Transcription
Two American spies have just arrived at Sandos Laboratories, one of the world's leading pharmaceutical factories. The mission: cornered the market on the world's supply of a powerful new psychoactive drug.
The CIA was scared stiff. The KGB was going to get all this LSD and come over and start get all this LSD and come over and start dosing people. So we bought every drop of LSD in existence. At that point, the CIA has just authorized the purchase of 10 kg of pure LSD-25, enough to dose more than of pure LSD-25, enough to dose more than half the population of the United States.
They gave it to George White and let George start dosing people. George Hunter White, a larger than life undercover Federal narcotics agent. Unbeknownst to a supervisors, White also works for the CIA. His job to conduct experiments for an operation called Midnight Climax.
George had a CIA Safe House stock with booze. George would sit behind this one-way mirror drinking martinis, sitting on a portable toilet if he had to take a on a portable toilet if he had to take a leak. He didn't want to get up and leave. Leak he didn't want to get up and leave.
White pays prostitutes to lure their clients to the agency's safe house. Hookers who would bring these suckers back to the apartment and dose them with pure LSD-2. This is where I have my effect in LSD-2. This is where I have my effect in the mind. This is lysergic acid diamide, better known known as acid.
The powerful drug was first synthesized in 1938 in Switzerland. With a dose of mere micrograms, the mind becomes confused, perception is distorted, personal identity is called into question. The results can be euphoric bliss or deadly panic. White takes meticulous notes and files his reports to a CIA handlers.
So that was how LSD was introduced to this country. Operation Midnight Climax is part of a larger top secret CIA program called MK Ultra. The goal: learn how to control and even reprogram people's minds. The CIA believes LSD might hold the key.
Over the next 10 years, the agency doses across section of the American public. Everyone from unwitting housewives to soldiers to even criminals like gangster Whitey Bulger is tested. You know what the CIA really dreamed of was sort of like a drug you could give to sort of like a drug you could give to someone, get them to commit all sorts of unspeakable acts, and they wake up the next day and they don't remember what they've done.
They were looking into brainwashing. They were looking into mind control. They were looking into how they could create what they call Manchurian candidates. They were trying to figure out if they could get people to go out, if they could get people to go out and do things that they would ordinarily not do, like assassinations.
The case of MK Ultra has to be one of the craziest cases of blowback in CIA history. Because here they took this drug LSD and thought that they were going to be able to use it to, they were going to be able to use it to control people's minds. And the unbelievable irony is that LSD is a drug that does exactly the opposite. It frees your mind and uh causes people to question authority. Turn on, tune in, drop out.
The CIA's attempt to control people turned out to be just the opposite. It created the counterculture as we know it of the 60s. It was the CIA that introduced LSD to the United States. We were watching through surveillance some individuals gathered on a campfire looking like they were having a meeting. The main person we were going after was a facilitator of some type of.