Government Testing on Human Subjects and the Intricacies of Informed Consent

The intense stimulant lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) can briefly possess the mind of an individual who ingests it. As a result of its intensity and capability to open the "entryways of recognition," LSD could be violent to the psyche (Baker, 1999). It can seize the user's brain, tenderly uncovering life's dormant truths, or it can turn angry, decreasing the user to a state of complete panic. Obviously, LSD is not to be taken carelessly. This makes dosing an unknowing individual with it, particularly one who isn't familiar with LSD's properties, an especially frightful act. An individual unacquainted with LSD and completely unaware they had been dosed could be brought to the edge of mental breakdown.

In 1951, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) discovered that the Swiss drug manufacturer Sandoz Pharmaceuticals had 100 million dosages of LSD, accessible to any individual who wanted to purchase them. At the height of the Cold War, this was seen as a credible threat against the American public. The United States Army purchased the LSD, and shortly thereafter the military analysts and the CIA started Operation MKULTRA (Project MKULTRA, 1977). The experiments were primarily directed at consenting, willing respondents at colleges, CIA labs and independent research offices. However, some of these tests fell outside of the limits of adequate convention: One study tricked heroin addicts to take part as subjects by paying them in heroin, while another considered the impacts of LSD on African American detainees in a jail (Baker, 1999). The military organizations needed to know the degree to which it was conceivable to control human conduct through the utilization of psychoactive medications like LSD, mescaline, in addition to using psych...

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