Project MK-ULTRA

In at number 7, Project MK-ULTRA - possibly the CIA's finest moment. How many other intelligence agencies give out free drugs to anyone other than enemy informants? Which of our top ten unethical experiments do you think is worst?

	1950s - 60s
	How do recreational drugs affect people?
	Slip LSD to unsuspecting members of society.
	“Hey look, he thinks he can fly.”
	Not only did they drug the unwary and unwilling the CIA, who ran the project, also set up brothels to ensnare people and make sure that they were too embarrassed to talk about the experiment.
	3/5

Details:
With the increasing popularity of recreational drugs in the 1960’s, the CIA were anxious to know the full effects of taking them, and so devised an experiment so unethical that it has since destroyed all files on it.

LSD was administered to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, prostitutes, mentally ill patients and the general public to study their reactions. This took place without the knowledge or informed consent of those being given the drug. Not observing these two most basic of ethical guidelines violated the Nuremberg code, set in place after World War 2.

When short of volunteers, the CIA used brothels as a recruitment agency, setting them up specifically to drug the clients and observe them through one way mirrors, knowing that they would be too embarrassed to talk about their experience, and therefore complain about what had been done to them.

Project MK-ULTRA was so hideously unethical that in 1973 the CIA destroyed all evidence of it having taken place, making any investigation into their actions physically impossible.

Image: Marko Manojlovic

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