in technical services tried it; a typical experiment involved two people in a room where they observed each other for hours and took notes. as the experimentation progressed, a point arrived where outsiders were drugged with no explanation whatsoever and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among cia operatives. adverse reactions often occurred, such as an operative who received the drug in his morning coffee, became psychotic and ran across washington, seeing a monster in every car passing him. the experiments continued even after frank olson, an army chemist who had never taken lsd, was covertly dosed by his cia supervisor and nine days later plunged to his death from the window of a 13th-story new york city hotel room, supposedly as a result of deep depression induced by the drug. according to stephen kinzer, olson had approached his superiors some time earlier, doubting the morality of the project, and asked to resign from the cia. some subjects' participation was consensual, and in these cases they appeared to be singled out for even more extreme experiments. in one case, seven drug-addicted african-american volunteers at the national institute of mental health addiction research center in kentucky were given lsd for 77 consecutive days. mkultra's researchers later dismissed lsd as too unpredictable in its results. they gave up on the notion that lsd was "the secret that was going to unlock the universe," but it still had a place in the cloak-and-dagger arsenal. however, by 1962 the cia and the army developed a series of super-hallucinogens such as the highly touted bz, which was thought to hold greater promise as a mind control weapon. this resulted in the withdrawal of support by many academics and private researchers, and lsd research became less of a priority altogether. other drugs another technique investigated was the intravenous administration of a barbiturate into one arm and an amphetamine into the other. the barbiturates were released into the person first, and as soon as the person began to fall asleep, the amphetamines were released. other experiments involved heroin, morphine, temazepam (used under code name mksearch), mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, alcohol and sodium pentothal. hypnosis declassified mkultra documents indicate they studied hypnosis in the early 1950s. experimental goals included creating "hypnotically induced anxieties", "hypnotically increasing ability to learn and recall complex written matter", studying hypnosis and polygraph examinations, "hypnotically increasing ability to observe and recall complex arrangements of physical objects", and studying "relationship of personality to susceptibility to hypnosis". they conducted experiments with drug-induced hypnosis and with anterograde and retrograde amnesia while under the influence of such drugs. experiments on canadians donald ewen cameron c. 1967 the cia exported experiments to canada when they recruited british psychiatrist donald ewen cameron, creator of the "psychic driving" concept, which the cia found interesting. cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the psyche. he commuted from albany, new york to montreal every week to work at the allan memorial institute of mcgill university, and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 (us$579,480 in 2021, adjusted for inflation) to carry out mkultra experiments there, the montreal experiments. these research funds were sent to cameron by a cia front organization, the society for the investigation of human ecology, and as shown in internal cia documents, cameron did not know the money came from the cia.: 141–142 in addition to lsd, cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs as well as electroconvulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal power. his "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. his experiments were often carried out on patients who entered the institute for common problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanent effects from his actions.: 140–150 his treatments resulted in victims' urinary incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents and thinking their interrogators were their parents. during this era, cameron became known worldwide as the first chairman of the world psychiatric association as well as president of both the american psychiatric association and the canadian psychiatric association. cameron was also a member of the nuremberg medical tribunal in 1946–1947.: 141 motivation and assessments his work was inspired and paralleled by the british psychiatrist william sargant at st thomas' hospital, london, and belmont hospital, sutton, who was also involved in the secret intelligence service and who experimented on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage. in the 1980s, several of cameron's former patients sued the cia for damages, which the canadian news program the fifth estate documented. their experiences and lawsuit were adapted in the 1998 television miniseries the sleep room. naomi klein argues in her book the shock doctrine that cameron's research and his contribution to the mkultra project was not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing "a scientifically based system for extracting information from 'resistant sources'. in other words, torture." alfred w. mccoy writes, "stripped of its bizarre excesses, dr. cameron's experiments, building upon donald o. hebb's earlier breakthrough, laid the scientific foundation for the cia's two-stage psychological torture method", referring to first creating a state of disorientation in the subject, and then creating a situation of "self-inflicted" discomfort in which the disoriented subject can alleviate pain by capitulating. secret detention camps in areas under american control in the early 1950s in europe and east asia, mostly japan, germany and the philippines, the cia created secret detention centers so that the u.s. could avoid criminal prosecution. the cia captured people suspected of being enemy agents and other people it deemed "expendable" to undertake various types of torture and human experimentation on them. the prisoners were interrogated while being administered psychoactive drugs, electroshocked and subjected to extremes of temperature, sensory isolation and the like to develop a better understanding of how to destroy and to control human minds. revelation frank church headed the church committee, an investigation into the practices of the u.s. intelligence agencies. in 1973, amid a government-wide panic caused by watergate, cia director richard helms ordered all mkultra files destroyed. pursuant to this order, most cia documents regarding the project were destroyed, making a full investigation of mkultra impossible. a cache of some 20,000 documents survived helms's purge, as they had been incorrectly stored in a financial records building and were discovered following a foia request in 1977. these documents were fully investigated during the senate hearings of 1977. in december 1974, the new york times alleged that the cia had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on u.s. citizens, during the 1960s. that report prompted investigations by the united states congress, in the form of the church committee, and by a commission known as the rockefeller commission that looked into the illegal domestic activities of the cia, the fbi and intelligence-related agencies of the military. in the summer of 1975, congressional church committee reports and the presidential rockefeller commission report revealed to the public for the first time that the cia and the department of defense had conducted experiments on both unwitting and cognizant human subjects as part of an extensive program to find out how to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs such as lsd and mescaline and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. they also revealed that at least one subject, frank olson, had died after administration of lsd. much of what the church committee and the rockefeller commission learned about mkultra was contained in a report, prepared by the inspector general's office in 1963, that had survived the destruction of records ordered in 1973. however, it contained little detail. sidney gottlieb, who had retired from the cia two years previously and had headed mkultra, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of mkultra. the congressional committee investigating the cia research, chaired by senator frank church, concluded that "prior consent was obviously not obtained from any of the subjects." the committee noted that the "experiments sponsored by these researchers ... call into question the decision by the agencies not to fix guidelines for experiments." following the recommendations of the church committee, president gerald ford in 1976 issued the first executive order on intelligence activities which, among other things, prohibited "experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject" and in accordance with the guidelines issued by the national commission. subsequent orders by presidents carter and reagan expanded the directive to apply to any human experimentation. 1977 united states senate report on mkultra in 1977, during a hearing held by the senate select committee on intelligence, to look further into mkultra, admiral stansfield turner, then director of central intelligence, revealed that the cia had found a set of records, consisting of about 20,000 pages, that had survived the 1973 destruction orders because they had been incorrectly stored at a records center not usually used for such documents. these files dealt with the financing of mkultra projects and contained few project details, but much more was learned from them than from the inspector general's 1963 report. on the senate floor in 1977, senator ted kennedy said: the deputy director of the cia revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native americans and foreign." several of these tests involved the administration of lsd to "unwitting subjects in social situations. at least one death, the result of the alleged defenestration of frank olson, was attributed to olson's being subjected, without his knowledge, to such experimentation nine days before his death. the cia itself subsequently acknowledged that these tests had little scientific rationale. the officers conducting the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers. in canada, the issue took much longer to surface, becoming widely known in 1984 on a cbc news show, the fifth estate. it was learned that not only had the cia funded cameron's efforts, but also that the canadian government was fully aware of this, and had later provided another $500,000 in funding to continue the experiments. this revelation largely derailed efforts by the victims to sue the cia as their u.s. counterparts had, and the canadian government eventually settled out of court for $100,000 to each of the 127 victims. cameron died on september 8, 1967, after suffering a heart attack while he and his son were mountain climbing. none of cameron's personal records of his involvement with mkultra survived because his family destroyed them after his death. 1994 u.s. general accounting office report the u.s. general accounting office issued a report on september 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, the department of defense and other national security agencies studied thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances. the quote from the study: working with the cia, the department of defense gave hallucinogenic drugs to thousands of "volunteer" soldiers in the 1950s and 1960s. in addition to lsd, the army also tested quinuclidinyl benzilate, a hallucinogen code-named bz. (note 37) many of these tests were conducted under the so-called mkultra program, established to counter perceived soviet and chinese advances in brainwashing techniques. between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted of 149 projects involving drug testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects deaths given the cia's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of mkultra experiments, including deaths, may never be known. several known deaths have been associated with project mkultra, most notably that of frank olson. olson, a united states army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given lsd without his knowledge or consent in november 1953, as part of a cia experiment, and died after falling from a 13th-story window a week later. a cia doctor assigned to monitor olson claimed to have been asleep in another bed in a new york city hotel room when olson fell to his