Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

In the real Cuckoo’s Nest, McMurphy doesn’t hand out the LSD—Nurse Ratched does. But if acid is liberating, why would the government administer it to the people it locked up in jails and hospitals? The short answer is that the CIA wanted to see what happened. MK-Ultra was a suite of 183 subprojects financed by the CIA and conducted across North America by contractors at civilian institutions between 1953 and 1973.xiii 39 It’s often referred to as a mind control program because some of the projects focused on using drugs to break down the mental defenses of enemy prisoners during interrogation, but they had a wide range of objectives, from research on blood types to building a miniature lie detector, and those are just a couple of the experiments conducted at Stanford that we know about.xiv