Born of America’s Cold War paranoia that the Soviets had achieved breakthroughs in the development of mind control drugs, Project MK-Ultra was the CIA’s covert counter-operation to locate the ultimate “truth serum” for interrogations, as hearings on the project later described it. Approved in 1953 by then–CIA director Allen Dulles, MK-Ultra primarily involved the secret—and highly illegal—“administration of LSD to unwitting individuals,” according to the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities in its 1975 investigative report. In 1977, roughly 16,000 pages of misfiled documents were unearthed showing that the “25-year, $25-million effort by the [CIA] to learn how to control the human mind,” in The New York Times’ description, not only saw the US government dose thousands of American (and Canadian) citizens with LSD without their knowledge or consent, but also disproportionately target those “who could not fight back,” as one CIA official admitted.
“Black Americans were uniquely exploited during this first wave of psychedelic research,” concluded the authors of a 2021 University of Ottawa study of abuses in the early trials of LSD. Overwhelmingly, the African American victims of MK-Ultra were drawn from prisons and hospital mental wards, including the National Institute of Mental Health’s Addiction Research Center (ARC), which tested LSD and some 800 other psychoactive drugs on an inmate population that was almost exclusively Black. In numerous other MK-Ultra experiments, according to the study, “participants were subject to differential and torturous treatment and dosing dependent on race.” In one 1960 study, “‘Negro’ men convicted on drug charges…were recruited from prison and given LSD in a research ward,” while a comparison group made up of “professional White people at Cold Spring Harbor, living freely,” took LSD in “the principal investigator’s home ‘under social conditions designed to reduce anxiety.’”
“In the 1950s and ’60s, researchers weren’t thinking about the need to take extra precautions with vulnerable populations,” says Dana Strauss, a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Ottawa and a coauthor of the 2021 study. ”Whether or not those researchers were explicitly targeting Black Americans, they drew their participants mostly from prisons where Black Americans were overrepresented because of racism in arrests, charges, incarceration, and sentencing.”
Just as the mistreatment of marginalized Black folks in MK-Ultra demonstrates the dangers of medical racism, so, too, does their exclusion from contemporary research into the effectiveness of drugs such as psilocybin, ketamine, and MDMA to treat trauma, anxiety, and depression. As what’s been called the “psychedelic renaissance” in psychotherapy blooms, this is a key moment to acknowledge that, while the popular face of “tripping” has been stark white since the days of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and flower power, Black folks have long found creativity and solace in the intentional and consensual use of psychedelics. But the War on Drugs complicated that relationship.