59:34
Speaker
However, disproportionate criminalization still remains.
01:59:41
Speaker
And the ACLU found in a 2020 study that in every state that has legalized or decriminalized marijuana possession, Black people are still more likely to be arrested for possession than white people.
01:59:53
Speaker
The stigma attached to Black drug users under the war on drugs also mean that white people have the privilege of publicizing psychedelic use, as is an example from the 60s, with lesser consequences than minorities, and therefore some participants may feel excluded from these experiences.
02:00:12
Speaker
Sonia Faber, who's a clinical psychologist who's written about psychedelic-assisted therapy, states, for Black people, the punishment for using illicit substances is so much higher than
02:00:22
Speaker
So culturally, we've been told to stay far away from those things because you don't get a second chance if you get in trouble with drugs.
02:00:28
Speaker
And psychedelics are still illegal under federal law, even if these states and cities have changed their stance on it.
02:00:36
Speaker
Monica T. Williams and Dana Strauss, who I mentioned earlier –
02:00:40
Speaker
I did a study in 2018 kind of looking at who were the participants of the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy studies that have been happening more recently.
02:00:49
Speaker
And they found that across 18 trials, 82% of the participants were white, while just 2.5% were black.
02:00:58
Speaker
A lack of inclusion by an overwhelmingly white field of researchers that goes directly against federally mandated efforts to report and recruit diverse samples in clinical trials.
02:01:10
Speaker
Monica Williams states in a 2019 interview about talking about recruitment challenges.
02:01:16
Speaker
So this is what I was mentioning way at the beginning of the episode.
02:01:19
Speaker
She states, because of the criminalization of all of these substances and the fallout from the war on drugs, African Americans face a lot of danger when it comes to using drugs or even talking about them in a way that isn't true for white people.
02:01:32
Speaker
Black people have to be a lot more careful, and particularly those of us, for example, who are clinicians and are licensed.
02:01:39
Speaker
She also talks about the long history of medical racism that contributes to Black hesitancy to get involved in psychedelic trials.
02:01:46
Speaker
Quoting Dana Strauss, often, just in trying to access healthcare, Black people are routinely met with bias, and these same biases exist in mental healthcare.
02:01:55
Speaker
In 2021, a study led by Williams found that people of color in North America report improvements in racial trauma and mental health symptoms following psychedelic experiences and that trauma-related symptoms linked to racist acts were lowered in the 30 days after an experience with psilocybin, LSD, or MDMA.
02:02:13
Speaker
So there's a potential for healing that these substances can bring.
02:02:19
Speaker
to communities of color, but there's like such a loaded history of abuse that's tied to them as we've talked about today.
02:02:28
Speaker
Spent a lot of time talking about today.
02:02:31
Speaker
So that really makes it difficult to even recruit people to be participating in the studies because of the amount of fear and mistrust they have like towards the medical system in general.
02:02:44
Speaker
A psychiatric nurse practitioner and co-founder of MindLumen, Quasi-Aduse, says he hopes there will be alternative ways of offering therapy to those who need it most.
02:02:57
Speaker
Quoting him, "...no matter how amazing these tools, such as MDMA, are, if we don't deal with the issues of the system itself, all we do is widen health disparities."
02:03:08
Speaker
For those who do want access to psychedelics, getting their way into clinical models is going to be really difficult unless you're designing for it.
02:03:17
Speaker
If you can design for the people who are the least able to access these services, you offer a system that's accessible for literally everybody.
02:03:26
Speaker
So there's people that are trying to change this, which is very cool.
02:03:30
Speaker
Psychedelic research, like most Western science and medicine, has historically been and continues to be an extremely white-dominated field.
02:03:39
Speaker
In addition to what I just talked about, which is like ethical concerns around excluding certain groups of people from research, it also means that the treatments may not be as safe, effective, or accessible for those same groups of people.
02:03:53
Speaker
This article, which kind of talks about, you know,
02:03:57
Speaker
the history of psychedelic research and how it connects back to right now.
02:04:03
Speaker
says that it's imperative to find a way for the field to become inclusive.
02:04:07
Speaker
It's imperative that the field is inclusive of historically excluded and exploited groups, particularly Black and Indigenous communities.
02:04:15
Speaker
First and foremost, inclusivity means genuine, non-tokenized inclusion of Black, Indigenous, and people of color across all levels of research processes, from participants to principal investigators.
02:04:27
Speaker
Okay.
02:04:28
Speaker
also means treating all participants and experts in accordance with the principles outlined in the Belmont report with basic trust and respect, as well as publishing on culturally inclusive topics.
02:04:40
Speaker
Another important part of inclusivity involves divesting our institutions and ourselves of Eurocentric worldviews that value Western philosophies above all other ways of knowing and healing.
02:04:52
Speaker
This piece is fundamental to honoring indigenous communities through reciprocity.
02:04:57
Speaker
Finally, it's critical that the current and future psychedelic researchers, especially white researchers, recognize and take responsibility to address the research abuses perpetrated against Black and Indigenous peoples and their ongoing impacts on these communities.
02:05:15
Speaker
So this is from an article that is called the CIA exploited incarcerated Black Americans in race for mind control agent.
02:05:27
Speaker
published in July 2021.
02:05:29
Speaker
And yeah, it's related to the research paper I mentioned earlier on.
02:05:37
Speaker
So all of that being said, it's fucked up.
02:05:43
Speaker
But there's ways for it to not be fucked up anymore.
02:05:47
Speaker
If people are to, you know, admit to the, like, very racist and harmful origins of this research and try to center, like...
02:06:02
Speaker
the healing of historically marginalized and traumatized groups of people and afford them easy access to these potentially really amazing forms of treatment.
02:06:14
Speaker
Yeah.
02:06:14
Speaker
I'm also just thinking about how like psychedelics have been like gentrified to like these plants, like,
02:06:24
Speaker
psilocybin and ayahuasca, yeah, all of those things are like spiritually significant to different communities.
02:06:34
Speaker
And then now they've been one criminalized and then like, yeah, commodified for white people.
02:06:41
Speaker
Like white people go all the time for their ayahuasca journey.
02:06:44
Speaker
Oh yeah, totally.
02:06:45
Speaker
They have been, it's been very commercialized.
02:06:48
Speaker
And I mean, there's a lot of actually literature in the past few years.
02:06:51
Speaker
That's like kind of about the commercialization of,
02:06:54
Speaker
And how capitalism is like, you know, impacting the field of psychedelic research because it's a predominantly white dominated field.
02:07:03
Speaker
So of course it would.
02:07:04
Speaker
Right.
02:07:05
Speaker
And the exclusion of like indigenous people from this is especially fucked up because their practices were criminalized in a way that they weren't able to engage in their spiritual practices with these plant medicines anymore.
02:07:17
Speaker
And then now what like white people are able to use them in clinical settings.
02:07:22
Speaker
Like, yeah.
02:07:23
Speaker
Yeah.
02:07:24
Speaker
So.
02:07:26
Speaker
Is that?
02:07:28
Speaker
That's all.
02:07:28
Speaker
That's all I have.
02:07:29
Speaker
Wow.
02:07:30
Speaker
Okay.
02:07:31
Speaker
Well, I think that's it.
02:07:33
Speaker
That's it for MKUltra.
02:07:34
Speaker
Wow.
02:07:38
Speaker
We're going to follow up with some more info, but... Yeah, I mean, clearly there's a lot of stuff here that people can dig in on more if they're interested.
02:07:50
Speaker
Like, we definitely touched on a lot of different things.
02:07:55
Speaker
And if people are curious, for example, about what is the research that's happening right now, I encourage you...
02:08:01
Speaker
to take a look at that.
02:08:02
Speaker
One really cool organization that centers indigenous and people of color is the Chacruna Institute.
02:08:09
Speaker
So I would encourage you to check out their work.
02:08:11
Speaker
I would also encourage you to read the research of the people I mentioned, Dana Strauss, Monica T. Williams.
02:08:18
Speaker
Yeah.
02:08:19
Speaker
Awesome.
02:08:21
Speaker
There's that.
02:08:22
Speaker
Hope you enjoyed.
02:08:23
Speaker
Hope you learned, learned a lot about the horrific history, the United States.
02:08:31
Speaker
A little dot on the long timeline of fuckery that is the United States.
02:08:36
Speaker
But anyway.
02:08:37
Speaker
Take care of yourselves.
02:08:41
Speaker
And yeah, we'll catch you next time.
02:08:44
Speaker
Yep.
02:08:45
Speaker
Bye.
02:08:46
Speaker
Bye.
02:08:47
Speaker
Thanks for listening and for supporting us.
02:08:50
Speaker
You can find us on Instagram and Facebook at Unpacking the Eerie, on Twitter at Unpack the Eerie, and on our website at www.unpackingtheerie.com.
02:09:02
Speaker
Yes, and special thanks to all of you who subscribe to our Patreon.
02:09:08
Speaker
As we've mentioned before, we do all the research for this, we edit, and we don't have any sponsorships or ads.
02:09:17
Speaker
So Patreon support is super helpful in just keeping this project sustainable, keeping the Buzzsprout subscription going, paying for the website, all the stuff.
02:09:26
Speaker
So thank you so much.
02:09:28
Speaker
Sari, Liz, Clifton.
02:09:31
Speaker
Jill, Victoria, and Lindsay.
02:09:33
Speaker
Lauren, Vivian, Valerie.
02:09:36
Speaker
Micheline, Montana, Katrina.
02:09:38
Speaker
Raina, Allie, Jake.
02:09:40
Speaker
Drithi, Daphne, and Katie.
02:09:42
Speaker
Vern, Meredith, H, and Vince.
02:09:45
Speaker
To April, Aaron, and Ellen.
02:09:47
Speaker
And to Brittany, Alyssa, and Meredith R. Yay, thank you so much.
02:09:52
Speaker
Thank you.