Project MKULTRA

Beginning in the early 1950s, the CIA operated a program known as MKULTRA, which mostly involved the administering of LSD and other drugs to unconsenting adults, including Americans. The program stemmed from an Agency fear that the Soviet Union and other communist countries were developing chemical and biological agents for the purposes of interrogating, brainwashing, and possibly even attacking Westerners.As the Church Report described:

The CIA had received reports that the Soviet Union was engaged in intensive efforts to produce LSD; and that the Soviet Union had attempted to purchase the world’s supply of the chemical. As one CIA officer who was deeply involved in the work with this drug described the climate of the times: “[It] is awfully hard in this day and age to reproduce how frightening all of this was to us at the time, particularly after the drug scene has become as widespread and as knowledgeable in this country as it did. But we were literally terrified, because this was the one material that we had ever been able to locate that really had potential fantastic possibilities if used wrongly.”

The MKULTRA program sought to administer LSD and other drugs to individuals in order to determine the threat of such drugs, and to design means to thwart that threat. In most cases, the subjects were unwitting nonvolunteers, who were slipped the drugs in their drinks at parties or at bars.The MKULTRA program eventually became quite extensive such that, by the time the CIA terminated the project in 1963, it contained 149 subprojects that the CIA contracted out to more than eighty universities, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and other institutions. However, the full range and extent of the program, as well the number of individuals affected by it, is impossible to determine because the chief of the program ordered all MKULTRA records destroyed in January 1973.

There is no doubt that the MKULTRA project was illegal from its inception. This may be why the CIA’s Office of General Counsel was not informed of the project until years after it had been terminated.Upon learning of the project, the CIA’s General Counsel immediately condemned it,and with good reason.

Government experimentation on unconsenting individuals, such as occurred in the MKULTRA program, was a clear violation of the Constitution. The courts have long held that the Fifth Amendment’s protection of liberty interests includes protection from nonconsensual experiments on a person’s body. Usually described as the right to bodily integrity, this is “a right which has been recognized throughout this nation’s history. Unconsenting human experimentation also constituted a tort for which the United States could be held liable under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). Indeed, courts have upheld FTCA claims specifically made by alleged victims of MKULTRA.

MKULTRA however was not successful. To learn more about MKULTRA watch the film “The Sleep Room” about how dumb the entire program was & what a colossal failure the program was.

Does the CIA do Such Experiments Today?

A federal statute also prohibits unconsenting human experimentation, as does a policy regulation issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, applicable to all U.S. government agencies.45 CFR 46.101 requires informed consent before conducting experiments on human subjects except in very limited circumstances not applicable here.

Finally, a presidential directive specifically prohibits the practice by U.S. intelligence agencies. Executive Order 12333 requires written informed consent for any human experimentation by an agency within the Intelligence Community. Similar prohibitions have existed since the mid-1970s with Executive Order 12036 and Executive Order 11905. Internal safeguards and the congressional oversight process assure compliance.

Conclusion:

It is therefore unequivocal that unconsenting human experimentation, such as that conducted by the CIA in its MKULTRA program, was illegal in the 1950s and 1960s. Both the Church Commission Report and the Rockefeller Report found that the project violated U.S. law.The law has not changed in any significant manner since that time. However, this is one of the only few types of examples of an activity done by the CIA that was actually illegal.