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17. Psychedelic Nightmare Pt. 1: Fucked Up Set & Setting
6 Plays3 years ago
DARK HISTORY: MKULTRA, Intro/History
In our second series, we explore our first ever conspiracy theory, that is absolutely wild & incredibly true. Project MKULTRA was a secret CIA project that took place between the early 1950s to the early 1970s, in which hundreds of tortuous experiments were conducted on (mostly) unsuspecting human subjects. The project, Sidney Gottlieb, aimed to develop strategies and identify drugs (such as LSD), that could be used for the purposes of “mind-control” (read: how can we psychologically torture, force confessions and manipulate the consciousness of the human mind?). In the first part of this multi-part series, we dig in to Allan Memorial, one of the many institutions where these experiments took place & set the stage for MKUltra. Learn about how the Cold War and the Red Scare motivated the creation of this project, the discovery of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and its unique characteristics and of course, the project’s lead “Poisoner in Chief”, Sidney Gottlieb.
content warning: gun violence, torture, homophobia, racism, drugs
Uvalde/Buffalo Shooting Resources & References
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FYI: we've recently unpublished older episodes as we are in process of re-editing for a smoother flow & audio experience.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
Accidental LSD Overdose
00:00:04
Speaker
Yeah, they like snorted something that they thought was cocaine.
00:00:07
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It was actually pure LSD and it was 100 to 700 times the normal to listen.
00:00:12
Speaker
Oh, fuck.
00:00:13
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So they invested like 1,000 to 7,000 micrograms of it.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:20
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Hi, I'm Akshi.
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And I'm Shayna.
00:00:23
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And you're listening to Unpacking the Eerie.
00:00:25
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A podcast that explores the intersections of our dark and morbid curiosities through a social justice lens.
00:00:32
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You're welcome.
00:00:33
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You're welcome.
Social Issues Discussion
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Before we get started, here's our usual content warning.
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This episode will include discussions that include torture, homophobia, and racism.
00:00:52
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All right.
00:00:53
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Hello.
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Hello.
Impact of Mass Shootings
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I guess before we get started, we wanted to just like acknowledge a few things.
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Today is May 29th.
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This might be coming out later.
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But you know, the past couple weeks, there's just been a barrage of shootings.
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And you know, I think I'm not alone when I say like, I really can't.
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Stop thinking about all of these like families and survivors that will be impacted for the rest of their lives.
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In Buffalo, New York, in Irvine at the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church, and most recently Uvalde, Texas.
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I'm just thinking about how these people and these children just died, like, terrified doing everyday things that they should be able to feel safe doing.
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You know, going to the grocery store, going to connect with community, just trying to go to school.
Solidarity with Marginalized Communities
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In communities that already face violence of racism and classism, xenophobia, and, like, other forms of violence from the state.
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And I'm just sending a lot of love and healing and solidarity to those of you who see family members and friends and people you love in the faces of the victims and the survivors of these shootings.
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My heart's really with you.
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It hurts and is enraged with you.
Desensitization to Violence
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Yeah, I mean...
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I was talking about this the other day that like, I'm a pretty empathetic person, which makes sense, because I'm a social worker, you know.
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But I've just realized over the past couple of years that I don't have the same emotional responses.
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when things like this happen that I used to and like that's kind of like scary for me because clearly I have me and I'm not alone in this have developed like a defense of not being able to like feel the grief of like such shocking and violent acts such as the ones that you just mentioned.
Government Priorities: Abortion vs. Gun Control
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It's just so jarring to me to see this happen at the same time that, like, they're trying to ban abortions across the country and it's just, like, it's not clicking at all.
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I don't know.
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It's really... It's really scary.
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It's really scary.
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on a lot of levels.
American Exceptionalism Myth
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And I think a lot of people would be like, people are always like, this is not America.
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And I'm like, what are you talking about?
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Like, yes, it is.
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You know, I saw this thing on Instagram, which I wanted to read.
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It's from Sarah Lee, whose Instagram handle is Sarah, by Sarah Lee.
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The myth of American exceptionalism is one paid for in blood and
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Never mind what makes America exceptional is also what makes it crude.
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The casual violence, the apathy from leadership.
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America spends billions of dollars on propaganda and warfare to feel great, only to turn a blind eye on the very real suffering of the people whose backs built the American dream.
Revisiting American History
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What we need now more than ever is a radical reimagining of society.
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Gun violence, abortion rights, climate change are all interconnected.
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To be better, we must first abolish the myth that America was ever great to start with.
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I guess some of what we're going to be starting to talk about today is relevant to that because it's one of many very dark stories that are part of American history.
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And what I've come to learn as an adult is that much of what I learned about America, especially not growing up here, it was like entirely false lies, propaganda.
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And this is going to uncover a lot of stuff for people.
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And it's going to be the first in a few part series that
00:05:26
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Do you have anything more to share before we shift?
Support for Violence-Affected Communities
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I was just thinking that maybe we can collect some resources, like collect the GoFundMes and the free mental health resources that are being offered right now in the communities that were impacted.
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Yeah.
00:05:47
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So we can collect those for you and put them in the description.
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Yeah.
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And even if this is like
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Coming out three weeks later.
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It's a great time to donate because people have historical amnesia and decide they just want to keep going with their lives.
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Yeah.
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Or are forced to.
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That's true.
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Yeah, because capitalism doesn't take time for pause or grief or transformation or any of that.
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Or healing.
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Yeah.
MKUltra Experiments
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Anyways, that's all.
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We shift.
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We're going to shift.
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Into the topic of today.
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Yes.
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It's dark as fuck, but not in the way that you're used to with this podcast.
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Yeah.
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Different dark.
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Different dark.
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During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds and...
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And in response to this, the CIA began its own program called MKUltra, and they wanted to find a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.
CIA's Mind Control Fears
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The American government really could not fathom that people could put their communities before their own personal interests.
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They're like, it must be mind control.
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I'll go deeper into the Cold War in this, but also I was reading an article about how some prisoners of war ended up wanting to stay in Korea.
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Yeah.
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after they were prisoners of war and america was like they were brainwashed they were saying all the same shit over and over and over and that could be true you know could it also be true that people go elsewhere and realize oh fuck america's really out here being the worst and not want to come home anyway like with this particular person i don't know i think he was tortured but i feel like
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There were probably times where people went to war and realized how fucked it was and didn't want to come back.
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And just, I'm sure they used this, like, one instance of brainwash and was like, oh, look at all of our soldiers being brainwashed into thinking that America's not great.
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Okay.
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It just kind of reminds me of, you know, when white people are like, aliens...
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invented the pyramids how did they get there it was so long ago and I'm just like you're so racist that you can't even fathom that non-white people could create such intricate systems that you don't understand that it had to be aliens yeah I mean the Indus Valley civilization was also a thing so long ago they had plumbing irrigation systems
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Bye.
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Bye.
00:08:46
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So, MKUltra, they're wanting mind control.
Allen Memorial Institute Experiments
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They think their enemies are controlling the minds of their soldiers, and they want to be the ones first to, you know...
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basically control the whole fucking world which we'll get to later before we like go in to mk ultra we have to go back a little bit in history um because it sets the groundwork the foundation for what's to come um and we're going over to montreal quebec canada
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at the Allen Memorial Institute, which used to be a mansion, and then I guess the family that owned it sold it or gave it to Royal Victoria Hospital in 1940, and then it was renamed Allen Memorial Institute in 1943.
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So this is a psychiatric hospital and research institute.
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It was heralded as a very prestigious, high-class, top-of-the-line psychiatric hospital.
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People thought that this was groundbreaking, and that's how they put it out there.
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And when they introduced it, too, they called it a voluntary hospital.
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psychiatric hospital that people had freedom to just like go and check in and check out as they pleased and a lot of people who came in there were like i don't know they were suffering from like a variety of things that were that could have been they were pretty mild i don't know i don't know how else to describe it like sure yeah
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You know, like depression.
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Like, I'm feeling a little sad.
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And they didn't have a name for, like, postpartum, which is what I think a lot of women who went in there were experiencing.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And also, there was this one guy who had, like, a nerve that was freaking out on one side of his face, and he just wanted to...
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get this nerve taken care of because he realized that it was a psychosomatic issue.
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Oh, gotcha.
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And I guess the only treatments that they were offering at the time is cutting the nerve.
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And then, you know, half your face is, like, paralyzed.
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Yeah, so he was like, I don't want to do that.
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And so he went to this, like, this psych hospital thinking that they had a better solution.
00:11:00
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Sure, sure.
00:11:00
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So let me tell you about this fucking psych hospital.
00:11:03
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It's horrible.
00:11:04
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The guy who's kind of in charge of all of the things...
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Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron.
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a Scottish-born American psychiatrist.
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And he was like, he had an impressive background.
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People thought he was like hot shit, you know?
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He was the head of the Canadian and American Psychiatric Associations, and even like he had leadership positions at the World Psychiatric Association at some point.
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So this man had a ton of power, and people really trusted what he had to say.
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And then he was the first director of the Allen Institute.
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Some of the things that would go on here when people entered is extreme electric shock.
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They induced comas into people for weeks, sometimes months.
00:11:52
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Jeez.
00:11:52
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Yeah.
00:11:53
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They would make people pee in their bed instead of going to the bathroom because they wanted to promote incontinence.
00:12:00
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And they wanted to do this because they wanted to bring that person back to a place of childhood.
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Completely break down all of their... Yes.
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Yes.
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They wanted to wipe their memory.
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They did all these experiments to see if they could break someone down.
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This happened to over 100 patients, people who went in being like, oh, I want some help, like a little depressy.
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They're like induced comas.
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Yeah.
00:12:24
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And they also injected them with LSD to brainwash them and led them through like really horrific scenarios.
00:12:33
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Like people reported just crying for hours and hours and hours and hours on end.
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There was this one lady who was like, I thought my bones were melting away.
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They did this without their consent, and no one really had an idea of what psychedelics were at the time.
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So they were really fucking confused and scared and reverting back to childhood, literally.
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One person said after three weeks, she said, I didn't know my children, I didn't know my husband or my sister.
00:13:00
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I had to be toilet trained.
00:13:02
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Oh my god.
00:13:03
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Yes.
Velma Orlikow's Story
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And then they also would play these tapes all day long.
00:13:08
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Oh yeah.
00:13:09
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You know, it's just like interesting because that was something that I was reading about because I came across this person too.
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They call it like psychic driving where they repeat a statement on loop for like hours, hundreds and thousands of times.
00:13:25
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And now as you're talking about it, I was like, oh my God, that's what Jim Jones did.
00:13:28
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Yeah.
00:13:30
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Jim Jones did do that.
00:13:32
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Yeah.
00:13:33
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Like playing the shit on the loudspeaker.
00:13:36
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Yes.
00:13:36
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24-7.
00:13:36
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So we could see where he gets some of his ideas from.
00:13:39
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Oh my god.
00:13:40
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The...
00:13:43
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The legacy of colonial violence is so vast.
00:13:47
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Because this is in the 40s, 50s?
00:13:49
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This is 40s, 50s.
00:13:50
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40s, 50s, continuing through the 60s.
00:13:52
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Yeah, and then Jim Jones is like in the 60s, 70s.
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So, yeah.
00:13:57
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You know, the timelines are going to overlap at some point because we're going to go into some people who were subject to these things.
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So I'm going to tell you a story.
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about one person who went through this brainwashing experiment.
00:14:13
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This is an article from The Guardian, and it's written by Ashifa Kassam in Toronto.
00:14:21
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Sarah Ann Johnson had always known the broad strokes of her maternal grandmother's story.
00:14:26
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In 1956, Velma Orlikow checked herself into a renowned quote-unquote
00:14:31
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Canadian Psychiatric Hospital, the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, hoping for help with what we now know as postpartum depression.
00:14:38
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All the people who I listened to interviews, they were like, we didn't have a name for it.
00:14:42
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We had no idea.
00:14:43
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I was just in deep sadness after I had my baby.
00:14:47
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She was in and out of the clinic for three years, but instead of improving, her condition completely deteriorated, and her personality underwent jarring changes.
00:14:57
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More than two decades passed before Johnson and her family had an explanation, and it was much stranger than any of them could imagine.
00:15:04
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In 1977, it emerged that the CIA had been funding experiments in mind control brainwashing at the Institute as part of the North America wide project known as MK Ultra.
00:15:14
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So this is where it connects, because in the middle of all of this shit that he did.
00:15:22
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The CIA approached Cameron through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a research foundation, and one of the front organizations they funneled money through.
00:15:35
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And they encouraged him to apply for a grant, which he did, and then he quickly received a ton of money.
00:15:41
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From January 1957 to September 1960, the CIA gave Cameron $1.
00:15:46
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60,000 US dollars, which is equivalent now to a little more than 500,000 today.
00:15:55
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He did not know that it was being funded by the CIA, which doesn't matter much because they targeted him because they knew that he liked to do experiments like this.
00:16:05
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Yes.
00:16:05
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And so they were like, oh, this dude would be a good person to do these studies for us.
00:16:10
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But yeah, they were trying to like front...
00:16:12
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a lot and not make it seem like the CIA was doing these experiments.
00:16:16
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So some people who were part of the studies knew that it was through the CIA and some people like this dude didn't.
00:16:22
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Doesn't make it better, but like... Yeah.
00:16:25
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He was like, this is from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.
00:16:29
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Yeah.
00:16:29
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Okay.
00:16:33
Speaker
Anyways.
Dr. Cameron's Unethical Practices
00:16:34
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One funny thing that I actually heard at a podcast was the way that they found out about him particularly is because this, like, investigative journalist who was, like, going through all of these CIA documents after, like, using the Freedom of Information Act.
00:16:52
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They had redacted a ton of stuff on it, but they were, like...
00:16:56
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Bad at redacting.
00:16:57
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And he figured out this doctor's name because they were bad at redacting it.
00:17:02
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Nice.
00:17:04
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Classic.
00:17:06
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Back to the story.
00:17:08
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So, Orly Cow was one of several hundred patients who became unwitting subjects of these experiments in Montreal in the late 1950s and early 60s.
00:17:18
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It's almost impossible to believe, said her granddaughter, Sarah Ann Johnson.
00:17:22
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After her grandmother died, the Canadian artist began reading on the Institute, delving into Orly Cow's journals and court documents.
00:17:30
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Some of the things he did to his patients are so horrible and unbelievable that it sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
00:17:35
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Patients were subjected to high voltage electroshock therapy several times a day, forced into drug induced sleeps that could last months and injected with mega doses of LSD.
00:17:47
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Mega doses.
00:17:49
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:17:50
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After reducing them to a childlike state, at times stripping them of basic skills such as how to dress themselves or tie their shoes, Cameron would attempt to reprogram them by bombarding them with recorded messages for up to 16 hours at a time.
00:18:03
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First came negative messages about their inadequacies, followed by positive ones, in some cases repeated up to half a million times.
00:18:10
Speaker
Oh, goodness.
00:18:13
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He couldn't get his patients to listen to them enough, so he put speakers in football helmets and locked them on their heads.
00:18:21
Speaker
This is literally clockwork orange.
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:24
Speaker
This must be the inspiration for that movie.
00:18:28
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They were going crazy, banging their- This is her granddaughter talking.
00:18:35
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They were going crazy, banging their heads into walls, so he figured he would put them in a drug-induced coma and play the tapes as long as he needed it.
00:18:45
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Yes.
00:18:45
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This man was head of the Psychiatric Association of multiple countries and the entire world.
00:18:50
Speaker
The history of psychiatry is so fucked up.
00:18:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:52
Speaker
It is gnarly.
00:18:53
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Yeah.
00:18:53
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Oh my gosh.
00:18:57
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I remember I, so my bachelor's in psychology.
00:19:01
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Me too.
00:19:02
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I mean, I think all my friends got their bachelor's in psychology.
00:19:06
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I mean, not all of them, but a lot of them.
00:19:08
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A lot.
00:19:09
Speaker
And I remember I took a class on the, like,
00:19:12
Speaker
controversial issues in psychology um it was like one of the core classes and we talked about the history of psychiatry and how fucked up it was and what they did to people yeah like they really lobotomies yeah bro in the what in the world looks like an ice pick and they're hammering into their heads yeah
00:19:37
Speaker
It's really fucked up.
00:19:38
Speaker
Like, what?
00:19:39
Speaker
And then bloodletting?
00:19:40
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I remember reading specifically, like, they opened up some early psychiatric hospitals and they were like, oh, well, if you just kind of drain their blood, they get, like, calm.
00:19:49
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I'm like, yeah.
00:19:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:52
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They're about to pass out.
00:19:54
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Because you're supposed to have blood in your body, bro.
00:19:59
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I was like, what in the actual world?
00:20:01
Speaker
Who is giving these men license to do these things?
00:20:06
Speaker
Probably no one, and they're just doing it.
00:20:08
Speaker
That's true.
00:20:09
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Yeah, they're giving themselves license.
00:20:12
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They are.
00:20:13
Speaker
They are.
00:20:13
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And then you also have Lindas out there doing wild ass shit, calling it science.
00:20:18
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I can't.
00:20:19
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I cannot.
00:20:19
Speaker
Anyways.
00:20:24
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Okay.
00:20:25
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Along with intensive bouts of electroshock therapy, Johnson's grandmother was given injections of LSD on 14 occasions.
00:20:33
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She said it made her feel like her bones were melting.
00:20:35
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She would say, I don't want these.
00:20:38
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And doctors and nurses would say to her, you're a bad wife.
00:20:40
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You're a bad mother.
00:20:41
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If you wanted to get better, you would do this for your family.
00:20:44
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Think about your daughter.
00:20:48
Speaker
Orly Cow died when Johnson was 13 years old.
00:20:51
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Her experience and the profound imprint it left on her family has influenced Johnson's artwork.
00:20:57
Speaker
So she's an artist.
00:20:59
Speaker
Um...
00:21:03
Speaker
I knew even at a very young age that my grandma was not like other grandmothers.
00:21:08
Speaker
She had a hair trigger for nerves and anger.
00:21:10
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If someone bumped into her or if we were in a restaurant and someone spilled something on her, she would just explode.
00:21:16
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She wouldn't hurt anybody.
00:21:17
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She would just scream and yell and it would take hours to calm her down.
00:21:21
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Johnson was close to her grandmother, often spending afternoons at her home while her parents worked.
Impact on Orlikow's Family
00:21:26
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They would sit on the couch and watch TV together, surrounded by piles of books and newspapers.
00:21:30
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Years later, Johnson found out that the experiments had wreaked havoc on Orlikow's brain.
00:21:35
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It could take her three weeks to read a newspaper, months to write a letter, and years to read a book.
00:21:45
Speaker
Jesus.
00:21:46
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Mm-hmm.
00:22:08
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Her mother was 33 at the time, reeling from the loss of her first child and showing signs of depression.
00:22:14
Speaker
Back at this time, Dr. Cameron, he was this miracle psychologist, said Steele.
00:22:18
Speaker
Ugh.
00:22:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:20
Speaker
He was supposed to do wonders with people with depression or mental health issues.
00:22:24
Speaker
Who says?
00:22:25
Speaker
I don't know.
00:22:26
Speaker
That's everybody said.
00:22:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:28
Speaker
They treated him like a god, which I'm sure he loved.
00:22:31
Speaker
And he was playing god, right?
00:22:32
Speaker
He was.
00:22:33
Speaker
He was like, I'm gonna erase your personality.
00:22:36
Speaker
Yes.
00:22:37
Speaker
I'm gonna break you down to nothing.
00:22:39
Speaker
You don't have an identity.
00:22:40
Speaker
No relationships.
00:22:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:42
Speaker
What the fuck?
00:22:44
Speaker
Steele's mother, Jean, was put into chemically induced sleep once for 18 days and a second time for 29 days.
Family Transformations from MKUltra
00:22:51
Speaker
She was subjected to rounds of electroshocks, injections of experimental drugs, and seemingly endless bouts of recorded messages.
00:22:58
Speaker
They say it was torture for human beings.
00:23:00
Speaker
Human torture, said Steele, who was four years old when her mom was hospitalized.
00:23:07
Speaker
What they attempt to do is erase your emotions.
00:23:10
Speaker
They strip you of your soul.
00:23:12
Speaker
This is her words.
00:23:14
Speaker
After three months at the institution, her mother returned home.
00:23:17
Speaker
The treatments had taken a toll on her memory and left her riddled with nervousness and anxiety.
00:23:21
Speaker
She wasn't able to talk to me about life and regular stuff.
00:23:24
Speaker
She wasn't able to joke and laugh.
00:23:28
Speaker
At times, her mother would interrupt conversations to utter statements out of the blue, which Steele believes were the recorded messages that she'd been exposed to.
00:23:35
Speaker
She would blurt out something like, we must do the right thing.
Victims' Fight for Compensation
00:23:40
Speaker
Cameron, the psychiatrist behind the experiments, died in 1967 of a heart attack while mountain climbing.
00:23:45
Speaker
Okay.
00:23:48
Speaker
But recent decades have seen various attempts by former patients and their families to hold the Canadian government and the CIA accountable, which is fair.
00:23:55
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:23:58
Speaker
In 1992, the Canadian government, which had provided grants from several agencies to fund Cameron's research, offered compensation payments of $100,000, which is $78,000 in U.S. dollars, to 77 former patients of the Institute who had been reduced to a childlike state.
00:24:15
Speaker
In 1992... So many years later.
00:24:19
Speaker
Hundreds of others, including Steele's mother, were denied compensation at times because they were deemed to not have been damaged enough by the experiments.
00:24:28
Speaker
You should not have been damaged at all.
00:24:29
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:24:30
Speaker
Steele, who launched a legal challenge against the government in 2015, settled last year.
00:24:36
Speaker
Or this article was written in 2018, so 2017.
00:24:39
Speaker
Was when they settled.
00:24:41
Speaker
Receiving a $100,000 payment in Canadian dollars in exchange for signing a non-disclosure agreement.
00:24:48
Speaker
Oh, my god.
00:24:50
Speaker
You know, see, everyone, what's up with everyone's perception of Canada as if they aren't also just, like, colonizing assholes, too?
00:24:59
Speaker
Okay.
Artistic Expression of Trauma
00:25:00
Speaker
Well, art became Johnson's means of processing her family's painful history.
00:25:05
Speaker
A 2009 series uses a squirrel to represent her grandmother at times after Orly Kauss once said that LSD injections made her feel like a squirrel trapped in a cage.
00:25:14
Speaker
A 2016 video installation shows Johnson wearing a mask from an old photo of her grandmother trying to prepare a meal.
00:25:21
Speaker
The doctor took her apart and put her back together, so it's an impossible task, said Johnson.
00:25:26
Speaker
Velma Orlikow's experience at the Montreal Institute left deep scars, but her fight for justice is a source of deep pride for her granddaughter.
00:25:35
Speaker
It's that mix that Johnson aimed to capture in a 2009 piece that painted over an image of her grandmother smiling as she balanced her two grandchildren in her lap.
00:25:45
Speaker
turning her grandmother's hands into vines and tendrils that wrap tightly around the children.
00:25:50
Speaker
Those vines, they're just a fact.
00:25:52
Speaker
They're not dark.
00:25:53
Speaker
It's not bad, she said.
00:25:55
Speaker
It seems strange to say this, but because of the horrific ordeal that my grandma went through and then going after the CIA, I grew up feeling like I'm from a family that stands up for things.
00:26:05
Speaker
And so this is a part of me now, and it's how I see the world.
00:26:10
Speaker
So that's like one story.
00:26:13
Speaker
These fuckers really just like ruined all these people's lives.
00:26:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:17
Speaker
I mean, during a time too that like, I mean, mental health stigma exists now.
00:26:22
Speaker
I think, I mean, to be someone who was like, honestly, I'm feeling a little depressed and to go forward and try to get mental health care.
00:26:30
Speaker
I feel like that's like a significant thing to do in the fucking fifties.
00:26:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:35
Speaker
And then they went there.
00:26:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:38
Speaker
It gets worse because MKUltra and experiments like this were a continuation of experiments that were done in Nazi camps and experiments that were done by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.
MKUltra's Dark Connections
00:26:50
Speaker
And in the Nuremberg trials, Rudolf Hess was on trial for obviously committing atrocious acts in Nazi camps as a Nazi general.
00:27:01
Speaker
What was he?
00:27:02
Speaker
I don't even care.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:03
Speaker
Whatever.
00:27:04
Speaker
Whatever.
00:27:05
Speaker
He was horrible and he was buddy buddies with Hitler.
00:27:08
Speaker
He was like trying to claim amnesia that he didn't remember anything.
00:27:13
Speaker
And you know who was on the team of psychiatrists who got to decide whether or not he had amnesia?
00:27:21
Speaker
Dr. Donald Ewan Cameron?
00:27:24
Speaker
Yes, absolutely.
00:27:26
Speaker
So he's sitting there in the Nuremberg trials, listening to all this shit.
00:27:31
Speaker
Taking notes!
00:27:32
Speaker
Taking fucking notes.
00:27:34
Speaker
Because he was doing the same shit.
00:27:37
Speaker
And the hypocrisy of the United States to be like, oh, we came in and we shut down concentration camps and we saved the fucking day.
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah, so...
00:27:51
Speaker
That's fucked.
00:27:52
Speaker
So this man was horrible and he did all that shit.
00:27:56
Speaker
Someone said, before I pass it on to you, someone was talking about in an article how it sounded like techniques outlined in a brave new world, which I don't know if you've read that.
00:28:06
Speaker
Yeah, I have.
00:28:07
Speaker
Okay.
00:28:08
Speaker
aldous huxley aldous yeah i didn't who was actually friendos with who i'm just about to talk about really yeah oh wow what a what a connection yeah for folks who don't know it's a 1932 dystopian novel i was like wow i didn't realize it was 1932 whoa yeah me neither he was really talking about some shit
00:28:30
Speaker
a long time ago that feels relevant today.
00:28:34
Speaker
But anyways, it was a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley about the dangers of rising technology and mass population control, you know, compliance and obedience.
00:28:44
Speaker
And, uh,
00:28:45
Speaker
I mean, he wasn't wrong.
00:28:47
Speaker
I feel that way about Ray
Aldous Huxley's Utopian Vision
00:28:48
Speaker
Bradbury, too.
00:28:48
Speaker
I'm like, that bitch knows.
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:51
Speaker
It's cool to also read Aldous Huxley's last book ever that he wrote, which is Island.
00:29:01
Speaker
It's very interesting.
00:29:04
Speaker
I feel like you've talked about this before.
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah, I have.
00:29:06
Speaker
I have.
00:29:07
Speaker
It's about a kind of utopian society that lives on this island.
00:29:12
Speaker
And this journalist goes there to kind of cover what life is like.
00:29:16
Speaker
It's a very, very communal society where, for example, children don't have parents.
00:29:23
Speaker
Their parents have multiple sets of parents that take care of them.
00:29:27
Speaker
And when they go through, well, like puberty, they have like ceremony where they use plant medicine to like honor the transition through puberty, like all this kind of stuff.
00:29:45
Speaker
But underlying the whole time in the book is that these like colonizers are trying to come in because there's like these resources on the island that they want.
00:29:58
Speaker
So it's a cool book.
00:29:59
Speaker
It was the last one that he ever wrote before he passed away.
00:30:01
Speaker
He passed away in 1963.
00:30:01
Speaker
So yeah.
00:30:02
Speaker
He's an interesting fellow.
00:30:08
Speaker
Although, I mean, he's a white man and that very much sounds like stuff indigenous people have been saying forever.
00:30:14
Speaker
Oh, yeah, for sure.
00:30:15
Speaker
Yeah, totally.
00:30:16
Speaker
The people in the island are indigenous people.
00:30:20
Speaker
So both and because he's out here in like when 1932 or whatever, using his like access to a platform.
00:30:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:31
Speaker
So there's that.
00:30:34
Speaker
Yeah, apparently this book is supposed to be the utopian counterpart to Brave New World.
00:30:41
Speaker
Yeah, but you're right.
00:30:42
Speaker
He talks about this utopian society, which is very much based in already existing tons of indigenous communities.
00:30:50
Speaker
It's supposed to be located somewhere where Indonesia is.
00:30:54
Speaker
Well, this is a perfect time to pass it on to you and give people a little more idea about, like, what the fuck LSD?
LSD's Discovery and Effects
00:31:02
Speaker
What's going on with LSD?
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:04
Speaker
I'm sure there's some people listening.
00:31:06
Speaker
You know, everyone has heard of it one way or the other, but probably most people, unless you've really dug into it yourself, don't know, like, actual true facts about it because there's just, like,
00:31:19
Speaker
so much socio-political cultural baggage associated with it part of which is like the mk ultra stuff and these experiments for sure lsd lysergic acid dithyla dithyla
00:31:39
Speaker
The surrogic acid dithalamide, commonly referred to LSD or acid, is actually the best known and most researched psychedelic drug of all time.
00:31:51
Speaker
It was discovered by Albert Hoffman in Sandoz Labs in Basel, Switzerland in 1938.
00:31:59
Speaker
He created it while trying to create a stimulant to treat respiratory and circulatory problems.
00:32:10
Speaker
And in 1938, when he synthesized it for the first time, he didn't know if it's psychedelic effects.
00:32:15
Speaker
And when it was like tested on like
00:32:17
Speaker
animals like rats and mice it didn't seem to show that effect so it was put to the side and then in 1943 in april he returned to it synthesized another batch and accidentally got some absorbed into his skin and he says quote that he sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated like condition characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination and
00:32:46
Speaker
So he accidentally took some and then he was like, what the heck?
00:32:50
Speaker
So a couple of days later, he was like, let me intentionally take some and see actually what happens.
00:32:54
Speaker
So he intentionally dosed himself with 250 micrograms at 4.20 p.m.
00:33:01
Speaker
on April 19th, 1943.
00:33:04
Speaker
He started to feel like it was going to be an intense experience.
00:33:06
Speaker
So he asked his assistant to help him get home.
00:33:10
Speaker
And because it was like wartime, cars were prohibited.
00:33:14
Speaker
So they had to bike home.
00:33:16
Speaker
And as he's biking home, he's like coming up.
00:33:19
Speaker
And so April 19th is now known as Bicycle Day, which is like the discovery of LSD Day.
00:33:24
Speaker
On his 100th birthday in 2006, he was at a symposium in
00:33:31
Speaker
in basal switzerland and he shares about lsd he also wrote this book called lsd my problem child probably because all this bullshit happened like after you know he said it gave me an inner joy and open-mindedness a gratefulness open eyes and an internal sensitivity for the miracles of creation i
00:33:54
Speaker
I think that in human evolution, it has never been as necessary to have the substance LSD.
00:34:00
Speaker
It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.
00:34:03
Speaker
So people who were, you know, you're listening to what Shana said and you're like, how can this substance have this impact while also this impact?
00:34:16
Speaker
Because those seem like really far into the spectrum, right?
00:34:19
Speaker
But if you know about LSD, it'll make sense.
00:34:23
Speaker
why that happened so getting into the science of it the science so it's derived from rye fungus and is a 5-ht or serotonin receptor activator um it deactivates the regulation of serotonin so that there's just like more active serotonin in the brain
00:34:47
Speaker
There's 15 serotonin receptors in our brain, and the one that LSD prefers is the subtype involved with cognitive processes in the prefrontal cortex.
00:35:00
Speaker
LSD is, like, really wild because it's super active at exceptionally small doses.
00:35:08
Speaker
So, like,
00:35:10
Speaker
He ingested 250 micrograms the first time that he took it.
00:35:15
Speaker
And that's two and a half times the regular dose.
00:35:19
Speaker
But it's all like you can still feel it at like 20 micrograms.
00:35:23
Speaker
And that's like very, very small compared to like any other kinds of, you know, drugs that you can think about.
00:35:30
Speaker
It's usually taken orally, sometimes as droplets, more commonly on blotter paper, and it's absorbed through the tongue and then swallowed.
00:35:38
Speaker
The common dose for it is 50 to 150 micrograms.
00:35:43
Speaker
And people say that the effects include deep introspection, can have feelings of euphoria.
00:35:51
Speaker
The effects are difficult to categorize because they impact people really, really differently based on a lot of different variables.
00:35:59
Speaker
A lot of people's experiences with it have tied LSD to be known for its ability to catalyze mystical or spiritual experiences that facilitate feelings of interconnection.
00:36:11
Speaker
So it increases sensory perception.
00:36:13
Speaker
For example, like if you're listening to a song, some people will say like, oh, wow, this is the first time I'm ever listening to the song because it like sounds entirely different.
00:36:21
Speaker
You can experience a sharpened sense of smell or taste or touch or
00:36:27
Speaker
People also say that they experience synesthesia, which is like when your senses kind of merge.
00:36:32
Speaker
So like when sounds have a smell, stuff like that.
00:36:36
Speaker
People experience vivid hallucinations, including the sense of time changing.
00:36:45
Speaker
So minutes can feel like hours.
00:36:48
Speaker
or the opposite way around.
00:36:49
Speaker
Real or imagined objects appear to be moving, so flowing patterns and shapes, both with eyes open or closed.
00:36:57
Speaker
You can have unusual thoughts and speech, personal insight, reflection.
00:37:02
Speaker
But individual reactions to these perceptual changes are very much based on set and setting, which I'll go into.
00:37:13
Speaker
So people can also have like negative reactions to this, including paranoia, anxiety, fear of death and overwhelming feelings.
00:37:20
Speaker
So what is the set and setting?
00:37:23
Speaker
Setting talks about the external circumstances that a person is in.
00:37:27
Speaker
So like the environment that they're in, the people that they're with.
00:37:31
Speaker
And then set talks about like their mental state when they're going home.
00:37:37
Speaker
into this experience.
00:37:39
Speaker
So if we're thinking about Albert Hoffman's set and setting, he's like with his personal assistant who he trusts and he is biking in nature and then is home feeling comfortable, feeling safe.
00:37:56
Speaker
And so that's the environment that he's doing this in where he has a pretty positive experience.
00:38:00
Speaker
Whereas like the people that you're talking about are already in a state of like mental distress and then are being psychologically tortured in all of these other ways.
00:38:13
Speaker
Not even counting LSD.
00:38:15
Speaker
They're in like a very clinical hospital setting.
00:38:18
Speaker
And so there's just like an environment of fear and anxiety and confusion that is just like enhanced.
00:38:23
Speaker
So if you just like think about it at the most basic level, like LSD is going to extremely enhance what your pre-existing condition is.
00:38:32
Speaker
So if your pre-existing condition is pretty chill, you're set in setting, then you're probably going to have a pretty chill good time.
00:38:39
Speaker
But if your pre-existing setting is like in these experiments that you didn't choose to be part of and also like you've never experienced anything like this before,
00:38:50
Speaker
Like, that's obviously going to trip the fuck out of you.
00:38:52
Speaker
That sounds so fucking horrible.
00:38:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:56
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:38:57
Speaker
A nightmare.
00:38:59
Speaker
So, talking a little bit about, like, LSD's capacity for, like, harm.
00:39:06
Speaker
There's actually no lethal dose of LSD has ever been documented.
00:39:11
Speaker
So, no one has ever died specifically just from, like, taking too much damage.
00:39:17
Speaker
acid or taking too much LSD.
00:39:19
Speaker
It's one of the least toxic drugs.
00:39:21
Speaker
And recent studies have shown lower rates of mental health disorders and suicide from people who have used LSD by their choice.
00:39:29
Speaker
It's not addictive, doesn't lead to compulsive use due to being really long and intense and being mentally and physically challenging.
00:39:37
Speaker
The human body also builds a tolerance to it really fast, which means that like you have to take a lot more to have the same effect.
00:39:44
Speaker
Um,
00:39:46
Speaker
Very quickly.
00:39:47
Speaker
So like if you took 100 micrograms and then took 100 micrograms the next day, you probably wouldn't feel it at all because your body just builds a tolerance to it.
00:39:56
Speaker
Some examples like of times where people took way too much LSD.
00:40:01
Speaker
To just like kind of show how this isn't really a toxic drug.
Accidental LSD Overdoses Insight
00:40:06
Speaker
There was one report of how eight people mistook LSD for cocaine.
00:40:12
Speaker
And they ended up, yeah, they like snorted something that they thought was cocaine.
00:40:15
Speaker
It was actually pure LSD.
00:40:18
Speaker
And it was 100 to 700 times the normal dose.
00:40:21
Speaker
Oh, fuck.
00:40:21
Speaker
So they invested like $1,000.
00:40:24
Speaker
They all suffered comatose states, hyperthermia, vomiting, respiratory problems.
00:40:33
Speaker
But like within a couple of days, they had all recovered with hospital treatment and had no residual effects after that.
00:40:40
Speaker
They probably didn't have any pre-existing conditions.
00:40:43
Speaker
They probably never did acid again.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yes, probably.
00:40:46
Speaker
There's also this, like, paper that came out in 2019 where they covered these three different case studies of, like, LSD overdoses.
00:40:54
Speaker
One of them was this 15-year-old girl also took, like,
00:40:58
Speaker
a thousand micrograms of LSD.
00:41:01
Speaker
And she had previously had a diagnosis of bipolar two and had a history with like psychotic symptoms too, and had been hospitalized like twice before this.
00:41:11
Speaker
And this was like at a summer solstice party.
00:41:13
Speaker
And she wasn't the only one who ended up taking too much because the supplier pretty much just like did math wrong.
00:41:20
Speaker
And the things that were supposed to have one dose ended up actually having 10 times more.
00:41:25
Speaker
normal dose.
00:41:26
Speaker
She like had a lot of erratic behavior.
00:41:30
Speaker
They thought that she had a seizure, so they took her to the hospital.
00:41:34
Speaker
But then after like 12 hours, like her dad came and she was like, it's over.
00:41:39
Speaker
And he thought she was talking about the LSD overdose, but she actually meant that her bipolar disorder was cured.
00:41:47
Speaker
And in the months following that, her father and her like therapist's
00:41:52
Speaker
observed that she, like, had seemed to be completely recovered from all of her mental health concerns after the accidental overdose.
00:42:01
Speaker
It's like she didn't have symptoms of bipolar or depression anymore.
00:42:05
Speaker
That is wild.
00:42:06
Speaker
For the subsequent 13 years until she gave birth to a child and then had postpartum.
00:42:12
Speaker
Holy shit.
00:42:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:13
Speaker
That's wild.
00:42:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:15
Speaker
So, like, this was obviously not on... None of these are on purpose, but she, like, had this, like, positive...
00:42:20
Speaker
effect.
00:42:21
Speaker
And then a similar thing happened to this 49 year old woman who had Lyme disease and like was on morphine because of like chronic pain.
00:42:29
Speaker
And she did, it was kind of a similar situation where she thought it was cocaine.
00:42:33
Speaker
It was like 500 times normal dose.
00:42:35
Speaker
She was like vomiting a ton for this next couple of days, but her roommate kind of just like sat with her through it.
00:42:42
Speaker
And then she reported that her pain was gone the next day.
00:42:46
Speaker
So she stopped using morphine, didn't have any
00:42:49
Speaker
withdrawal symptoms even though like she had been taking it for like years her pain did return but she and she restarted the morphine but to a much smaller amount and then she started microdosing which is just funny I'm like this woman really like took 500 times a normal dose of LSD but then it was like I'm gonna microdose to help with my chronic pain afterwards um
00:43:11
Speaker
And she did that for three years where she was taking a little bit of morphine and microdosing.
00:43:16
Speaker
And then she stopped all of her pain meds because her pain had been so significantly reduced.
00:43:21
Speaker
Wow.
00:43:21
Speaker
And she did not have withdrawal symptoms after stopping the morphine.
00:43:25
Speaker
That's incredible.
00:43:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:27
Speaker
What the fuck?
00:43:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:29
Speaker
So this is just to say like this substance is just like people's experiences with it can be extremely variable.
Set and Setting Importance
00:43:36
Speaker
There's no toxicity level for it that has ever been discovered to this day, even though people have overdosed on it pretty significantly.
00:43:46
Speaker
This is not to say, obviously, that there haven't been many cases of adverse psychological reactions to LSD that have led to people
00:43:55
Speaker
you know, trying to kill themselves or, you know,
00:43:59
Speaker
developing psychosis that lasts a lot longer.
00:44:02
Speaker
So there's this thing that's pretty rare, but it's called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder or HPPD.
00:44:10
Speaker
And it's characterized by a continual presence of sensory disturbances, most often visual, continuing for months or years following psychedelic use.
00:44:20
Speaker
It's usually treated with antipsychotics or anti-seizure medication.
00:44:25
Speaker
um it's rare but it's more likely to occur if psychedelics are taken outside of a safe and responsible situation which mk ultra and all of its experiments are some next level of unsafety yeah you know like the bare basics of like harm reduction especially when it comes to psychedelics is like
00:44:49
Speaker
set and setting is just like make sure that you're with safe people in an environment that you feel comfortable in and that when you go into it you're like in an okay enough mental state or have someone like there to support you and guide you through the process you know and you're taking like a normal amount of it it's and like you know
00:45:13
Speaker
People who use psychedelics regularly will probably be using this like once or twice a year because of how like significant of an impact it has on you.
00:45:26
Speaker
Just keep that in mind as we like go into talking about the experiments later on.
00:45:31
Speaker
So rewind, rewind, rewind.
00:45:34
Speaker
Sandoz, the lab that synthesized LSD for the first year,
00:45:38
Speaker
time started sending samples of it to psychiatrists, scientists, and mental health professionals around the world so that they could do more research on it.
00:45:47
Speaker
So this was in the early 40s.
00:45:50
Speaker
And for the next two decades, thousands of experiments with LSD led to, you know, people understanding how it affected consciousness in different ways.
00:46:04
Speaker
I will pass it back to you.
00:46:07
Speaker
Okay.
00:46:07
Speaker
So LSD, wide variety of experiences and obviously MKUltra, really irresponsible and horrible use of it.
00:46:16
Speaker
So I'm going to go back to MKUltra a bit.
00:46:19
Speaker
Akshay's going to dive in later, so I'm going to scratch the surface to bring you to more context because I think it's important for you to know the backdrop under which this was happening.
CIA's LSD Acquisition
00:46:30
Speaker
So as we mentioned before, this project operated from the 1950s until the early 60s and was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb.
00:46:41
Speaker
who is the man who brought LSD to the United States.
00:46:45
Speaker
In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to purchase the world's supply of LSD for $240,000, which I'm not even sure how that translates now.
00:46:57
Speaker
And as Akshi mentioned, they disseminated it out.
00:47:00
Speaker
But they disseminated it to clinics, hospitals, prisons, and other institutions to carry out quote-unquote research projects and find out what LSD was.
00:47:07
Speaker
was, what its effect was, how it could be used as a tool for mind control.
00:47:11
Speaker
This journalist, Stephen Kinzer, who wrote a book about this, said that it was the most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control.
00:47:23
Speaker
This was happening during the Cold War, which was a heightened time of like a deep paranoia and honestly like wild imperialist hunger for power and control.
00:47:35
Speaker
Like the U.S. really just wants to take over the whole fucking world.
00:47:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:47:39
Speaker
And they say this too, blatantly.
00:47:42
Speaker
Anyways.
00:47:43
Speaker
Side note, I just want everyone to know that when I was in high school, I thought that it was called the Cold War because it was cold in Russia.
00:47:58
Speaker
Why are you sharing that?
00:48:00
Speaker
I just think it's funny.
00:48:03
Speaker
I've learned things since then, but I didn't know anything about it.
00:48:07
Speaker
So I was like, Cold War.
00:48:09
Speaker
Cold War.
00:48:10
Speaker
It's cold in Russia.
Cold War Paranoia
00:48:11
Speaker
Okay.
00:48:13
Speaker
You know, to be fair, history is not taught well.
00:48:17
Speaker
Exactly.
00:48:18
Speaker
Why is your education in Singapore so centered around the U.S. to begin with?
00:48:23
Speaker
Oh my god, yeah.
00:48:24
Speaker
It is.
00:48:24
Speaker
I didn't learn anything about Asian history.
00:48:26
Speaker
That's wild.
00:48:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:28
Speaker
Yeah, stuff that I learned about South Asian and East Asian history has been from reading magical realism, historical fiction books.
00:48:38
Speaker
Not in school.
00:48:39
Speaker
Classic.
00:48:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:42
Speaker
So, the Stephen Kinzer guy, I listened to a NPR interview with him.
00:48:47
Speaker
Fresh Air.
00:48:49
Speaker
You can look it up.
00:48:50
Speaker
And he said, the CIA became paralyzed with the fear that communists had perfected some kind of drug or potion or technique potion.
00:48:59
Speaker
Potion.
00:49:00
Speaker
I love that.
00:49:03
Speaker
CIA's out here trying to be witches.
00:49:05
Speaker
That would allow them to control human minds.
00:49:08
Speaker
This was actually a greatly exaggerated fear, but it played on something culturally that affected everyone that grew up during the mid-20th century.
00:49:16
Speaker
So he talks also about how there's lots of media shows, cartoons that depicted this kind of thing.
00:49:21
Speaker
So everyone was on high alert.
00:49:23
Speaker
And this is around the time the Korean War is ending.
00:49:26
Speaker
And the New York Times published a startling story that was saying that American prisoners of war were returning to the country and they may have been converted, quote unquote, by communist brainwashers, which is what I was noting earlier in our conversation.
00:49:41
Speaker
Some GIs were confessing to war crimes, like carrying out germ warfare against the communists.
00:49:48
Speaker
A charge the U.S. categorically denied.
00:49:52
Speaker
They did that shit.
00:49:53
Speaker
And germ warfare is just another way to say biological warfare.
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:57
Speaker
And others were reportedly so brainwashed that they had refused to return to the U.S. And also, the U.S. was weeks away from secretly sponsoring the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in Iran.
00:50:11
Speaker
The hypocrisy.
00:50:12
Speaker
It's wild out here.
00:50:14
Speaker
So, the CIA was also interested in being able to manipulate foreign leaders with these techniques and would later invent several schemes to drug Fidel Castro.
00:50:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:27
Speaker
This is also during the time of the Red Scare, which... It's like everyone's scared of communism.
00:50:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:35
Speaker
It was just like a fear-mongering tactic that was pushed forward by Senator Joseph McCarthy to really just like surveil people and like identify them as communists and punish and criminalize them and like oust people from their jobs.
00:50:52
Speaker
So they used the foundation...
00:50:55
Speaker
Like, it was true that the USSR had carried out espionage activities inside the U.S. with the aid of some U.S. citizens during World War II, and so they really used this and they ran with it to, like, fear-monger everyone in the United States.
00:51:11
Speaker
This really escalated things.
00:51:13
Speaker
On March 21st, 1947, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9835, which was also called the Loyalty Order, and that mandated all federal employees be analyzed to determine whether they were sufficiently loyal to the government.
00:51:32
Speaker
Oh, my gosh.
00:51:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:33
Speaker
The way that we're so nationalistic and have the nerve to, like, shake fingers at dictatorships in other countries as if we're not like that is wild to me.
00:51:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:47
Speaker
I mean, it's also like you're talking about brainwashing when you fuel, still fuel shit tons of propaganda throughout the media, like about a vast variety of things.
00:51:59
Speaker
Like, I'm just thinking about this video that I watched the other day about how...
00:52:05
Speaker
romantic relationships are built to oppress women and how all of these like mass media like things rom-coms essentially it's a tool of capitalism so that like you get kind of insularized in your family unit and disconnected from community and that your only definition of love exists within romantic love when across history there's been all these other definitions of it so like they're talking about brainwashing when
00:52:34
Speaker
To a certain extent, we're all brainwashed because we are socially conditioned, you know?
00:52:40
Speaker
Yes.
00:52:40
Speaker
So, like, what is your definition of brainwashing?
00:52:43
Speaker
Your definition of brainwashing is when people have beliefs that you don't agree with.
00:52:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:50
Speaker
They're like, we want to control minds, but it's not brainwashing.
00:52:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:54
Speaker
Bye.
00:52:57
Speaker
They also, I don't know, this also reminds me of, I didn't take notes on this, but when we're looking at timeline, this is also not long after Japanese incarceration.
Japanese American Incarceration
00:53:08
Speaker
So the same rhetoric around like, you're not loyal to the US government for folks who don't know.
00:53:16
Speaker
After Pearl Harbor happened, the American government, under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, decided that Japanese people in the United States were a threat to...
00:53:31
Speaker
National security.
00:53:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:32
Speaker
Were like mandated to leave their homes and their jobs and like relinquish all of their like assets to be incarcerated on like racetracks and then later in horse stables.
00:53:46
Speaker
There was a time in there where they were trying to recruit Japanese people to go to war.
00:53:53
Speaker
And it was like this dichotomous thing of like,
00:53:56
Speaker
Are you loyal to the United States?
00:53:58
Speaker
If you're loyal to the United States, then you have to prove it by going to war for us.
00:54:02
Speaker
And those of you who choose not to, we're going to send you to Manzanar.
00:54:06
Speaker
I think it was Manzanar, but I'll double check.
00:54:08
Speaker
Okay, I double checked and I was wrong.
00:54:11
Speaker
Manzanar was the largest camp, but those who were considered quote-unquote disloyal were sent to Tule Lake.
00:54:20
Speaker
And I call them incarceration camps because I was reading online that like internment implies like a war enemy.
00:54:27
Speaker
You know, like internment implies that the person like is like an enemy of the state.
00:54:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:33
Speaker
When really these were just like everyday citizens.
00:54:36
Speaker
Like here in Seattle, at some point in time, Japanese people were like the largest non-white population.
00:54:43
Speaker
And that number is like dwindled down greatly.
00:54:45
Speaker
They used to like have a lot of like some farmland.
00:54:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we briefly talk about one instance of that in our first episode.
00:54:54
Speaker
Yeah, of how a person lost their entire business.
00:55:00
Speaker
Because this white lady was like, oh, keep it safe for you while you're gone.
00:55:04
Speaker
And then when they came back, she was like, it's mine.
00:55:08
Speaker
If there's anything we learn in this podcast, it's that white people can't be trusted.
00:55:14
Speaker
Come at me.
00:55:15
Speaker
Anyways.
00:55:17
Speaker
What was I trying to say?
00:55:18
Speaker
You're talking about the Red Scare.
00:55:19
Speaker
Red Scare, okay.
00:55:21
Speaker
The loyalty thing.
00:55:23
Speaker
Social context.
00:55:24
Speaker
Okay, and then when incarceration was over, there was, like, all of this, like, all of these policies and shit that, like, Japanese people could not congregate together and they would be punished for it.
00:55:36
Speaker
And they were so traumatized that there was stories of this, like,
00:55:39
Speaker
This man was saying, you know, I'd be walking and I'd see another Japanese man across the street and I would immediately just, like, walk the other direction so that they couldn't blame me for, like, congregating and they couldn't lock me up again.
00:55:51
Speaker
And so it's just, like, really intentional the way the United States, like, inserts black and white thinking and, like...
00:56:01
Speaker
forces people into a place of loyalty or disloyalty and then all of a sudden you become an enemy of the state and they also like ship japanese people all across the country in different areas so that that community could not you know you can't create community and if you can't create community you can't unite and struggle
00:56:20
Speaker
Anyways, so back to the Red Scare.
00:56:26
Speaker
Around the same time, the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, was really quick to conflate any kind of protest with communist, quote-unquote, communist subversion.
FBI's Surveillance on MLK
00:56:40
Speaker
And this included civil rights demonstrations led by Martin Luther King Jr. So Hoover was like, King is a communist, and he was covertly working to intimidate and discredit Martin Luther King.
00:56:52
Speaker
Which makes sense because we know the CIA did all this weird shit where they like surveilled him and tapped his phone and shit.
00:57:00
Speaker
Just fucking racist.
00:57:01
Speaker
And then at the same time, people don't talk about the Lavender Scare conflating like gayness with communism
Lavender Scare and Homosexuality Persecution
00:57:07
Speaker
too.
00:57:07
Speaker
They just wanted to persecute people who didn't fall within the confines of, you know.
00:57:11
Speaker
traditional American values.
00:57:14
Speaker
In 1947, this is in Washington, D.C., U.S. Park Police initiated a quote-unquote sex perversion elimination program targeting gay men for arrest and intimidation.
00:57:29
Speaker
And then a year later, Congress passed an act that was...
00:57:34
Speaker
quote-unquote, for the treatment of sexual psychopaths in the nation's capital.
00:57:39
Speaker
Which is just so wild to me, because last I checked, colonizers are the most... Reverse.
00:57:46
Speaker
I mean, they're just, like, the rapists of the world.
00:57:49
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:57:50
Speaker
Pedophiles.
00:57:52
Speaker
I just... What?
00:57:55
Speaker
I can't...
00:57:58
Speaker
The way that they just project their own shit.
00:58:01
Speaker
Yeah, just all their internalized homophobia.
00:58:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:06
Speaker
So this was the law that facilitated the arrest and punishment of gay people.
00:58:12
Speaker
And also they labeled them mentally ill, which I feel like connects to the Jack episode when we talk about why, like, the conversation about BDSM and, like, how...
00:58:27
Speaker
We just need to be more intentional about how we're using the term like sadism and shit because it's a slippery slope into this kind of pathology.
00:58:36
Speaker
Yeah, this kind of pathology.
00:58:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:39
Speaker
Because they like grouped everything in one category.
00:58:43
Speaker
So they're like, this is a subversive threat.
00:58:45
Speaker
It seems like any kind of sex outside of the purpose of reproduction seems to fall into this perversion category.
00:58:56
Speaker
Does it not?
00:58:57
Speaker
Yes.
00:58:59
Speaker
You know, like that's the definition that they're going for and that's what they're trying to do right now as well with all these like oppressive reproductive laws are pretty much trying to tell you, oh, any sex that you have outside of the purposes of reproduction is is wrong.
00:59:15
Speaker
Mm hmm.
00:59:17
Speaker
This shit is so puritanical.
00:59:18
Speaker
I'm like, what in the actual fuck are we doing?
00:59:22
Speaker
They're trying to ban condoms in some places.
00:59:25
Speaker
Like, bro, this is not about abortion.
00:59:27
Speaker
No.
00:59:29
Speaker
This is about controlling and criminalizing people's bodies.
00:59:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:35
Speaker
Trying to ban IUDs.
00:59:37
Speaker
Like, goddamn.
00:59:40
Speaker
I want people to just have pleasure.
00:59:41
Speaker
Pleasure.
00:59:44
Speaker
I mean, so much of the work of oppression is telling people that they're not entitled to their pleasure.
00:59:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's true.
00:59:53
Speaker
Oppressive people get so angry when they just see a group of people having a good time that they decide that's not part of their own group.
01:00:01
Speaker
Yeah, totally.
01:00:03
Speaker
It made me think about times where I have just been out with friends and
01:00:09
Speaker
for the purpose of chilling or having a good time and like have had like men insert themselves in into the situation in a
Pleasure Activism
01:00:20
Speaker
way which made us feel so uncomfortable and I'm just like yeah people experiencing pleasure is not okay for those that want the powers that be you know pleasure freedom they're like that's not okay mm-hmm
01:00:41
Speaker
We talked about that in the witches episode too on how in India and in other places, women doing what they want to do is seen as an affront and so that they're violently oppressed for just existing.
01:00:57
Speaker
Yes.
01:00:58
Speaker
You know?
01:00:59
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:59
Speaker
And I don't know if this was included in the last episode, but I feel like I've talked about pleasure activism and
01:01:06
Speaker
Before.
01:01:07
Speaker
If folks haven't read it, it's really good.
01:01:09
Speaker
It's a collection of essays curated by Adrienne Marie Brown.
01:01:14
Speaker
And it's very good.
01:01:16
Speaker
It's about the politics of pleasure.
01:01:19
Speaker
So, this is the backdrop.
01:01:22
Speaker
In February 1950, McCarthy delivered a now-famous speech in which he claimed to have a list of 205 known communists working at the State Department.
01:01:33
Speaker
I mean, I just imagine it included anybody who diverted away from the status quo.
01:01:38
Speaker
Particularly people of color and queer folks.
01:01:41
Speaker
So...
01:01:43
Speaker
Fuck that.
01:01:44
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:45
Speaker
But that's what was going on during this time of MKUltra.
01:01:49
Speaker
I'm going to pass it back to Akshi to tell you about what the fuck MKUltra was all about.
01:01:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:59
Speaker
As we were doing, starting to do research on this topic, it's just like, there's so much information about it, like so much.
Destruction of MKUltra Documents
01:02:08
Speaker
And that only also scratches the surface because most of the documents about MKU, like 90% of the documents of it were destroyed so that no one would ever find it.
01:02:19
Speaker
This is literally just like the surface of it.
01:02:23
Speaker
And because there's so much information and it requires a lot of
01:02:29
Speaker
digging deeper into things that we wanted to dig deeper into.
01:02:32
Speaker
I'm going to give you now like kind of a general overview of like the experiments that were being done, but I'm not going to dig into them because we're going to save that for the next episode.
01:02:43
Speaker
So keep that in mind.
01:02:45
Speaker
So this, this is just a lot, a lot of context, which is very important when going into the story from, from our perspectives.
01:02:54
Speaker
So MKUltra started in April, 1953.
01:02:57
Speaker
It had over 149 what they called sub-projects that are known about, and it occurred across 80 different institutions, including universities, prisons, hospitals, including studies funded at Columbia University, Stanford, and other colleges.
01:03:16
Speaker
Part of MKUltra was administering LSD to patients in mental institutions, incarcerated folks, those with substance use disorders.
01:03:26
Speaker
It was also administered to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, government agents, and members of the general public.
MKUltra's Varied Experiments
01:03:33
Speaker
That was one part of MKUltra, a big part of it, but it also included research on other drugs,
01:03:41
Speaker
And many sub projects focused on the use of like one drug alone or in combination with other techniques to manipulate people.
01:03:47
Speaker
So like Shana said earlier,
01:03:49
Speaker
The main purpose of this was to figure out how to control people, whether there's a way for mind control.
01:03:55
Speaker
So whether that be with drugs or other kinds of techniques.
01:04:00
Speaker
So other drugs that were used in these experiments were barbiturates, amphetamines, heroin, morphine, temazepam, mescaline, psilocybin, which is mushrooms, scopolamine, alcohol, and sodium pentamide.
01:04:16
Speaker
pentothal so those are some uh sub project five of mk ultra was at the university of minnesota and they were testing using hypnosis to induce anxiety and also how to teach people how to thwart lie detectors and induce trances um one very interesting sub project um which is
01:04:39
Speaker
Kinzer goes into in his book is sub project four where they used a celebrity stage magician John Mulholland to teach CIA agents techniques of misdirection and sleight of hand to better distract targets while they were drugging them.
Misdirection Techniques in MKUltra
01:04:59
Speaker
So the manual that Mulholland produced for the CIA actually resurfaced in 2007, and it's the only full-length MKUltra document known to have survived fully intact.
01:05:11
Speaker
Most of these experiments occurred where the drugs were administered without the subject's knowledge or consent, which is a direct violation of the Nuremberg Code, which the U.S. agreed to follow right after World War II.
01:05:28
Speaker
Oh, I forgot to talk about Operation Paperclip.
01:05:31
Speaker
Oh.
01:05:31
Speaker
Should I do that now?
01:05:32
Speaker
Yeah.
US-Nazi Scientist Collaboration
01:05:33
Speaker
Sidebar, there was this Operation Paperclip.
01:05:36
Speaker
Don't know why it was called that, but it was a secret U.S. intelligence program.
01:05:41
Speaker
More than 1,600 Nazi German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taking from Nazi Germany to the U.S.,
01:05:49
Speaker
for government employment after World War II ended between 1945 and 1959.
01:05:56
Speaker
Okay.
01:05:58
Speaker
Conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency.
01:06:02
Speaker
It was mostly carried out by special agents of the US Army's Counterintelligence Corps.
01:06:08
Speaker
But many of these personnel were former members and some were former leaders of the Nazi Party.
01:06:13
Speaker
So, like, we're really just out here consulting with Nazis, employing Nazis...
01:06:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:20
Speaker
Taking notes from Nazis while simultaneously being like Nuremberg trials and then totally back like being like, yeah, Nuremberg code.
01:06:29
Speaker
Let's sign this.
01:06:30
Speaker
Oh, but we're not going to follow it.
01:06:32
Speaker
No, it doesn't matter to us.
01:06:34
Speaker
And Operation Paperclip was also like it's like part of the Cold War stuff where they were like, oh, let's try to figure out how to fight the communists with the help of the Nazis, with the help of the Nazis.
01:06:46
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:47
Speaker
That's kind of a really overarching general overview.
01:06:51
Speaker
What we'll go into next time is digging kind of deeper into the experiments, but also we'll talk about how MKUltra pretty much introduced psychedelic counterculture in the 60s, and we'll talk a little bit about that and how that led to the criminalization of LSD and the Controlled Substances Act generally.
01:07:12
Speaker
I will end with one quote that...
01:07:17
Speaker
is from Mike J's review of Stephen Kisner's book.
01:07:21
Speaker
And then I will pass it to Shana to give us a little glimpse into the wonderful Sydney, who was the lead conspirator, I guess.
Kinzer's View on MKUltra
01:07:35
Speaker
Mike says, this was not the CIA as the American public was encouraged to imagine it.
01:07:42
Speaker
A dapper Ivy League fraternity coolly dedicated to safeguarding the nation.
01:07:48
Speaker
The picture that emerged was of a game without rules, played recklessly and with impunity by, as Stephen Kinzer characterizes it, a cast of obsessed chemists, cold-hearted spy masters, grim torturers, hypnotists, electroshockers, and Nazi doctors.
01:08:09
Speaker
Wow.
01:08:10
Speaker
Wow.
01:08:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:15
Speaker
I also want to mention, we can go into this further next time, that there were secret detention camps in other countries, Japan, Germany, and the Philippines, where Sidney Gottlieb wanted to do experiments there because he just didn't have to deal with the repercussions of future legal problems in the United States, which he really didn't experience
International Detention Camps
01:08:38
Speaker
them here at all.
01:08:38
Speaker
But if you can imagine what he got away with here...
01:08:43
Speaker
Yeah, imagine what they kind of did elsewhere.
01:08:46
Speaker
Like, it just, I mean, it just blows my mind that this is, like, barely anything about what they did, and it's so fucked up on its own, of, like, what did they destroy?
01:08:59
Speaker
What was all the documentation that they destroyed?
01:09:02
Speaker
Right, because this is, like, overwhelming information.
01:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:09:06
Speaker
So they did that, and it's kind of like giving me Guantanamo vibes.
01:09:12
Speaker
And then I was looking into Guantanamo, and they do use tactics that really mirror the tactics that were used in MKUltra projects.
01:09:22
Speaker
And so Japan, Germany, and the Philippines, the U.S. had military control of all those places, so they were like hot spots to go.
01:09:31
Speaker
and try to, you know, they just did whatever the fuck they wanted.
01:09:34
Speaker
And also connects back to how many times do we talk about how fucking US military soldiers go to Japan and are sexually violent.
01:09:43
Speaker
Anyways, there's a confluence of two interests.
01:09:50
Speaker
Sidney Gottlieb is like, I want to discover mind control.
01:09:54
Speaker
But also the CIA was capturing quote-unquote enemy agents and quote-unquote expendable people.
01:10:02
Speaker
Whatever the fuck that means.
01:10:03
Speaker
Well, you know what that means is that they targeted a lot of vulnerable groups in doing these experiments.
01:10:09
Speaker
Yes.
01:10:10
Speaker
Which, dig deeper into next time, but a CIA official truly admitted that they targeted people who, quote, could not fight back or would not complain afterward or didn't have the ability to complain and be believed afterwards.
01:10:24
Speaker
Right.
01:10:24
Speaker
Right.
01:10:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:27
Speaker
So... A lot of these people... I mean, all of these people that they captured were incarcerated, and they tortured them.
CIA's Torture Methods
01:10:34
Speaker
This included LSD and other tactics, like electroshock, therapy again, sensory deprivation, bombarding with questions to the point of exhaustion and overwhelm in an attempt to destroy the human ego, very much like what's-his-face at the psychiatric hospital wanted to do.
01:10:52
Speaker
They also mirrored some of the...
01:10:56
Speaker
sedating people into the coma state and then force stimulants.
01:11:00
Speaker
So they would put people into coma state and then they would be like, oh, you're too sleepy and then pump them up with stimulants and then they're wired and then they would shock them.
01:11:11
Speaker
Like, it's really not...
01:11:13
Speaker
surprising and it's extremely sad that miss orlikov like her nervous system was so fried that even the smallest stuff was like putting her into a state of panic yes because they really brought her her inner child which was probably fine to the surface and then traumatized the fuck out of her nervous system yes so so much and
01:11:37
Speaker
that she was just like in a raw state for the rest of her life.
01:11:42
Speaker
Yes.
01:11:43
Speaker
She like was pretty much a raw nerve.
01:11:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:46
Speaker
That's what, that's what he did to her.
01:11:48
Speaker
I was listening to interviews with all these people's kids and grandkids.
01:11:51
Speaker
Kids were like, you know, it's a special kind of grief to be present with your parent and see that they're no longer there.
01:12:00
Speaker
And you can't get them back.
01:12:02
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:03
Speaker
Anyways.
01:12:04
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:04
Speaker
So Sydney Gottlieb was very into all of that.
01:12:09
Speaker
And it got us thinking, like, what the fuck happened to Sydney?
01:12:14
Speaker
Why is he like this?
Sidney Gottlieb's Background
01:12:16
Speaker
I couldn't find any information about his childhood at all.
01:12:19
Speaker
But I did find that he was born to Hungarish... Hungarish?
01:12:25
Speaker
Wow, he just mixed up Hungarian Jewish.
01:12:29
Speaker
Born to Hungarian Jewish immigrant parents, Fanny and Louis Gottlieb, in the Bronx on August 3rd, 1918.
01:12:36
Speaker
Fucking Leo.
01:12:41
Speaker
A fucking Leo.
01:12:42
Speaker
It's Leo, man.
01:12:44
Speaker
Like Jack.
01:12:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:47
Speaker
Jack.
01:12:48
Speaker
Elizabeth Bathory is also Leo.
01:12:49
Speaker
Wow, Elizabeth.
01:12:52
Speaker
She really did like the spotlight.
01:12:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:55
Speaker
Anyways, back to Sydney.
01:12:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:58
Speaker
It's interesting because Wikipedia says he was born with a club foot.
01:13:02
Speaker
Oh.
01:13:02
Speaker
Which got him rejected from the military service in World War II, but it did not prevent his pursuit of folk dancing.
01:13:08
Speaker
A lifelong passion.
01:13:11
Speaker
It just kind of reminds me of Hitler.
01:13:13
Speaker
Hitler had a bunch of weird things, like he was a vegetarian, and he loved the circus, and he was rejected from art school.
01:13:22
Speaker
And that's really what set him on his journey to being a fucking asshole.
01:13:29
Speaker
He was like, I'm rejected, but...
01:13:31
Speaker
They always do that.
01:13:32
Speaker
It's rejection sensitivity dysphoria to some next level.
01:13:38
Speaker
In conjunction with white supremacy and patriarchal violence?
01:13:41
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:41
Speaker
Great.
01:13:42
Speaker
My rejection sensitive dysphoria is just that I cry at the most silly things.
01:13:52
Speaker
Oh.
01:13:54
Speaker
You know, it's not in conjunction with white supremacy and patriarchal violence.
01:13:58
Speaker
Yeah, it just goes to show that... It's in conjunction with people-pleasing.
01:14:03
Speaker
Sydney.
01:14:03
Speaker
Anyway, Sydney.
01:14:05
Speaker
So, he's out here.
01:14:07
Speaker
He's folk dancing.
01:14:10
Speaker
I just... How do you go from folk dancing to mind control?
01:14:15
Speaker
I don't know.
01:14:16
Speaker
And wanting to buy all of the LSD in the entire world.
01:14:20
Speaker
You know, it looks like he tried to get into the military and he was like, I need to be a man.
01:14:27
Speaker
Right?
01:14:29
Speaker
Sure.
01:14:29
Speaker
And he's like, but I love to folk dance, but I'm not feeling like, you know, I really do think like this grasping for control is like you not being to attain the level of madness that society tells you you need to be.
01:14:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:44
Speaker
I don't know.
01:14:45
Speaker
gender as trauma gender as trauma um so he graduated from high school in 1936 he enrolled in a free city college in nyc he like transferred to university of wisconsin and then he went to arkansas tech university where he studied botany organic chemistry and principles of dairying and
01:15:12
Speaker
His success at Arkansas Tech won him admission to the University of Wisconsin, where he was mentored by Ira Baldwin, the assistant dean of the College of Agriculture.
01:15:22
Speaker
So his, like, area of focus is, like...
01:15:25
Speaker
Very agriculture-based, which is interesting.
01:15:28
Speaker
He was denied the chance at military service again, and then so he sought out a different way to serve, to quote-unquote serve.
01:15:38
Speaker
And so this is when he went to go look to work in government in Washington, D.C.
01:15:44
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:15:46
Speaker
Well, this is kind of interesting.
01:15:47
Speaker
It's interesting to me because we think of CIA people to be like these, like you were saying, Ivy League fraternity boys.
Gottlieb's Career Path
01:15:55
Speaker
And it sounds like he really came from immigrant working class, community college, liked agriculture.
01:16:07
Speaker
And then him and his family lived in a remote area.
01:16:10
Speaker
cabin in Virginia for a long time that had no electricity, no running water.
01:16:15
Speaker
And that's where he was when he began to work at the CIA.
01:16:19
Speaker
Interesting.
01:16:20
Speaker
So his first government position was in the Department of Agriculture, where he researched the chemical structure of organic soils.
01:16:26
Speaker
He was transferred to the Food and Drug Administration.
01:16:29
Speaker
He developed tests to measure the presence of drugs in the human body.
01:16:35
Speaker
And then he got bored and he wanted to be challenged.
01:16:37
Speaker
Hmm.
01:16:39
Speaker
So in 1948, he found a job at the National Research Council.
01:16:43
Speaker
This is where he described being, quote-unquote, exposed to some interesting work concerning ergot alkaloids as vasoconstrictors and hallucinogens.
01:16:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:57
Speaker
He soon relocated to the University of Maryland as a research associate, and he began studying metabolisms of fungi.
01:17:06
Speaker
And then on the 13th of July, 1951, this is when he starts working at the CIA.
01:17:13
Speaker
And MKUltra started 1953.
01:17:18
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:17:18
Speaker
He just, he wasn't there very long.
01:17:21
Speaker
He just decided.
01:17:22
Speaker
Gottlieb loved LSD.
01:17:24
Speaker
He took it more than 200 times.
01:17:28
Speaker
This, uh, the Wikipedia says he tended towards Buddhism.
01:17:32
Speaker
which I find interesting.
01:17:34
Speaker
Wow, the cognitive dissonance.
01:17:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:37
Speaker
Like, what kind of energy are you putting out the world, sir?
01:17:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:42
Speaker
Jesus.
01:17:42
Speaker
So he's, like, super, um, and then he goes into, like, I want to find a truth serum.
01:17:49
Speaker
I want to find an amnesiac.
01:17:51
Speaker
I want to control agents to engage in sabotage or assassination.
01:17:54
Speaker
I'm just like, wow, the escalation here.
01:17:56
Speaker
there's not a lot of information about how or why he escalated yeah yeah there's just like this happen yeah it just went from like i'm living off the grid i like to folk dance yeah i'm buddhist i love lsd i mean what yeah and then he's like now i'm control now i want to control the world and do this really unethical shit and ruin people's lives yeah yeah
01:18:21
Speaker
Anyways, so, like, back to these other detention camps that he really, like, was doing some wild ass shit.
CIA's Exploitative Operations
01:18:28
Speaker
He, like, really had license to, like, kill these people.
01:18:30
Speaker
There was no oversight.
01:18:33
Speaker
Supervisors didn't want to know anything that he was doing so he could avoid legal entanglements that he might run into, like we were talking about before.
01:18:41
Speaker
And the idea of global world power outweighed the harm that was done in these experiments to him.
01:18:48
Speaker
And he did this for 10 years without any intervention.
01:18:52
Speaker
At all.
01:18:53
Speaker
What I'll leave you with at the end is an operation that occurred under MKUltra in San Francisco, in Marin County, and in New York City, which...
01:19:09
Speaker
had very little oversight.
01:19:10
Speaker
It was called Operation Midnight Climax.
01:19:12
Speaker
Oh, God.
01:19:13
Speaker
And there's a quote that I read that said, CIA agents involved admitted that a freewheeling party-like atmosphere prevailed.
01:19:20
Speaker
So this was an operation in which government employed sex workers, lured unsuspecting men to safe houses where they conducted drug experiments, and they were watched through one-way mirrors and also recorded.
01:19:31
Speaker
they were dosed with lsd the cia agents that were watching would often drink cocktails and like it was just like entertainment for them so live porn yeah exactly um so an agent named george white who will come up
01:19:48
Speaker
some more next time, talked... His diary was one of the things that was found that a lot of the MKUltra stuff came out with, but there was a quote from it that said, Of course I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun.
01:20:06
Speaker
Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, deceive, rape, and pillage with the sanction and the blessing of the all-highest?
01:20:16
Speaker
Bye.
01:20:18
Speaker
My God.
01:20:18
Speaker
So that is very much the energy of MKUltra.
01:20:23
Speaker
Oh my God.
01:20:25
Speaker
That's a little teaser for you.
01:20:27
Speaker
It's a little teaser.
01:20:29
Speaker
You're probably going to have to wait a little while for the next episode.
01:20:33
Speaker
Probably a couple weeks.
01:20:34
Speaker
We'll try to get to it.
01:20:35
Speaker
We'll try to get to it.
01:20:37
Speaker
But we really were like, there's way too much information to cover.
01:20:41
Speaker
You got the context.
01:20:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:20:43
Speaker
And then next time we're going to dig deeper into the individual experiments.
01:20:51
Speaker
Yes.
01:20:52
Speaker
And you're going to learn more.
01:20:53
Speaker
You're going to learn more.
01:20:55
Speaker
Same vibe as Stranger Things, right?
01:20:57
Speaker
Oh, it is a little Stranger Things.
01:20:58
Speaker
Coming out at the same time as Stranger Things.
01:21:01
Speaker
Okay.
01:21:01
Speaker
Well, on a good note, I guess, speaking of Stranger Things, the scene in the last season where, what's his name?
01:21:14
Speaker
The kid without the teeth.
01:21:15
Speaker
Dustin.
01:21:16
Speaker
Where Dustin and his little girlfriend are singing NeverEnding Story.
01:21:21
Speaker
It is so cute.
01:21:22
Speaker
It is.
01:21:23
Speaker
It is.
01:21:24
Speaker
Sometimes when I'm having a bummer day, I'll just go and watch that scene on YouTube.
01:21:28
Speaker
Oh my god, that's so funny.
01:21:29
Speaker
It is so cute.
01:21:31
Speaker
I love it.
01:21:32
Speaker
Yeah, Dustin's great.
01:21:34
Speaker
I started watching the new season.
01:21:36
Speaker
It's pretty scary, but it's also good.
01:21:39
Speaker
Do you have a favorite character?
01:21:40
Speaker
I think Steve is honestly my favorite character.
01:21:42
Speaker
Steve!
01:21:42
Speaker
Steve and Robin.
01:21:44
Speaker
Yeah, and I like their... Steve, Robin, and Dustin.
01:21:48
Speaker
Steve!
01:21:49
Speaker
They are my favorites.
01:21:50
Speaker
That surprises me.
01:21:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:51
Speaker
Steve came around.
01:21:52
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:53
Speaker
He's like dad energy.
01:21:55
Speaker
He is dad energy.
01:21:57
Speaker
He really was a shithead for a while.
01:21:59
Speaker
He was.
01:21:59
Speaker
He was.
01:22:00
Speaker
And then they really... But I really like Robin, too.
01:22:05
Speaker
You know?
01:22:06
Speaker
She's like the queer character, but also I relate to her.
01:22:09
Speaker
She's very clumsy.
01:22:11
Speaker
So, you know.
01:22:13
Speaker
Yeah.
01:22:14
Speaker
Funnier than I am.
01:22:16
Speaker
I'm funny on accident.
01:22:22
Speaker
Anyways, so we end on a little not so horrific note.
01:22:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:22:27
Speaker
See you next time.
01:22:28
Speaker
See you next time.
01:22:30
Speaker
Bye.
01:22:46
Speaker
Thanks for listening and for supporting us.
01:22:49
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.
01:23:01
Speaker
Yes, and special thanks to all of you who subscribe to our Patreon.
01:23:07
Speaker
As we've mentioned before, we do all the research for this, we edit, and we don't have any sponsorships or ads.
01:23:16
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.
01:23:25
Speaker
So thank you so much.
01:23:27
Speaker
Sari, Liz, Clifton.
01:23:30
Speaker
Jill, Victoria, and Lindsay.
01:23:32
Speaker
Lauren, Vivian, Valerie.
01:23:35
Speaker
Micheline, Montana, Katrina.
01:23:37
Speaker
Raina, Allie, Jake.
01:23:39
Speaker
Drithi, Daphne, and Katie.
01:23:41
Speaker
Vern, Meredith, H, and Vince.
01:23:44
Speaker
To April, Aaron, and Ellen.
01:23:46
Speaker
And to Brittany, Alyssa, and Meredith R. Yay, thank you so much.
01:23:51
Speaker
Thank you.