They came, or were sent, to the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal for help with their mental problems—for caring, curing and healing, but they never got it.
Instead, the “patients,” hundreds of them, were treated as guinea pigs in horrible psychiatric experiments involving massive doses of LSD, electroshock and mind control by repetition of phrases thousands of times, even while they slept in drug-induced comas.
It was all part of the CIA’s notorious MK-Ultra mind control program, which experimented on unwitting subjects in search of techniques the agency hoped to use against Cold War communist adversaries.
As in the films A Clockwork Orange and The Manchurian Candidate, the experiments were attempts to erase memories and personalities, and alter minds.
“They just did what they wanted to us. We were guinea pigs.”
All too often, the results were catastrophic, with victims confined to lives of hallucinogenic despair, never realizing that their brains had intentionally been scrambled by monsters in lab coats who cared only for the “experiment,” no matter what torture real people had to endure.
But now, finally, over 60 years after the brutality they suffered, the time for retribution, for vengeance, may be drawing near.
Canadian Justice Dominique Poulin of Quebec’s Superior Court ruled on July 31 that a class action lawsuit that could represent hundreds of families of MK-Ultra victims in Canada may go forward to discovery and trial. On November 13, that decision was confirmed on appeal.
The lawsuit, filed in 2019, is aimed at the Royal Victoria Hospital, McGill University and the Canadian government for their part in the experiments conducted without their informed consent between 1948 and 1964 by Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron.
Judge Poulin noted that the experiments had “a goal of erasing a patient’s thoughts whereby patients were immobilized, rendered intellectually helpless and prevented from using their defenses.”
The experiments were immoral, unethical and, today, utterly illegal—but in those murky times, Cameron and others like him working for the CIA got away with it.
In fact, the psychiatric establishment didn’t merely tolerate Cameron—it celebrated him. He wasn’t a mere outlier lurking on the fringes of the profession. He was its standard-bearer. Cameron rose to the very top of psychiatry’s global hierarchy, serving as president of the World Psychiatric Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Psychiatric Association—all positions he held while actively carrying out psychiatric torture. That the leading figure in his field was also one of its most sadistic experimenters says everything about how thoroughly the system protected him, and how evil the psychiatric industry really is. To the profession, Cameron wasn’t a scandal—he was a star.
“I was an ordinary teenager,” said Lana Ponting, one of two lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Her parents sent her to Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric facility, for treatment because she kept running away.
Cameron saw his appointment to director of Allan as an excellent chance to conduct his experiments on hundreds of helpless patients.
“I’ve been sick all my life because of what they did to me,” Ponting, now 84, said. “They just did what they wanted to us. We were guinea pigs.”
Ponting had been strapped down and injected with methamphetamine and LSD in a series of psychiatric experiments. “I didn’t even know half the time who I was,” she said. “It was almost like a jail. It was horrible.”
After extensive drugging and electroshock, Ponting suffered memory loss, lifelong nightmares and other long-term damage.
“I felt it all my life, because I was wondering why I would think this way, or what happened to me,” the grandmother of four said. “Sometimes I wake up screaming in the night because of what happened.”
“Every time I see a picture of Dr. Cameron, it makes me so angry.”
The lawsuit, she said, “isn’t really about giving the patients back what they lost, because that’s not possible, but sort of almost making sure their suffering wasn’t in vain, that we do learn from this.”
Learn, that is, that we should never give control over patients to monstrous so-called “doctors” like Cameron.
“He never came back to the person he was before.”
In one of Cameron’s early experiments, victims were placed in extreme heat—up to 107.6°F for one hour—with their change in body temperature measured. Patients were also placed in a tub of cold water with their temperature taken every three minutes.
Jordan Torbay, author of a study on Cameron, stated: “This 1934 study is a prime example of how ethics can be neglected when researchers are set on finding answers. Being exposed to 40°C heat [104°F] for an hour could put a person at risk of heat exhaustion, and it would certainly not be pleasant to endure.
“Cameron’s experiments had devastating consequences for patients and their families,” he said, becoming “a form of medical torture likened to the Nuremberg Trials.”
The sick part is that everyone, including Cameron and the CIA, knew what they were doing was terribly wrong, but did it anyway.
They even came up with a cover story for Cameron’s payments, listing the source as the “Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology,” a CIA front for civilian research.
The other named plaintiff in the lawsuit, Julie Tanny, is suing on behalf of her father, Charles, who was treated in 1957 for facial pain and left mentally crippled as a result.
“Most of his life vanished,” Tanny said.
His classic brainwashing “treatment” involved two 30-day stints of chemically induced sleep, allegedly with a tape recorder under his pillow constantly broadcasting messages.
“He didn’t know me or my two siblings,” Tanny said. “He didn’t remember he had children or that he had a business or anything. And he was very detached. That never changed. He never came back to the person he was before.”
Justice Poulin wrote: “The applicants submit that the Montreal Experiments were conducted without the informed consent of the patients, or even without their knowledge.”
The lawsuit states the plaintiffs “blame the government of Canada for the faults of its representatives who would have negligently funded the Montreal Experiments. They also blame McGill University and Royal Victoria Hospital for enabling the Montreal Experiments.”
Attorney Jeffrey Orenstein, who represents the plaintiffs, called Justice Poulin’s July decision, “definitely a step in the right direction.”
He added, “We’re determined to bring it to trial.”
In the mid-1970s, Freedom led the fight against MK-Ultra with powerful investigative reporting that laid bare the terrible truth of CIA-sponsored mind control experimentation.
The psychiatrists and doctors involved in MK-Ultra were the embodiment of evil—individuals who had thrown their Hippocratic oaths into the garbage can, along with their shredded ethics and humanity.
Unfortunately, like his predecessor Josef Mengele, who drowned in 1979 in Brazil, Cameron is beyond retribution—he died in 1967.
Pity he never had to face his victims.
