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.
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.
Even when these facilities aren’t being used by the CIA to experiment, they are already torture facilities.
The US has an entire cottage industry of “troubled teen” treatment programs which are essentially completely unregulated. No requirements on accreditation, no requirements that staff have any sort of training, no requirements that the care offered be evidence-based. Children are raped and die at these places and it is covered up. Parents can essentially sign away all of their children’s rights.
Ms Ponting was given… desoxyn, a stimulant
It’s really weird of the BBC to use this little-known brand name when everyone knows what methamphetamine is.
Of course I know deso… Desoksin?
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.
Bets on it being intentional.
That’s horrible.
But isn’t the CIA a US American institution? Why Canada? Please excuse my ignorance.
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.
This does not explain why the CIA is active in Canada?
edit: OP just downvoted me for this. WTF?
edit2: Now OP also edited above comment to include content that actually answers my question (the 2nd paragraph). What an ass.
Downvoted for whining about downvotes.
Downvoted for whining about whining about downvotes.
The CIA operates everywhere but the US (in theory)
That’s the FBI. The CIA is supposed to only operate outside the US.
That’s what he said lol
Bot probably lol
I just got done with the 4-part Behind the Bastards did on this and, holy shit
They are some bastards. We only know about what they were, but let’s be real, they still are.
