LSD

D-lysergic acid diethylamide was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann at Sandoz in Basel, Switzerland, in 1938 as part of his search for a circulation stimulant derived from ergot, a fungus that attacks rye. Hofmann accidentally discovered its psychedelic properties on April 16, 1943, when he absorbed a small amount through his skin. Three days later he deliberately ingested 250 micrograms and experienced the first intentional LSD trip, a terrifying experience in which he feared he had gone mad or died. Because of LSD's extraordinary potency, even infinitesimal amounts produced profound alterations in consciousness.¹

Nazi Interest

Less than 200 miles from Hofmann's laboratory, doctors connected to the S.S. and Gestapo were conducting experiments at Dachau with mescaline, a drug with many of the mind-changing qualities of LSD, on prisoners. The goal was "to eliminate the will of the person examined," according to research team member Walter Neff. The Germans tried mescaline and hypnosis in combination but apparently never felt confident they had found a way to assume command of their victim's mind.¹

OSS Truth Drug Research

The Office of Strategic Services commissioned a research committee in 1942 to develop a "speech-inducing drug" for interrogation. Under committee chairman Dr. Winfred Overholser, superintendent of Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., researchers tested marijuana extract processed into a clear, tasteless liquid they code-named "TD." In field tests, OSS officer George White administered marijuana-laced cigarettes to New York mobster August Del Gracio on May 27, 1943. The results were inconsistent: some subjects became talkative while others experienced paranoid reactions. The Navy's parallel Project CHATTER, run at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda beginning in 1947, tested mescaline on animal and human subjects under lead researcher Dr. Charles Savage before concluding in 1953 without producing a reliable truth serum.²

First American LSD Experiments

Dr. Max Rinkel obtained the first LSD supply in the United States from Sandoz in 1949 and brought it to Dr. Robert Hyde at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Hyde became the first person in the Western Hemisphere to take LSD, consuming 100 micrograms in the presence of Rinkel and Dr. H. Jackson DeShon. He became "quite paranoiac" during the experience, claiming afterward that he had been given plain water. Rinkel reported at the 1950 American Psychiatric Association annual meeting that LSD produced a "transitory psychotic disturbance" in normal subjects. At the same meeting, Dr. Paul Hoch reported that LSD and mescaline symptoms resembled schizophrenia and coined the term "psychotomimetic," meaning madness-mimicking, for the class of drugs.²

CIA Begins Systematic Research

The CIA conducted a pilot LSD study on October 21, 1951, testing lysergic acid alongside morphine, ether, Benzedrine, ethyl alcohol, and mescaline on subjects described as "not too high mentality" who were told only that a new drug was being tested. In one case, an officer instructed not to reveal "a significant military secret" disclosed all details of the secret under LSD and had complete amnesia of the disclosure afterward. An Office of Scientific Intelligence memo titled "Potential New Agent for Unconventional Warfare" characterized LSD as useful "for eliciting true and accurate statements from subjects under its influence during interrogation," though other tests revealed the drug also induced intense anxiety, hallucinations, and paranoid reactions incompatible with controlled questioning.²

CIA Director Allen Dulles authorized MKULTRA on April 13, 1953, three days after a speech at Princeton warning that Soviet "brain perversion techniques" were "so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them." LSD was central to the new program. The Technical Services Staff under Sidney Gottlieb made LSD the primary research tool, running experiments at medical institutions, prisons, and safehouses across the country.¹²

MK-ULTRA Testing Programs

The CIA funded the Boston Psychopathic Hospital's LSD program at approximately $40,000 a year through four MKULTRA subprojects. Robert Hyde assembled a multidisciplinary team that discovered LSD's effects were primarily determined by the subject's existing personality ("set") and the environment of the experience ("setting"), a finding that became foundational to psychedelic research. Dr. Harold Abramson, a Columbia University allergist and chief of the allergy clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital who held an Army Chemical Corps consulting position, ran three additional subprojects with a total Agency funding of $85,000. Sidney Gottlieb's specification for Abramson's research listed the intended applications as disturbance of memory, discrediting by aberrant behavior, alteration of sex patterns, eliciting of information, enhancement of suggestibility, and creation of dependence.¹²

Dr. Harris Isbell, director of the Addiction Research Center at the federal hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, ran some of the most extreme experiments in the program, keeping seven men on LSD for 77 consecutive days and testing over 800 compounds on captive subjects, nearly all of them Black inmates compensated with heroin and morphine. The CIA also funded researchers including Dr. Paul Hoch, who served as the New York State Commissioner for Mental Hygiene while simultaneously consulting for the CIA and Army Chemical Corps, performing intraspinal injections of LSD and mescaline on psychiatric patients and conducting lobotomy comparison studies. Hoch chaired the first international LSD therapy conference, held in 1959 under Macy Foundation sponsorship, with Abramson serving as recording secretary.²

Everyone in the Technical Services Staff tried LSD. Colleagues slipped it into each other's drinks, with the target notified afterward. A planned incident at the CIA's 1954 Christmas party was headed off by a security memo warning it could "produce serious insanity for periods of 8 to 18 hours."²

The Sandoz Supply Problem and Eli Lilly Synthesis

On November 16, 1953, the CIA authorized the purchase of 10 kilograms of LSD from Sandoz for $240,000, enough for approximately 100 million doses, intending to preclude Communist acquisition. Two officers sent to Switzerland discovered that only 10 milligrams were actually available. Sandoz president Arthur Stoll, pleased by CIA interest, agreed to notify the Agency of all future LSD production and shipments. Total Sandoz production over ten years amounted to approximately 40 grams.²

To solve the supply problem, Gottlieb arranged for Eli Lilly Company in Indianapolis to synthesize LSD from scratch using open-market chemicals, bypassing Sandoz's dependence on ergot fungus. By mid-1954, Lilly broke the formula. A CIA document noted that Lilly assured the Agency that "in a matter of months LSD would be available in tonnage quantities." The Agency classified Lilly's synthesis process as "a closely guarded secret, should not be mentioned generally."²

Army Chemical Corps Research

General William Creasy, chief officer of the Army Chemical Corps, considered psychochemical weapons preferable to fire bombs or nuclear weapons because they could incapacitate without permanent injury. The Army tested LSD (code-designated EA-1729) in war games at Fort Bragg involving command-post maneuvers, tank driving, radar operation, and antiaircraft tracking, with results ranging from complete incapacity to marked performance decreases. Testing also took place at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Fort Benning, Fort Leavenworth, Dugway Proving Ground, and Edgewood Arsenal, with a total of nearly 1,500 military personnel tested by the mid-1960s. An Army interrogation protocol of September 1961 combined LSD with silent treatment, sustained interrogation, food, drink, and sleep deprivation, isolation, temperature cycling, and verbal degradation.²

The Army also developed BZ (quinuclidinyl benzilate), a more operationally useful incapacitant that produced a three-day "semi-quiet delirium" with no subsequent memory of the period. Approximately 50 tons of BZ were stockpiled. By the mid-1960s, BZ had largely displaced LSD as the preferred psychochemical weapon for military planning.²

From CIA Labs to the Counterculture

The structural mechanism by which CIA-funded LSD reached the American counterculture ran through the networks of researchers the Agency had created. Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist introduced to LSD by Harold Abramson at a CIA-adjacent conference, arranged Allen Ginsberg's first LSD experience in 1959 at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto under Dr. Joe Adams. Ginsberg subsequently brought psilocybin into the New York jazz scene, giving pills to Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. Ken Kesey participated in government-funded LSD research at Stanford University's Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park around 1960, receiving $75 per day, and obtained additional psychedelic compounds while working as a night attendant in the psychiatric ward. Timothy Leary, a Harvard psychology professor, consumed psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico in 1960, returned to Harvard to run the Harvard Psilocybin Project, and within years became the counterculture's most visible advocate for psychedelic experience. The CIA, having funded or facilitated the research networks that connected these figures, had no mechanism to prevent the drugs from spreading beyond institutional control.¹³

A special committee reporting directly to Richard Helms controlled operational CIA use of LSD under the code designation "P-i," with Helms specifying he was to "be advised at all times" when the drug was to be deployed, calling it "dynamite." Plans targeting foreign socialist and left-leaning politicians for "surprise acid attacks" intended to make them "babble incoherently and discredit themselves in public" were developed but proved unworkable in practice.²