Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly & Company, headquartered in Indianapolis, worked on a process to synthesize LSD from chemicals available on the open market, ending Sandoz's monopoly on production. In 1953, CIA officials asked Lilly executives to make them a batch, which the company subsequently donated to the government. Then, in 1954, Lilly scored a major breakthrough when its researchers worked out a complicated 12- to 15-step process to manufacture first lysergic acid (the basic building block) and then LSD itself from chemicals available on the open market. Given a relatively sophisticated lab, a competent chemist could now make LSD without a supply of the hard-to-grow ergot fungus. Lilly officers confidentially informed the government of their triumph. They also held an unprecedented press conference to trumpet their synthesis of lysergic acid, but they did not publish for another five years their success with the closely related LSD.¹

CIA and Military Procurement

TSS officials soon sent a memo to Allen Dulles explaining that the Lilly discovery was important because the government could now buy LSD in "tonnage quantities," making it a potential chemical-warfare agent. The memo writer pointed out that from the MKULTRA point of view, the discovery made no difference since TSS was working on ways to use the drug only in small-scale covert operations, and the Agency had no trouble getting the limited amounts it needed. But now the Army Chemical Corps and the Air Force could get their collective hands on enough LSD to turn on the world.¹

Of the Western world's two LSD manufacturers, one, Eli Lilly, gave its entire (small) supply to the CIA and the military. The other, Sandoz, informed Agency representatives every time it shipped the drug. If the CIA somehow missed anything with all these sources, the Agency still had its own network of scholar-spies. While the CIA may not have totally cornered the LSD market in the 1950s, it certainly had a good measure of control, the very power it sought over human behavior.¹