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.
Reporters should be expected to be more diligent in their research than the general public, though.
Either they didn’t look into this substance beyond what they were told (which is at best lazy, and at worst willfully deceptive when your job is the sharing of accurate and clear information), or they knew and intentionally chose to use a name that the average person wasn’t going to recognize. For reasons, I’m sure.
It is literally their job to know what desukinks is and explain to us that desuskank is meth. For some reason they chose not to.