Did the CIA test LSD in the New York City subway system?
Did the CIA test LSD in the New York City subway system?
By PHILIP MESSING
Last Updated: 5:05 AM, March 14, 2010
Posted: 1:28 AM, March 14, 2010
Comments: 7sports_story_lower sports_page quigo_lower 1482096 871776 440 225 * -->On Nov. 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a bland, seemingly innocuous 42-year-old government scientist, plunged to his death from room 1018A in New York’s Statler Hotel, landing on a Seventh Avenue sidewalk just opposite Penn Station.
Olson’s ignominious end was written off as an unremarkable suicide of a depressed government bureaucrat who came to New York City seeking psychiatric treatment, so it attracted scant attention at the time.
But 22 years later, the Rockefeller Commission report was released, detailing a litany of domestic abuses committed by the CIA. The ugly truth emerged: Olson’s death was the result of his having been surreptitiously dosed with LSD days earlier by his colleagues.
sports_story_lower sports_page quigo_lower 1482096 871776 440 225 * -->
The shocking disclosure led to President Gerald Ford’s apology to Olson’s widow and his three children, who accepted a $750,000 civil payment for his wrongful death.
But the belated 1975 mea culpa failed to close a tawdry chapter of our nation’s past. Instead it generated more interest into a series of wildly implausible “mind control” experiments on an unsuspecting populace over three decades.
Much of this plot unfolded here, in New York, according to H.P. Albarelli Jr., author of “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments.”
“For me, in countless ways the Olson story is a New York City story,” said Albarelli, a former lawyer in the Carter White House, who has written extensively about biological warfare and intelligence matters. “The CIA itself was created and initially composed of wealthy men who came from Wall Street and New York City law firms.”
Olson was a research scientist assigned to the CIA’s Special Operations Division, at Ft. Detrick, Md., who was performing top secret research relating to LSD-25, a powerful new drug whose properties were barely understood. Could psychedelic drugs be used to get enemy combatants to lay down their arms, or work as a truth serum on reluctant prisoners?
Albarelli spent more than a decade sifting through more than 100,000 pages of government documents and his most startling chestnut might be his claim that the intelligence community conducted aerosol tests of LSD inside the New York City subway system.
“The experiment was pretty shocking — shocking that the CIA and the Army would release LSD like that, among innocent unwitting folks,” Albarelli told The Post.
A declassified FBI report from the Baltimore field office dated Aug. 25, 1950 provides some tantalizing support for the claim. “The BW [biological weapon] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September 1950, have been indefinitely postponed,” states the memo, a copy of which the author provided to The Post
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Comments (7)
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PFTM
03/15/2010 9:27 AM
Something like this, and people post as comments a joke, another joke, and an indictment against Obama? WTF people? Our government tested mind-altering drugs on its citizens without their permission (and this wasn't the first or the only time). This isn't something that should ever happen in a free and democratic country. Why aren't people calling for congressional hearings and full disclosure?
Bigpapiwest
03/15/2010 8:52 AM
I hope they do it again.
Tomkat
03/15/2010 1:25 AM
The government's new weapon against the war on drugs should be aerosol marijuana... watch the demand from import drugs plumet
TryAgain
03/14/2010 4:15 PM
hahahaaha
it wasn't just the CIA who sprayed LSD in NYC's subways, NASA was part of it too. They had to get everyone stoned enough to believe we really went to the moon which, of course we didn't because the aliens who landed in Roswell told us not to. Halliburton made the stuff and Cheney smuggled it in GW's book bag.
LSD has lingering and reocurring effects - that's why even today people like Rangel, Sharpton, Dinkins, Masa, and anyone named Kennedy gets so much support from NYers.
Floyd DaBarber
03/14/2010 3:13 PM
Finally, something to explain the election of Obama.
CitizenWhy
03/14/2010 2:31 PM
My experience in the late 60s in the NY subway has convinced me some kind of germ gun was tested. I was young, healthy, strong, seldom (or never) getting a cold or flu.Returning home from night work early in the morning, I felt something hit me like a bullet and go down my throat. After that it was struggle to get home, I was violently ill for 24 hours, then poof, all gone. Very strange.. ... P.S. I am now elderly and never get colds of flus.
03/14/2010 11:32 AM
The code name for a number of these operations was MK-Ultra.
I personally don't think NYC and its subway system was the best place to test hallucinogenic drugs, since a majority of people riding the rails were already hallucinating, or causing others to do so. Had the CIA or anyone advertised the experiment, the NY Transit System might have doubled its revenue in a matter of minutes, possibly preventing a near economic collapse of New York City not long after.
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