Psycho-Warfare’s
Vile Legacy
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CANADIAN MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT
David Orlikow with his wife, Val, who was a victim of psychiatrist Ewen Cameron’s mind-control experiments. |
From LSD to Manchurian Candidates, sinister intel programs of decades past introduced psychiatric warfare. Today, hidden hands continue to wield these deadly tools.
When it comes to psychopolitical mind games, no matter the ideology served, their results amount to degradation and butchery.
Yet, amid the furor over recent incidents of human rights abuse and terror, mind manipulators of all stripes have escaped unchallenged. In this exclusive Freedom essay, Colin A. Ross, author of Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists, zeroes in on psychiatrists whose coercive methods have brought damage and death in the name of thought control.
By Collin A. Ross, M.D.Psychopolitics* in its variant forms—from the Phoenix program of the Vietnam War, to Jovan Raskovic’s introduction of ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia, to Ayman al-Zawahiri’s transformation of Osama bin Laden from mujahideen supporter to global terror lord—all bear the stamp of psychiatric programs. The information in the public domain is only a hint of what truly exists.
Modern terrorist recruitment and training bear the footprint of notorious mind-control programs in recent annals of history—each with an eerie code name implying their depth in the scheme of intelligence operations: MK ULTRA, MK SEARCH, Artichoke and Bluebird. These programs ran from 1950 through 1972. The names and content of intelligence and military mind-control programs running from 1972 to the present are classified, but evidence of their continuing existence is incontrovertible.
Why do I make this claim and what is my foundation for making it?
I attended medical school in Edmonton from 1977 to 1981. I completed my psychiatry residency in Winnipeg from 1981 to 1985, then worked as a full-time academic psychiatrist in Winnipeg until 1991, when I moved to Dallas, Texas.
A doctor with whom I worked during my residency had, in 1956, referred a woman, Val Orlikow, to psychiatrist Ewen Cameron in Montreal. Val Orlikow was one of the surviving plaintiffs who settled with the U.S. government for damages caused by Cameron’s mind-control experiments. (See “Inside the Sleep Room.”)
Despite the fact that I was thus rather familiar with these experiments, from 1981 until 1991 I never heard a word about them. Likewise, I never heard about intel and military mind-control contracting by physicians and medical schools. I had no awareness of the subject when I arrived in Dallas in November 1991. It was as if, as far as mainstream psychiatry was concerned, the subject did not exist.
I had heard vague comments on political abuse by psychiatrists in the Soviet Union. I was aware that the Soviet Union had been kicked out of the World Psychiatric Association in 1983 because Russian psychiatrists were helping the KGB and the Communist Party control political dissidents by admitting them to psychiatric hospitals. The expulsion of the Soviet Union from the World Psychiatric Association was spearheaded by American psychiatrists.
“Everyone knew” that the Communists were bad and “everyone knew” that nothing like that happened in North America. Here, we have freedom and democracy, and psychiatrists do not work for the state. Here, psychiatrists are ethical professionals who put the best interests of their patients first, or so the propaganda went.
When I arrived in Dallas, I had no idea that the propaganda was a lie. I just bought it like everyone else did. No one questioned it—why should I?
A Longtime Search
If someone had told me in 1991 that extensive, systematic political abuse by psychiatrists occurred at the leading medical schools in North America throughout the second half of the 20th century, I would have considered that person a conspiracy nut. If I were told that many of the grandfathers of late 20th and early 21st century psychiatry and psychology were, in fact, intelligence agency doctors with Top Secret clearances, I would have dismissed the claim as science fiction.
When I arrived in Dallas in late 1991, I had never seen the movie “The Manchurian Candidate.” My education on psychiatric/intelligence agency mind-control experimentation, including the post-World War II Manchurian Candidate programs, began in early 1992. It continues today as I read about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and observe the release of the remake of “Candidate,” which stars Denzel Washington and is set in the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War and its aftermath.
It was in Texas that patients began to tell me stories about being victims of mind-control experiments as children. They described experiments in hospitals or laboratories, often on military bases. The experiments involved hypnosis, drugs, systematic physical and sexual abuse, and other techniques designed to create “alter personalities.”
I had no evidence that any of the stories were true. However, in response to claims by my patients, I decided to study psychiatric mind-control experimentation, something that has little or nothing to do with treatment methods utilized in my practice.
Why, then, did I spend eight years reading and researching intelligence agency and military mind-control experimentation? Why did I write the book, Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists? (Bluebird was the name of a CIA mind-control program signed into existence by the agency’s director in April 1950, three months before the start of the Korean War.)
I believe the truth must be known.
And part of the truth is that there is no chance that psychiatry in its current form will ever become a real branch of medicine.
Psychiatry is lost in a search for genetic and internal biological causes of mental illness. Biological psychiatry in its current form is profitable, however, because it is highly subsidized by drug companies. Mental illness as brain disease is part of a package that includes “chemical imbalances” and treatment with drugs.
The marriage of psychiatry and the drug companies began in the early 1950s and was financed through government mind-control experimentation. There were numerous such programs in the U.S., including the aformentioned Bluebird, Artichoke, MK ULTRA and MK SEARCH, as well as MK NAOMI, MK DELTA and Project Often.
North America’s First LSD Manufacturer and Distributor
LSD was discovered in 1943 by Albert Hoffman, a chemist at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. In the early 1950s, according to documents I obtained from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act, the agency was concerned that the Russians were trying to buy the entire world’s supply of LSD. Both sides used the drug for mind-control and interrogation purposes.
To ensure a domestic supply of LSD, the CIA in 1953 signed a $400,000 contract with an American drug company to manufacture and supply the drug. This was done under Subproject 18 of the MK ULTRA program.
The first North American acidheads were psychiatrists, intelligence officers and military personnel themselves. Psychiatrists then turned America on to LSD. They distributed it to subjects in experiments and then used it in “treatment.”
The psychiatrists also took the drug themselves and recommended it to their colleagues, beginning in the late 1940s. Joel Elkes, for instance, who became the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, described taking LSD himself in 1948.
LSD experimentation on soldiers by the U.S. Army continued at least until the late 1970s, according to U.S. Senate testimony by Army medical personnel. Other drugs introduced into American culture by intelligence-linked psychiatrists include psilocybin and PCP or “angel dust.”
Psychiatry also introduced LSD and mescaline to children—in massive doses. In the 1960s, Lauretta Bender, a child psychiatrist, administered street-level hallucinogenic doses of LSD and mescaline to children 5 to 10 years old. Some children received doses daily for weeks, months or even years at a time. This experimentation took place at Creedmore State Hospital in New York.
How do I know about this? These experiments were published in mainstream psychiatry journals and presented at their widely promoted conferences.
Some LSD conferences were funded directly by the military/intelligence community. Many of the LSD papers from the 1950s and 1960s acknowledge sponsorship by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research and the Department of the Army. When the federal government made LSD illegal in 1967, the psychiatric industry condemned the action at meetings and in their published writings. They regarded LSD as a boon to therapy.
By the time I started my psychiatry training in 1981, however, the official position of psychiatry had changed. LSD was a substance of abuse and the psychiatric manual (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) now included a diagnostic category classifying its use as a psychiatric disorder.
In 30 years (1950 to 1980), LSD went from a recreational drug used by leading academic psychiatrists as a method of treatment to a dangerous street drug. Yet, none of these positions were supported by any real science.
*PSYCHOPOLITICS: The art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through “mental healing.”
