[Music] i was given a glass of kool-aid and so were the other children this kool-aid was spiked with lsd it was horrible in the early days of the cold war the cia ordered the creation of a secret program intended to find ways of mind control they funded an army of psychiatric institutions across the united states and canada to perform experiments on unsuspecting patients using psychedelic drugs sensory deprivation electroshock treatment and more the program was known by its code name mk ultra at the end of the korean war a number of freed american pows came home
seemingly brainwashed espousing communist propaganda american officials suspected that the soldiers had been subjected to what they thought were new communist mind control techniques alarmed by the situation the newly formed cia allocated 25 million dollars for psychiatric experiments on human beings it was the most secret program ever conducted by the cia in the united states patients at psychiatric hospitals prisoners and federal institutions and even people in the public were given drugs without their awareness or consent and experimented upon initial projects within mk ultra included operation midnight climax they established what were called safe houses where prostitutes
would lure men to these apartments and then once the men were in the apartments they were dosed with lsd and then they were basically studied by cia scientists usually behind a two-way mirror another common practice was the hosting and observing of lsd-induced parties with live music these parties were called acid tests and the culture that grew out of them played a key role in the development of the hippie and psychedelic movements a few years later however some of the most damaging experiments occurred at the allen memorial institute in montreal canada there under the direction of
infamous scottish american psychiatrist dr ewan cameron unsuspecting patients many of whom had common ailments such as postpartum depression were experimented on with aggressive drug cocktails and extreme techniques my father was a victim of dr cameron he was a 27 year old healthy skier canoer very athletic and he had asthma they told him if he went to the allen memorial they could cure his asthma my father charles was a patient of dr cameron's he had a trigeminal neuralgia it's called where there's a pain in the temple that radiates into the jaw that apparently is excruciatingly painful
they told him that it was psychosomatic which it's not but in those days what did they know so they sent him to a shrink this shrink that he went to was working with cameron although we didn't know so he he put my father right into the program i was having trouble with my parents my father and my stepmother decided to put me in the allen memorial institute they had no idea what went on in there i was 16 when i was there dr cameron pursued a concept he called deep patterning which was meant to reduce
patients to an infantile psychological state wherein doctors could take advantage of the person's cognitive vulnerability to attempt to rebuild their mind under the doctor's control a popular method of choice to achieve this was called psychic driving the day that my father was brought to the hospital they immediately put him on insulin to put him into like an insulin coma they took clips from the interview with the shrink and put it on tape to run a loop under his pillow while he was put into this sleep treatment he also was put in an insulin coma for
36 days with a with a recording beside him uh saying that your mother hates you over and over and over and over and over that was beside my bed constantly repeatedly two hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand times another common method was the use of extreme page russell electroshock therapy page russell shock treatment is approximately 40 to 75 times the strength of a normal shock treatment so it's really designed to wipe out the memory he received 54 high voltage shock treatments followed by 54 grand mal seizures after 27 days of this they said
that they were discouraged because he still had ties to his former life in that he was asking to see his wife they decided to give him more page russell shock treatments and put him to sleep for another 30 days when patients were released from the ellen memorial they and their families lives would never be the same again well there's a lot i could not remember after i got out of the island when my family came i was a zombie i didn't even know who they were he never came out the same he had a blank
blank look in his eye he didn't know who we were he didn't know we were his daughters he lost his job we went into poverty after he came out he had said in his interview with the shrink that i was the apple of his eye and after he came home he started beating me not long after in 1973 the mk ultra program was terminated and some of the evidence of his activities was systematically erased the whole thing was basically discovered because of a whistleblower named john marks who wrote the first book really about the program
called the search for the manchurian candidate there were congressional hearings here in the united states in the mid 70s after it had been exposed and during those hearings the cia finally admitted that this program existed they admitted that it was probably not the right thing to do but they feigned innocence despite the congressional hearings and marginal interest in the subject in popular culture most mk ultra survivors suffered in silence taking their trauma with them to the grave today having received no formal apology or compensation the children of some survivors are pursuing a class-action lawsuit against
the institutions they deem responsible the cia knew that it was breaking you know every moral ethical and legal law in the books to do these experiments they all were behind it they all knew what they were doing but they weren't doing it out of care or love they were doing it out of military and political reasons i am on medication now because of what happened to me when i was 16. i have not had any compensation or apology i want everyone to know in canada what went on in that horrible horrible hospital while historians and
survivors have exposed mk ultra's exploits to the world much remains unknown about its extent and wider impact given the highly sensitive nature of the program's activity it is likely this will remain the case for years to come [Music] you
