Prisons as Laboratories
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“Jolly” West moved on, changing his base of operations from Oklahoma to Los Angeles. In keeping with intelligence proposals to utilize prisons as experimental laboratories, he drafted a plan to use electric shock and drugs on state inmates in what was called “aversion therapy.”
In the 1960s, West could also be found in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, conducting more LSD experiments, this time within the hippie community.
A pet project of West’s in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. He proposed to establish a “securely fenced” center at a remote, abandoned Nike missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains, in keeping with earlier plans by the CIA to set up “mind-control” stations off the beaten path, where experimentation could be carried out free from such concerns as human rights. Ironically, West embarked on a PR campaign to promote himself as a champion of “human rights” — an effort that would be comical if not for the bottom line in terms of human suffering.
West’s plans for such centers were the subject of hearings by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1974, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, whose members were alarmed at reports that West planned to test radical forms of behavior modification — mind-bending drugs, electric shock, implantation of electrodes in the brain and forcible castration with the drug cyproterone acetate. Critics charged that his violence centers would target blacks and Mexican-Americans in its studies.
Other sites selected for West’s violence centers in California were Vacaville, Camarillo and Atascadero state hospitals. It has been documented that CIA drug and radiation experiments did take place at Vacaville.
Yet another study that West called for was clearly aimed at intelligence agency application: remote monitoring and behavioral control. His plan was to use electric shock and other means to remotely control human behavior by computer.
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