Project MKUltra[a] was a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.

The program has been widely condemned as a violation of individual rights and an example of the CIA’s abuse of power, with critics highlighting its disregard for consent and its corrosive impact on democratic principles.

[11]: 74 [14][15][16] MKUltra's scope was broad, with activities carried out under the guise of research at more than 80 institutions aside from the military, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.

During the early 1940s, Nazi scientists working in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau during World War II conducted interrogation experiments on human subjects.

Substances such as barbiturates, morphine derivatives, and hallucinogens such as mescaline were employed in experiments conducted on Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and other nationalities' prisoners of war.

[20] The aim of these experiments was to develop a truth serum which would, in the words of one laboratory assistant to Dachau scientist Kurt Plötner, "eliminate the will of the person examined".

[36] The agency poured millions of dollars into studies examining ways to influence and control the mind and enhance its ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation.

[39] American historian Alfred W. McCoy has claimed that the CIA attempted to focus media attention on these sorts of "ridiculous" programs so that the public would not look at the research's primary goal, which was effective methods of interrogation.

Its purpose was to develop, test, and evaluate capabilities in the covert use of biological, chemical, and radioactive material systems and techniques of producing predictable human behavioral and/or physiological changes in support of highly sensitive operational requirements.

"Subproject 68", conducted at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal under the direction of psychiatrist Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, represents one of the most infamous and ethically controversial endeavors within the MKUltra program.

Psychic driving involved subjecting patients to continuous playback of recorded messages, often with themes of self-improvement or identity reinforcement, while they were under the influence of powerful psychoactive substances such as LSD or barbiturates.

[49] During a hearing by the Senate Health Subcommittee, a testimony by the Deputy Director of the CIA stated that over 30 institutions and universities were involved in the experimentation program of testing drugs on unknowing citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign."

The third phase included Projects THIRD CHANCE and DERBY HAT which conducted experiments on 16 unwitting nonvolunteer subjects that after receiving LSD were interrogated as a part of operation field tests.

[55] Once Project MKUltra started, in April 1953, experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and prostitutes – "people who could not fight back", as one agency officer put it.

[58] In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up several brothels within agency safehouses in San Francisco to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events.

[11][60] At the invitation of Stanford psychology graduate student Vik Lovell, an acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey volunteered to take part in what turned out to be a CIA-financed study under the aegis of MKUltra,[61] at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital[62][63] where he worked as a night aide.

The experiments continued even after Frank Olson, an army chemist who had never taken LSD, was covertly dosed by his CIA supervisor and nine days later plunged to his death from the window of a 13th-story New York City hotel room, supposedly as a result of deep depression induced by the drug.

He commuted from Albany, New York to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University, and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 (US$766,936 in 2024, adjusted for inflation) to carry out MKUltra experiments there.

His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements.

[78] Naomi Klein argues in her book The Shock Doctrine that Cameron's research and his contribution to the MKUltra project was not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing "a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources'.

[80] In areas under American control in the early 1950s in Europe and East Asia, mostly Japan, West Germany and the Philippines, the CIA created secret detention centers (black sites) so that the U.S. could avoid criminal prosecution.

The prisoners were interrogated while being administered psychoactive drugs, electroshocked and subjected to extremes of temperature, sensory isolation and the like to develop a better understanding of how to destroy and to control human minds.

[88][89] The U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, the Department of Defense and other national security agencies studied thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.

They maintain that Frank Olson was murdered because, especially in the aftermath of his LSD experience, he had become a security risk who might divulge state secrets associated with highly classified CIA programs, about many of which he had direct personal knowledge.

[103] In the decision dismissing the suit, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote, The revelations about the CIA and the Army prompted a number of subjects or their survivors to file lawsuits against the federal government for conducting experiments without informed consent.

Although the government aggressively, and sometimes successfully, sought to avoid legal liability, several plaintiffs did receive compensation through court order, out-of-court settlement, or acts of Congress.

In dissent, Justice William Brennan argued that the need to preserve military discipline should not protect the government from liability and punishment for serious violations of constitutional rights: The medical trials at Nuremberg in 1947 deeply impressed upon the world that experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable.

The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects... [I]n defiance of this principle, military intelligence officials [...] began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials, including LSD.Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing a separate dissent, stated: No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case.

If this principle is violated, the very least that society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators.In another lawsuit, Wayne Ritchie, a former United States Marshal, after hearing about the project's existence in 1990, alleged the CIA laced his food or drink with LSD at a 1957 Christmas party which resulted in his attempting to commit a robbery at a bar and his subsequent arrest.

[107][108][106] Confirmed experimenters: Alleged experimenters: Confirmed subjects: Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist [...] and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells [...] By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane.