For two decades, the CIA conducted one of the most disturbing secret programs in American history: MKUltra, an illegal human experimentation project designed to develop mind control techniques through psychological torture and drugs. Starting in 1953, the program administered LSD and other substances to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and prostitutes—"people who could not fight back," as one CIA officer admitted.
The CIA became convinced during the Cold War that communists had discovered techniques to control human minds, so they launched their own program to find a "mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies." CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who oversaw the program, arranged for the agency to spend $240,000 in 1953 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD.
Through fake foundations, Gottlieb distributed LSD to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions across America, asking them to administer it to subjects and document their reactions—many facilities never knew they were conducting CIA experiments.
The experiments grew increasingly horrific. In one case documented by the CIA, they administered LSD to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 consecutive days. Gangster Whitey Bulger, who participated while imprisoned in Atlanta in 1957, described "total loss of appetite, hallucinating, the room would change shape, hours of paranoia and feeling violent, blood coming out of the walls, guys turning to skeletons in front of me." The program also dosed CIA employees, military personnel, and members of the general public without their knowledge or consent.
Perhaps most bizarrely, some of the unwitting participants became counterculture icons. Author Ken Kesey got his first LSD through MKUltra experiments at Stanford, poet Allen Ginsberg participated in CIA-funded LSD studies, and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter received his introduction to the drug through the program. The CIA chemist trying to develop weapons for Cold War interrogations accidentally became "the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture."
By the early 1960s, CIA directors determined that mind control was impossible, and the program wound down. In 1973, fearing exposure, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered most MKUltra records destroyed. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who investigated the program extensively, noted that "we don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed."
The existence of MKUltra only came to light through congressional investigations in the mid-1970s after a New York Times exposé. The U.S. government conducted illegal mind control experiments on its own citizens for 20 years—and deliberately destroyed most of the evidence.