MKUltra: LSD at 44 universities, Black prisoners dosed 77 days straight, evidence destroyed

The U.S. government spent a quarter-million dollars in the 1950s to secretly dose thousands of unwilling Americans with LSD. This wasn't speculation or a basement theory—it was documented, confirmed, and then systematically hidden.

Between 1953 and 1964, the CIA's MKUltra program distributed lysergic acid diethylamide to researchers at 44 universities, 12 hospitals, and 3 prisons across the country. The stated goal was to explore mind control and interrogation techniques during the Cold War. The actual result was years of illegal human experimentation on some of the nation's most vulnerable people, with minimal informed consent and no meaningful oversight.

The program was vast in scope but deliberately fragmented. Researchers at major institutions received funding to conduct experiments. Some subjects knew they were being given LSD. Most did not. Among the most egregious cases were seven Black men imprisoned in Kentucky who were administered LSD continuously for 77 consecutive days without their knowledge or permission. Their race and incarcerated status made them ideal targets in the eyes of those running the program—isolated, powerless, and unlikely to be believed if they complained.

When word of MKUltra began to surface in the 1970s, the government's response was damage control. CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of most MKUltra files in 1973, anticipating that public scrutiny would eventually arrive. This act of institutional erasure nearly succeeded. The evidence that proved MKUltra's existence was a fortunate accident—approximately 20,000 pages survived because they were misfiled and stored in a separate account.

Those surviving documents, combined with congressional testimony and victim accounts, confirmed the program's scope and methodology. The investigations of 1975 and 1976 formally documented what had occurred. Prisoners in Kentucky and elsewhere provided detailed accounts of their experiences. Universities and hospitals involved had institutional records. The evidence was overwhelming and irrefutable.