I was given a glass of Cool-Aid, and so were the other children.
This Cool-Aid was spiked with LSD. It was horrible.
In the early days of the Cold War, the CIA ordered the creation
of a secret programme intended to find ways of mind control.
They funded an army of psychiatric institutions
across the United States and Canada to perform experiments
on unsuspecting patients using psychedelic drugs,
sensory deprivation, electroshock treatment and more.
The programme was known by its code name: MK-Ultra.
At the end of the Korean War, a number of freed American POWs
came home seemingly brainwashed and espousing communist propaganda.
American officials suspected that the soldiers had been subjected
to what they thought were new communist mind control techniques.
Alarmed by the situation, the newly formed CIA allocated
$25 million for psychiatric experiments on human beings.
It was the most secret program ever conducted by
the CIA in the United States.
Patients and psychiatric hospitals, prisoners in federal institutions,
and even people in the public were given drugs without their awareness
or consent and experimented on.
Initial projects within MK-Ultra included Operation Midnight Climax
They established what were called safe houses,
where prostitutes would lure men to these apartments
and then once the men were in the apartments they were dosed with LSD.
And then they were basically studied by CIA scientists,
usually behind a two-way mirror.
Another common practice was the hosting and observing
of LSD-induced parties with live music.
These parties were called 'Acid Tests' and the culture that grew
out of them played a key role in the development
of the hippie and psychedelic movements a few years later.
However, some of the most damaging experiments occurred
at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada.
There, under the direction of infamous Scottish-American psychiatrist
Dr Ewan Cameron, unsuspecting patients,
many of whom had common ailments such as post-partum depression,
were experimented on with aggressive drug cocktails and extreme techniques.
My father was a victim of Dr. Cameron.
He was a 27-year-old healthy skier, canoer, very athletic.
And he had asthma.
They told him if he went to the Allan Memorial, they could cure his asthma.
My father Charles was a patient of Dr. Cameron's.
He had a trigeminal neuralgia, it's called,
where there is a pain in the temple that radiates into the jaw
that permanently is excruciatingly painful.
They told him it was psychosomatic, which it's not,
but in those days what did they know? So, they sent him to a shrink.
This shrink that he went to was working with Cameron, although we didn't know, so
he put my father right into the program.
I was having trouble with my parents.
My father and my stepmother decided to put me in the Allan Memorial Institute.
They had no idea what went on in there. I was 16 when I was there.
Dr. Cameron pursued a concept he called 'depatterning',
which was meant to reduce patients to an infantile psychological state
wherein doctors would take advantage of the person's cognitive vulnerability
to attempt to rebuild their mind under the doctor s control.
A popular method of choice to achieve this was called 'psychic driving'.
The day that my father was brought to the hospital,
they immediately put him on insulin to put him into an insulin coma.
They took clips from the interview with the shrink and put it on tape
to run on a loop under his pillow while he was put into this sleep treatment.
He also was put in an insulin coma for 36 days with a recording beside him
saying that your mother hates you, over and over and over and over.
That was beside my bed constantly,
repeated between 250,000 and 500,000 times.
Another common method was the use of extreme Page Russell electroshock therapy.
Page Russell shock treatment is approximately
40-75 times the strength of a normal shock treatment.
So, it's really designed to wipe out the memory.
He received 54 high voltage shock treatments,
followed by fifty-four grand mal seizures.
After 27 days of this they said that they were discouraged because
he still had ties to his former life, in that he was asking to see his wife.
They decided to give him more Page Russel shock treatments
and put him to sleep for another 30 days.
When patients were released from the Allan Memorial they
and their families lives would never be the same again.
Well, there's a lot I could not remember after I got out of the Allan.
When my family came, I was a zombie,
I didn't even know who they were.
He never came out the same.
He had a blank, blank look in his eye.
He didn't know who we were. He didn't know we were his daughters.
He lost his job. We went into poverty after he came out.
He had said in his interview with the shrink that I was the apple of his eye.
And after he came home, he started beating me, not long after.
In 1973, the MK-Ultra programme was terminated and
some of the evidence of its activities was systematically erased.
The whole thing was basically discovered
because of a whistleblower named John Marks, who wrote the first book
about the program called the search for The Search Manchurian Candidate.
There were congressional hearings here in the United States
in the mid 70s, after it had been exposed. And
during those hearings the CIA finally admitted that this program existed,
they admitted that it was probably not the right thing to do,
but the feigned innocence.
Despite the congressional hearings and marginal interest in the subject
in popular culture, most MK-Ultra survivors would suffer
in silence, carrying their trauma with them to the grave.
Today, having received no formal apology or compensation,
the children of some survivors are pursuing a class action lawsuit
against the institutions they deem responsible.
The CIA knew that it was breaking every moral, ethical and legal law
in the books to do these experiments.
They all were behind it. They all knew what they were doing,
and they weren't doing it out of care or love,
they were doing it out of military and political reasons.
I am on medication now because of things that happened to me when I was 16.
I have not had any compensation or apology.
I want everyone to know in Canada what went on
in that horrible, horrible hospital.
While historians and survivors have exposed MK-Ultra's exploits
to the world, much remains unknown about its extent and wider impact.
Given the highly sensitive nature of the programme's activity,
it is likely this will remain the case for years to come.