Harris Isbell

Dr. Harris Isbell directed the Addiction Research Center at the huge Federal drug hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, where he had access to a literally captive population for CIA-funded drug experiments. His work was funded through Navy cover with the approval of the Director of the National Institutes of Health. As director, Isbell controlled access to inmates who heard on the grapevine that if they volunteered for his program, they would be rewarded either in the drug of their choice or in time off from their sentences. Most of the addicts chose drugs, usually heroin or morphine of a purity seldom seen on the street. The subjects signed an approval form but were not told the names of the experimental drugs or their probable effects. This mattered little, since the volunteers probably would have granted informed consent to virtually anything to get hard drugs.¹

The 77-Day LSD Experiment

Given Isbell's almost unlimited supply of subjects, TSS officials used the Lexington facility as a place to make quick tests of promising but untried drugs. Isbell performed one study that would have been impossible to replicate with student volunteers: he kept seven men on LSD for 77 straight days. Nearly 20 years later, counterculture journalist Hunter S. Thompson would delight readers with accounts of drug binges lasting a few days, during which Thompson felt his brain boiling away. Even Thompson would shudder at the thought of 77 days straight on LSD. To Isbell, it was just another experiment. "I have had seven patients who have now been taking the drug for more than 42 days," he wrote in the middle of the test, which he called "the most amazing demonstration of drug tolerance I have ever seen." Isbell tried to break through the tolerance by giving triple and quadruple doses.¹

Experimental Practices

Filled with intense curiosity, Isbell tried out a wide variety of unproven drugs on his subjects. Just as soon as a new batch of scopolamine, rivea seeds, or bufotenine arrived from the CIA or NIMH, he would start testing. His relish for the task occasionally shone through the dull scientific reports: "I will write you a letter as soon as I can get the stuff into a man or two," he informed his Agency contact. His recorded personal comments about the subjects, who were nearly all black drug addicts, reveal a clinical detachment. He complained that they tended to be afraid of the doctors and were not as open in describing their experiences as the experimenters would have wished. He finally decided "in all probability, this type of behavior is to be expected with patients of this type." The subjects have long since scattered, and no one apparently has measured the aftereffects of the more extreme experiments.¹

Isbell refused all requests for interviews. He told a Senate subcommittee in 1975 that he inherited the drug payoff system when he came to Lexington and that "it was the custom in those days. The ethical codes were not so highly developed, and there was a great need to know in order to protect the public in assessing the potential use of narcotics. I personally think we did a very excellent job."¹

Racial Demographics of Subjects

Research published by the University of Ottawa documented a stark racial disparity in Isbell's experiments. At the Lexington facility and at other principal CIA-linked testing sites including Atlanta State Penitentiary, Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola Prison), the New Jersey Reformatory, and Maryland correctional facilities, subjects were overwhelmingly Black males. White participants at comparable facilities endured only 8 days of LSD administration on average, while Black participants endured chronic administration for up to 85 days. In a letter to his CIA contact describing one experiment, Isbell specifically identified the subjects as "seven Negro subjects" who received daily doses he doubled, tripled, or quadrupled to overcome tolerance, "without the patient's knowledge." The compensation structure reinforced this exploitation: subjects received the same hard drugs for which they were nominally being treated for addiction.²

Psilocybin and Expanded Drug Testing

Isbell's program at Lexington tested a wide range of psychoactive substances beyond LSD. After Albert Hofmann isolated psilocybin at Sandoz in 1958, Isbell conducted injections of the compound into nine Black inmates at Lexington, measuring physical responses and documenting psychological experiences including subjects' reports of "fear of insanity, or of death." He also tested mescaline, bufotenine, scopolamine, and DMT. In total, researchers estimated that Isbell tested approximately 800 psychoactive compounds on captive subjects over the life of the program.²³