Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Quiz question - Who produced LSD for the CIA and MK-ULTRA in 1954?

Before I post episide II of the MK-ULTRA story and its relevance for University contracting (See: LSD and the corruption of medicine -Part I), Matt Holford prompted me to find out who produced LSD for the MK-ULTRA sponsored torture studies. In my previous post I implied that Sandoz remained the source.

In fact CIA documents show that a U.S. source for LSD supply was desired. In 1953 the CIA provided Eli Lilly with funding to attempt synthesis of LSD for CIA use without the need for the expensive and scarce reagents required by Sandoz. A year later, Lilly chemists succeeded in their quest, and subsequent supplies were from Lilly[1,2]. Another more potent chemical used by MK-Ultra, BZ (3-quinuclidinyl benzilate), was produced by Hoffman-La Roche.

References:
  1. CIA documents: Document #24, 16 November, 1953, Subject: ARTICHOKE Conference; Document #268, 23 October, 1953, Subject: Meeting in Director's Office at 1100 hours on 23 October with Mr. Wisner and [deleted]; Document # 316,6 January,1954, Subject: Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD-25); and Document #338, 26 October 1954, Subject: Potential Large Scale Availability of LSD through newly discovered synthesis by [deleted]; interviews with Sandoz and Lilly former executives; and Sidney Gottlieb's testimony before Kennedy subcommittee, 1977, p. 203.
  2. Marks, John (1979). The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: CIA and Mind Control. W W Norton & Co Ltd, 264. ISBN 0393307948


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2 comments:

soulful sepulcher said...

thanks Aubrey, I hope people are reading this, an hurry up w the rest of it :)

Radagast said...

The scientific community, then, if only at the highest level, was populated with people who believe that administering LSD covertly to members of the public (as I recall, once they'd done testing on volunteers, the CIA decided that the only way to understand the true effectiveness of their methods was to test them on people who were unsuspecting)? Now, if that was the culture, then, and nothing has been done to deal with that (it hasn't - the only way that this sort of thing can be countered is for it to be made public, and also for the driving force behind this sort of mindset to be neutralized), then it still exists, today. Indeed, given that Eli was never fucked until its arse bled over this, as it should have been, then anybody taking up the baton at the healm of the Company is very likely to have been indoctrinated in its ways - the ways that permitted the Company to believe that it was OK to do this, just as long as nobody ever found out.

Erm. It was never OK - not even if we still weren't aware of MKULTRA.

Matt