Harold Abramson

Harold Abramson was a New York allergist and immunologist affiliated with Mt. Sinai Hospital and Columbia University who became one of the CIA's most important LSD researchers and a key intelligence-gatherer for the MKULTRA program. He also held a consulting position with the Army Chemical Corps. Abramson became one of the first Johnny Appleseeds of LSD by giving it to a number of his distinguished colleagues. He documented all sorts of experiments on topics like the effects of LSD on Siamese fighting fish and snails, but he never wrote a word about his operational assignments from the Agency.¹

CIA Assignments

In a 1953 document, Sidney Gottlieb listed subjects he expected Abramson to investigate with the $85,000 the Agency was furnishing him across three subprojects. Gottlieb wanted "operationally pertinent materials along the following lines: a. Disturbance of Memory; b. Discrediting by Aberrant Behavior; c. Alteration of Sex Patterns; d. Eliciting of Information; e. Suggestibility; f. Creation of Dependence." The gap between the innocent-sounding published research and the operational questions posed by the CIA characterized the entire MKULTRA program. Most of the CIA's academic researchers published articles in professional journals, but those long, scholarly reports often gave an incomplete picture. In effect, the scientists would write openly about how LSD affects a patient's pulse rate, but they would tell only the CIA how the drug could be used to ruin that patient's marriage or memory.¹

Intelligence Gathering and the Macy Conferences

Abramson talked regularly to virtually everyone interested in LSD, including the few early researchers not funded by the Agency or the military, and he reported his findings to TSS. He served as recording secretary of two conference series sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, the Agency's sometime conduit, as well as the first international LSD therapy conference in 1959, which Paul Hoch chaired. The two Macy series each lasted over five-year periods in the 1950s; one dealt with "Problems of Consciousness" and the other with "Neuropharmacology." Held once a year at the Princeton Inn, the conferences brought together TSS's leading contractors as part of a group of roughly 25 with multidisciplinary backgrounds, including such luminaries as Margaret Mead and Jean Piaget. The topics discussed usually mirrored TSS's interests at the time, and the conferences served as a spawning ground for ideas that allowed researchers to engage in cross-fertilization.¹

Through these networks, Abramson introduced Gregory Bateson to LSD. Bateson subsequently arranged Allen Ginsberg's first LSD experience in 1959 at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, beginning the chain through which psychedelics reached the American counterculture.¹

Abramson once unknowingly ingested some LSD, probably by swallowing water from his spiked snail tank. He started to feel bad, but with his wife's help pinpointed the cause. Harold was greatly relieved. "Oh, it's nothing serious," he said. "It's just an LSD psychosis. I'll just go to bed and sleep it off."¹

The Frank Olson Case

After Frank Olson showed signs of psychosis following the November 1953 retreat at Deep Creek Lodge where Gottlieb administered LSD without warning to SOD scientists, Gottlieb sent Olson to Abramson in New York rather than notifying the CIA's Office of Security as regulations required. The choice kept the LSD dosing within TSS. Abramson had no psychiatric credentials, but Gottlieb trusted him with the secret.¹

In New York, Olson's condition worsened under Abramson's care. He became convinced the CIA was putting stimulants in his coffee, tore up his paper money, and threw his wallet down a chute while wandering the streets at night. Abramson eventually admitted he could not handle the case and recommended hospitalization, writing that Olson "was in a psychotic state with delusions of persecution."¹

After Olson fell from a tenth-floor window at the Statler Hotel on November 28, 1953, Abramson and Robert Lashbrook coordinated their accounts. Lashbrook dictated symptoms to Abramson, who made a recording. In a contemporaneous memo, Abramson wrote that Olson's "psychotic state seemed to have been crystallized by the LSD experiment." In a subsequent report he reversed course, calling the dose "therapeutic" and saying he believed it "could hardly have had any significant role in the course of events that followed."¹