When the CIA took LSD: the twisted experiments that inspired Ratched

Ratched takes place in a psychiatric hospital from heaven – all soft furnishings, acid colour palettes and hourglass nurses outfits. But scratch the plushly upholstered surface and you’ll find some rather nasty things going on beneath.

The Salem facility at the centre of this eight-part origin story for one of literature’s signature baddies (Nurse Ratched, the tyrannical ward matron of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) is home to the experiments of the visionary Doctor Hanover (played by Jon Jon Briones), a man convinced that even the most disturbed human mind may be “cured”.

I’m using beneath literally: as the series progresses, Hanover and his nurses carry out a succession of chilling procedures down in the secret underground bowels of the hospital. On the menu are full frontal lobotomies, which destroy the nerve connections in the part of the brain thought to be responsible for memory and personality and hydrotherapy, in which the patient is essentially boiled alive, then frozen.

There’s even a flashback to Hanover secretly dosing a patient with LSD, leading to one of the show’s goriest moments. It’s glossy period piece meets fantasy horror.

But fantasy, it turns out, is not the relevant term. Some of the most bizarre and blood-curdling incidents in Ratched are closely modelled on a real government programme, Project MKUltra. In 1953, at the height of Cold War tensions, CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles put a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb in charge of setting up a secret network of psychological experiments that soon grew to involve 185 researchers, in hospitals and universities across the country.

Next to the agenda of MKUltra, the experiments of Ratched look like child’s play (if the game was based on prejudice and torture). Doctor Hanover’s experiments are his work alone, the ideas of a deranged fanatic on a mission to “cure” the human mind of its perceived ills. At the start of the series we see him buttering up local politicians in a desperate bid for funding. It is made clear to the viewer that he works alone. The CIA project, on the other hand, was large scale, government-funded and had a far more sinister objective: mind control.

The CIA had become convinced that the Soviet Union was working on its own mind control capabilities. MKUltra was their answer. Gottlieb, known as “Black Sorcerer”, was particularly interested in improving interrogation techniques. The project was top secret and most records of it were destroyed. But from the few that survive, the nature of the experiments can be pieced together.

With Gottlieb at the helm, the majority seem to have been concerned with mind-altering substances, including heroin, opioids, methamphetamine, psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and a then little known drug called LSD.

Gottlieb was fascinated by LSD and was, by his own account, a frequent user. He recalled his first trip as “a feeling as though I am in a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole body and it is shimmering”. Under his direction, the CIA purchased the world’s entire supply of LSD from a Swiss pharmaceutical company for $240,000, to use as part of MKUltra.

Some of the experiments were obviously illegal: Gottlieb admitted that his teams targeted those “who could not fight back” and the secrecy of the operation meant that many participants were unaware of their involvement and certainly did not give consent. These included prisoners, addicts, sex workers and the terminally ill.

One project, codenamed Operation Midnight Climax, involved taking over brothels and employing the prostitutes to ply their customers with LSD-laced cocktails. From behind two-way mirrors, researchers would observe the effects.

Eventually, Gottlieb began to experiment on his own. At a 1953 CIA retreat, a CIA scientist named Frank Olson drank a cocktail that had been secretly spiked with LSD. A few days later, Olson fell to his death from the window of a New York City hotel room in an alleged suicide. His family suspected foul play and asked for a second autopsy; injuries were discovered on the body that seemed to have occurred before the fall. Some have always suspected the CIA had a hand in his death. Olson had become disaffected with MKUltra and attempted to resign shortly before his death. His family were given a settlement of $750,000 of a personal apology from the CIA Director.

The aims of the studies were diverse and chilling: Gottlieb was looking for drug cocktails that would produce effects including “illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public… physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc… mental confusion of such a type the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning”. He wanted to find ways to make captured Soviet agents talk and captured American agents withstand questioning.

But more than that, according to journalist Stephen Kinzer, Gottlieb believed that in order to achieve mind control, he first had to “blast away” the subject’s existing consciousness. Many of the experiments were designed to literally drive people out of their minds. Other suspected MKUltra techniques include electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and sexual abuse.

The records of these most flagrantly abusive and illegal studies and their victims were destroyed along with the rest of the MKUltra files but a few traces have survived. One mental patient in Kentucky was given a dose of LSD every day for 174 consecutive days. Another, the future crime boss Whitey Bulger, asserted that in 1956, while serving time at Atlanta Pentitentiary, he and eighteen other inmates were offered reduced sentences for taking part in what they were told was a schizophrenia drug trial.

In fact, it was an MKUltra experiment. Bulger described his experiences as “nightmarish”, recalling being repeatedly asked “Would you ever kill anyone?” by the monitoring physician while high. Over the course of his criminal career, Bulger would go on to kill many.

Other participants had more positive experiences. Gottlieb was interested in the everyday effects of LSD on the average American and so organised widespread voluntary trials which administered non-traumatic doses. While a cash-strapped Stanford student working the graveyard shift as an orderly at Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital in California, Ken Kesey was paid $75 a session to take part in an MKUltra trial. It was this experience that inspired One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

He later compared the experiment to exploring a haunted house. “[The scientists] didn’t have the guts to do it themselves, so they hired students. ‘Hey, we found this room. Would you please go inside and let us know what’s going on in there?’ When we came back out, they took one look at us and said, ‘Whatever they do, don’t let them go back in that room!’”

He became a lifelong LSD enthusiast, along with a group of like-minded friends, known as the Merry Pranksters, including Neal Cassady and Tom Wolfe, who were infamous for their “Acid Test” parties. They were hugely influential figures in the development of Sixties counterculture. For this reason, Gottlieb has been called the unwitting godfather of counterculture.

The cultural impact may have been enormous but scientifically, the results of MKUltra’s LSD trails were limited. Many of the researchers decided LSD was too unreliable and moved on to other work. MKUltra was gradually wound down. During the government-wide panic surrounding Watergate in 1973, the then Director of the CIA, Richard Helms, ordered all the files destroyed.

In 1974, the New York Times published a story accusing the CIA of conducting non-consensual drug experiments and illegal spying operations on US citizens. The following year, President Ford set up the President’s Commission on CIA Activities (commonly called the Rockefeller Commission) and the activities of MKUltra were gradually revealed to the public.

As a result, in 1976, Ford issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities which, among other things, prohibited “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject”. Gottlieb testified before the committee but faced no further repercussions.

For all the stylised horror of Ratched’s basement butchery, there is something more chilling about the truthful events that inspired it. As one agent wrote to Gottlieb in 1971: “Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”