You know those conspiracy theories that the government is using mind control to mess with your brain?
It turns out that for a several years over in the US it was actually true.
In 1953 the CIA started a project that came to be known as MKUltra with the goal of developing mind control drugs which might help the US win the Cold War.
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They had heard that communist countries had used mind control techniques on US prisoners during the Korean War and decided that messing with people's brains for your own gain sounded like a good idea.
As you can likely imagine, the methods by which they tried figuring out mind control were deeply unpleasant for the unfortunate people subjected to their experiments.
Psychoactive drugs like LSD, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and electroshock therapy were among the methods the CIA used to try and bend a human mind to their will.
They were trying to mess with people's minds, make them doubt their perception of the world around them and find the limits of what the human mind could actually take.
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In some cases people were drugged without giving either knowledge or consent, causing them serious distress.
It wasn't just Americans that the CIA experimented on, there were some experiments done on Canadians too and some of the victims of MKUltra appeared on 60 Minutes in 1984 to describe what it was like being subjected to the experiments.
Dr Donald Ewen Cameron carried out the experiments on one of the many projects which formed part of MKUltra, though it is not clear whether he ever knew his funding was coming from the CIA or not.
His victims explained how he would inject his them with LSD, give them regular electroshock therapy with '67 times the average dose of electric current' and would subject people to a technique he called 'psychic driving' where he'd play them tapes that would say the same message thousands of times in constant repetition.
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20 years after the mind control experiments started many of the documents chronicling the widespread experiments were destroyed as the Nixon administration became mired in the Watergate scandal, so the true extent of the damage done will likely never be known.
Known results from MKUltra indicate that torturing and tormenting people to determine how they might be mind controlled ended up being ineffective.
What these experiments largely managed to achieve was causing suffering to the people subjected to them such as Dr Mary Morrow, one of the victims of MKUltra who said she 'had no idea I was a human being' after what was done to her, with her suffering brain damage that left her with 'permanent difficulty'.
While psychoactive drugs such as LSD could alter a person's perceptions of reality, f**king with people's minds didn't pave the way for mind control and instead was a vehicle for deeply unethical practices.
Topics: US News, Conspiracy Theory, Mental Health, Drugs
Joe Harker