Lana Ponting is part of a class-action lawsuit against the Canadian government for its alleged role in the MK-Ultra experiments.

The first thing Lana Ponting remembers about the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, is the smell - almost medicinal.

“I didn’t like the look of the place. It didn’t look like a hospital to me,” she told the BBC from her home in Manitoba.

That hospital – once the home of a Scottish shipping magnate – would be her home for a month in April 1958, after a judge ordered the then-16-year-old to undergo treatment for “disobedient” behaviour.

It was there that Ms Ponting became one of thousands of people experimented on as part of the CIA’s top-secret research into mind control. Now, she is one of two named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for Canadian victims of the experiments. On Thursday, a judge denied the Royal Victoria Hospital’s appeal, paving the way for the lawsuit to proceed.

    • HellsBelle@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      204·
      13 hours ago

      During the early 1940s, Nazi scientists working in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau during World War II conducted interrogation experiments on human subjects. Substances such as barbiturates, morphine derivatives, and hallucinogens such as mescaline were employed in experiments conducted on Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and other nationalities’ prisoners of war. The aim of these experiments was to develop a truth serum which would, in the words of one laboratory assistant to Dachau scientist Kurt Plötner, “eliminate the will of the person examined.” American historian Stephen Kinzer said that the CIA project was a continuation of these earlier Nazi experiments, as evidenced by MKUltra’s use of mescaline on unwitting subjects, replicating previous Nazi experiments conducted at Dachau.

      The CIA exported experiments to Canada when they recruited Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, creator of the “psychic driving” concept, which the CIA found interesting. Cameron had been hoping to correct schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the psyche. He commuted from Albany, New York to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University, and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 (US$766,936 in 2024, adjusted for inflation) to carry out MKUltra experiments there. The Montreal experiments research funds were sent to Cameron by a CIA front organization, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and as shown in internal CIA documents, Cameron did not know the money came from the CIA.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra