Bobby is seven years old, but this is not the first time he has been subjected to electroshock. It’s his third time. In all, over the next year, Bobby will experience eight electroshock sessions. Placed on
the examining table, he is held down by two male attendants while the
physician places a solution on his temples. Bobby struggles with the
two men holding him down, but his efforts are useless. He cries out and
tries to pull away. One of the attendants tries to force a thick wedge
of rubber into his mouth. He turns his head sharply away and cries
out, “Let me go, please. I don’t want to be here. Please, let me go.”
Bobby’s physician looks irritated and she tells him, “Come on now,
Bobby, try to act like a big boy and be still and relax.” Bobby turns
his head away from the woman and opens his mouth for the wedge that
will prevent him from biting through his tongue. He begins to cry
silently, his small shoulders shaking and he stiffens his body against
what he knows is coming.

Mary is only five years old. She sits on a small, straight-backed chair, moving her legs back and forth, humming the same four notes over and over and over. Her head, framed in a tangled mass
of golden curls, moves up and down with each note. For the first three
years of her life, Mary was thought to be a mostly normal child. Then,
after she began behaving oddly, she had been handed off to a foster
family. Her father and mother didn’t want her any longer. She had become
too strange for her father, whose alcoholism clouded any awareness of
his young daughter. Mary’s mother had never wanted her anyway and was
happy to have her placed in another home. When the LSD Mary has been
given begins to have its effects, she stops moving her head and legs and
sits staring at the wall. She doesn’t move at all. After about ten
minutes, she looks at the nearby physician observing her, and says, “God
isn’t coming back today. He’s too busy. He won’t be back here for
weeks.”

From early 1940 to 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected child neuropsychiatrist practicing at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, experimented extensively with electroshock therapy on children
who had been diagnosed with “autistic schizophrenia.” In all, it has
been reported that Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to at
least 100 children ranging in age from three years old to 12 years,
with some reports indicating the total may be twice that number. One
source reports that, inclusive of Bender’s work, electroconvulsive
treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from
1942 to 1956, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children’s Service
from 1956 to 1969. Bender was a confident and dogmatic woman, who
bristled at criticism, oftentimes refused to acknowledge reality even
when it stood starkly before her.

Despite publicly claiming good results with electroshock treatment, privately Bender said she was seriously disappointed in the aftereffects and results shown by the subject children. Indeed, the
condition of some of the children appeared to have only worsened. One
six-year-old boy, after being shocked several times, went from being a
shy, withdrawn child to acting increasingly aggressive and violent.
Another child, a seven-year-old girl, following five electroshock
sessions had become nearly catatonic.

Years later, another of Bender’s young patients who became overly aggressive after about 20 treatments, now grown, was convicted in court as a “multiple murderer.” Others, in adulthood, reportedly were in and
of trouble and prison for a battery of petty and violent crimes. A
1954 scientific study of about 50 of Bender’s young electroshock
patients, conducted by two psychologists, found that nearly all were
worse off after the “therapy” and that some had become suicidal after
treatment. One of the children studied in 1954 was the son of
well-known writer Jacqueline Susann, author of the bestselling novel
“Valley of the Dolls.” Susann’s son, Guy, was diagnosed with autism
shortly after birth and, when he was three years old, Dr. Bender
convinced Susann and her husband that Guy could be successfully treated
with electroshock therapy. Guy returned home from Bender’s care a
nearly lifeless child. Susann later told people that Bender had
“destroyed” her son. Guy has been confined to institutions since his
treatment.

To their credit, some of Dr. Bender’s colleagues considered her use of electroshock on children “scandalous,” but few colleagues spoke out against her, a situation still today common among those in the medical
profession. Said Dr. Leon Eisenberg, a widely respected physician and
true pioneer in the study of autistic children, “[Lauretta Bender]
claimed that some of these children recovered [because of her use of
shock treatment]. I once wrote a paper in which I referred to several
studies by [Dr. E. R.] Clardy. He was at Rockwin State Hospital – the
back up to Bellevue – and he described the arrival of these children.
He considered them psychotic and perhaps worse off then before the
treatment.” (This writer could find no case where any of Bender’s
colleagues spoke out against her decidedly racist viewpoints. Bender
made it quite clear that she felt that African-Americans were best
characterized by their “capacity for laziness” and “ability to dance,”
both features, Bender claimed, of the “specific brain impulses” of
African-Americans.)

About the same time Dr. Bender was conducting her electroshock experiments, she was also widely experimenting on autistic and schizophrenic children with what she termed other “treatment
endeavors.” These included use of a wide array of psycho-pharmaceutical
agents, several provided to her by the Sandoz Chemical Co. in Basel,
Switzerland, as well as Metrazol, sub-shock insulin therapy,
amphetamines and anticonvulsants. Metrazol was a trade name for
pentylenetetrazol, a drug used as a circulatory and respiratory
stimulant. High doses cause convulsions, as discovered in 1934 by the
Hungarian-American neurologist and psychiatrist Ladislas J. Meduna.

Metrazol had been used in convulsive therapy, but was never considered to be effective, and side effects such as seizures were difficult to avoid. The medical records of several patients who were
confined at Vermont State Hospital, a public mental facility, reveal
that Metrazol was administered to them by CIA contractor Dr. Robert
Hyde on numerous occasions in order “to address overly aggressive
behavior.” One of these patients, Karen Wetmore, received the drug on a
number of occasions for no discernible medical reason. During the same
ten-year period in which Metrazol was used by the Vermont State
Hospital, patient deaths skyrocketed. In 1982, the FDA revoked its
approval of Metrazol.

Here it should be noted that, during the cold war years, CIA and Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) interrogators, working as part of projects Bluebird and Artichoke, sometimes injected large amounts of
Metrazol into selected enemy or Communist agents for the purposes of
severely frightening other suspected agents, by forcing them to observe
the procedure. The almost immediate effects of Metrazol are shocking
for many to witness: subjects will shake violently, twisting and
turning. They typically arch, jerk and contort their bodies and grimace
in pain. With Metrazol, as with electroshock, bone fractures –
including broken necks and backs – and joint dislocations are not
uncommon, unless strong sedatives are administered beforehand.

A November 1936 Time magazine article seriously questioned the benefits of Metrazol, citing “irreversible shock” as a “great danger.” The article described a typical Metrazol injection as such: “A patient
receives no food for four or five hours. Then about five cubic
centimeters of the drug [Metrazol] are injected into his veins. In
about half-a-minute he coughs, casts terrified glances around the room,
twitches violently, utters a horse wail, freezes into rigidity with
his mouth wide open, arms and legs stiff as boards. Then he goes into
convulsions. In one or two minutes the convulsions are over and he
gradually passes into a coma, which lasts about an hour. After a series
of shocks, his mind may be swept clean of delusions…. A patient is
seldom given more than 20 injections and if no improvement is noted
after ten treatments, he is usually given up as hopeless.”

The Army, the CIA and Metrazol

Army CIC interrogators working with the CIA at prisoner of war camps and safe house locations in post-war Germany on occasion used Metrazol, morphine, heroin and LSD on incarcerated subjects. According
to former CIC officer Miles Hunt, several “safe houses and holding
areas outside of Frankfurt near Oberursel” – a former Nazi
interrogation center taken over by the US – were operated by a “special
unit run by Capt. Malcolm S. Hilty, Maj. Mose Hart and Capt. Herbert
Sensenig. The unit was especially notorious in its applications of
interrogation methods [including the use of electroshock and Metrazol,
mescaline, amphetamines and other drugs].” Said Hunt: “The unit took
great pride in their nicknames, the ‘Rough Boys’ and the ‘Kraut
Gauntlet,’ and didn’t hold back with any drug or technique … you name
it, they used it.” Added Hunt, “Sensenig was really disappointed when
it was found that nothing had to be used on [former Reichsmarschall]
Herman Goering, who was processed through the camp. Goering needed no
inducement to talk.”

Eventually, CIC interrogators working in Germany would be assisted in their use of interrogation drugs by several “former” Nazi scientists recruited by the CIA and US State Department as part of Project
Paperclip. By early 1952, the CIC’s Rough Boys would routinely use
Metrazol during interrogations, as well as LSD, mescaline and
conventional electroshock units.

Metrazol-like drugs are still used in interrogations today. According to reports from several former noncommissioned Army officers, who served on rendition-related security details in Turkey, Pakistan
and Romania, drugs that produce effects quite similar to Metrazol are
still used in 2010 by the Pentagon and CIA on enemy combatants and
rendered subjects held at the many “black sites” maintained across the
globe. Observed one former officer recently, “They would twist up like a
pretzel, in unbelievable shapes and jerk and shake like crazy, their
eyes nearly popping out of their heads.”

In 2008, at the behest of US Sens. Carl Levin, Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel and in reaction to a March 2008 article in The Washington Post, the Pentagon initiated an Inspector General Report on the use of
“mind-altering substances by DoD [Department of Defense] Personnel
during Interrogations of Detainees and/or Prisoners Captured during the
War on Terror.” It is not known if the investigation has been
completed. Among the more famous recent cases of the use of drugs upon
prisoners concerns one-time alleged “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla, who
had originally been accused of wanting to set off a “dirty bomb.” The
charge was later forced, but Padilla was held in solitary confinement
for many months and forced to take LSD or other powerful drugs while
held in the Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina.

The government has gone to great efforts to keep the public uninformed as regards use of drugs on prisoners. In an article by Carol Rosenberg for McClatchy News in July 2010, Rosenberg reported that,
when covering the Guantanamo military commissions trials, when the
question of “what psychotropic drugs were given another accused 9/11
conspirator, Ramzi bin al Shibh, the courtroom censor hits a white noise
button so reporters viewing from a glass booth can’t hear the names of
the drugs. Under current Navy instructions for the use of human
subjects in research, the undersecretary of the Navy is described as
the authority in charge of research concerning “consciousness-altering
drugs or mind-control techniques,” while at the same time is also
responsible for “inherently controversial topics” that might attract
media interest or “challenge by interest groups.”

Dr. Bender Discovers LSD

In 1955 and1956, Dr. Bender began hearing glowing accounts about the potential of LSD for producing remarkable results in children suffering mental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia.
Bender’s earlier work with electroshock therapy had brought her into
contact with several other prominent physicians who, at the time, were
covert contractors with the CIA’s MK/ULTRA and Artichoke projects.
Primary among these physicians were Drs. Harold A. Abramson, Paul Hoch,
James B. Cattell, Joel Elkes, Max Fink, Harris Isbell and Alfred
Hubbard. Some of these names may be familiar to readers. Dr. Abramson, a
noted allergist who surreptitiously worked for both the US Army and
CIA since the late 1940s, was the physician Frank Olson was taken to
see, shortly before his murder in New York City in November 1953. About
a year earlier, Drs. Hoch and Cattell were responsible for injecting
unwitting New York State Psychiatric Institute patient Harold Blauer
with a massive dose of mescaline that killed him. Dr. Elkes was one of
the earliest physicians in Europe to experiment with LSD, having
requested samples of the drug from Sandoz Chemical Co. in 1949. Elkes
was a close associate of Dr. Abraham Wikler, who worked closely with Dr.
Harris Isbell at the now-closed Lexington, Kentucky, prison farm,
where hundreds of already drug-addicted inmates were given heroin in
exchange for their participation in LSD and mescaline experiments
underwritten by the CIA and Pentagon. Elkes worked closely with the
CIA, Pentagon and Britain’s MI6 on drug experiments in England and the
United States.

Dr. Fink, who was greatly admired by Bender, is considered the godfather of electroshock therapy in the United States. In the early 1950s and beyond, Fink was a fully cleared CIA Project Artichoke
consultant. In 1951, CIA officials under the direction of Paul Gaynor
and Morse Allen of the agency’s Security Research Service (SRS) that
oversaw Artichoke, worked closely with Fink in New York City in efforts
to thoroughly explore the merits of electroshock techniques for
interrogations. The CIA was especially interested in the use of standard
electroshock machines in producing amnesia, inducing subjects to talk
and making subjects more prone to hypnotic control. According to one
CIA document, Fink told officials “an individual could gradually be
reduced through the use to electroshock treatment to the vegetable
level.”

In addition to Fink, Bender also greatly admired the work of Dr. Lothar B. Kalinowsky, a psychiatrist who also consulted closely with the CIA on electroshock matters. Kalinowsky, who was part Jewish and
had fled Germany in 1933, was Fink’s close friend and, like Fink, was
widely recognized as an expert on electroconvulsive therapy. Kalinowsky
met with the CIA’s Allen and Gaynor frequently and sometimes was
accompanied by Dr. Fink at the New York State Psychiatric Institute,
where he worked closely with Dr. Hoch.

While it is clear from Dr. Bender’s papers that she also considered the early LSD work of “Dr.” Alfred M. Hubbard in Vancouver, Canada, to be “very substantial and beneficial,” it is important to state here
that Hubbard was not a physician nor did he have any formal medical
training. Hubbard, a jovial character who sometimes worked with the FBI
and CIA, was a strong proponent of the use of LSD. Despite the fact
that he had no medical credentials and once served time in prison for
smuggling, he hoodwinked the Sandoz Chemical Co. into supplying him
such ample amounts of LSD that he dispersed so widely and abundantly
that he earned the title “The Johnny Appleseed of LSD.” Hubbard’s use
of LSD in allegedly curing alcoholism is still cited today. How Hubbard
so easily passed as a physician is unknown. Even a 1961 paper
published by New York Medical College, Department of Psychiatry, and
authored by Dr. A.M. Freedman, cited Hubbard’s LSD work with “children,
primarily delinquents” to have been 85% successful.”

Other physicians whom Dr. Bender consulted about the effects of LSD on children were Drs. Ronald A. Sandison, Thomas M. Ling and John Buckman. These three worked in England at both the Chelsea Clinic in
London and Potwick Hospital in Worcestershire, outside of London.
Sandison is credited with having been the first person to bring LSD
into England, this in 1952 after he met Albert Hofmann in Basle,
Switzerland, at the Sandoz Chemical laboratories. Hofmann handed
Sandison a box of around 600 ampules, each containing 100 micrograms of
LSD. Back in England, Sandison shared his psychedelic bounty with
associates Drs. Ling and Buckman. Before the year was out, Sandison also
turned Hubbard on to LSD, guiding Hubbard through his first trip.
Sandison also began a new treatment program at the Gothic-looking
Potwick facility that he dubbed Psycholytic Therapy. His program’s
patients were mostly schizophrenics. In 1958, an LSD treatment unit was
established at Potwick. Over the years, it has been reported that the
CIA, MI6 and the Macy Foundation secretly helped finance the unit. Dr.
Elkes helped by raising about $75,000 for the unit’s operation. For the
next ten years the unit administered over 15,000 doses of LSD to about
900 patients.

Drs. Buckman and Ling worked closely with Sandison in the Potwick unit. In 1963, Buckman and Ling wrote in a publication, describing “good examples” of the use of LSD in psycholytic psychotherapy: “The
patients’ experiences under LSD have not supported Marx’s dictum that
Religion is the opium of the people but rather that there is a deep
basic belief in a Supreme Being, whether the religion background be
Christian, Jewish or Hindu.”

Dr. Buckman also worked at London’s Chelsea Clinic, often times treating adults and sometimes children. Buckman believed strongly that “frigidity” in women could be treated successfully with LSD. In 1967,
he said of LSD: “Many therapists believe that a transcendental
experience – a feeling that it is a good world and one is a part of it –
is a curative experience in itself.” According to several informed
sources in the London, for years MI6, the British intelligence service
and the CIA closely monitored the LSD work conducted by Sandison, Ling
and Buckman.

Two Sisters, LSD and Dr. Buckman

Marion McGill, today an attorney and college professor in the western United States and her sister, Trudy, were sent in 1960 by their parents to be interviewed by Drs. Ling and Buckman at the Chelsea
Clinic in London. At the time, Marion was 13 years old and her sister
was 15. Marion says that both her mother and father were “quite taken
with the benefits of LSD and thought that we would also benefit from
the drug.” Both parents had undergone a series of ten LSD “treatments”
at the Chelsea clinic. Marion goes on:

“As a 13-year old at the time, my decision-making capacity was very limited. I was, by nature, fairly compliant and docile, rather eager to please my parents. I understood nothing of what
was being suggested for me and my 15 year-old sister – namely that we
participate in some sort of ‘research’ that both our parents had also
participated in. Whether the word ‘experiment’ was used, I don’t recall.
The term ‘LSD’ was vaguely familiar, however, because my parents were
‘taking’ this drug as a form of ‘quick therapy’ – their term for it –
that had been recommended by my uncle, a psychiatrist at a well known
east coast medical school. Both parents needed therapy, in my view.
While highly successful professionally, my father was a tightly wound,
rather angry and insecure man, an accomplished academic, but an
‘industrial strength narcissist,’ as I later called him. My mother was a
submissive, obedient, Catholic woman without much identity of her own,
other than being a doctor’s wife.

“My sister and I, however, were about as ‘normal’ as any two teenagers could be. We were at the top of our classes in school; both of us had lots of friends, participated in extra curricular activities.
We didn’t need ‘therapy.’ We were told we would get a day off from
school after each overnight stay at the clinic for this LSD. It was
perhaps the prospect of a day off from Catholic girls’ school that
persuaded us to do it. I wasn’t aware of making a ‘decision.’ The
purpose of this program was never explained. There were to be 10
sessions – once a week for 10 weeks. I believe they started in January
1960.

“The experiences at the clinic where the LSD was administered were quite strange. There was a brief ‘interview’ by Dr. John Buckman, asking banal questions about health issues (none), but providing no
information about what to expect from the LSD. There was no mention,
for example, of hallucinations or perceptual distortions or anything
frightening. I was not informed of any persistent effects, such as
nightmares. Certainly the possibility of lasting damage was not
mentioned. The word ‘experiment’ was not used. There was, in other
words, no informed consent whatsoever. I was not told that I could
refuse to participate, that I could quit at any time (as provided in the
Nuremberg Code). Since I was below the age of consent, my parents
would have been the ones to agree to this. Indeed, they were the ones
to suggest that we be used in these experiments. It would not otherwise
have happened. But my parents would never discuss this in later years
and never explained why they did it.

“During the 10 sessions, each of which involved an injection, my sister and I were kept in separate bedrooms, darkened rooms, usually with someone present in the room, but I don’t know who the person was.
Occasionally, my mother was also present. At times, I was so frightened
by the hallucinations that I screamed and tried to escape from the
room. I remember once actually reaching the hallway and being forcibly
put back into the bedroom by my mother. I saw a wild array of images –
nightmarish visions, occasionally provoking hysterical laughter,
followed immediately by wracking sobs. I had no idea what was happening
to me. It was terrifying.

“There was no effort to counsel us during or after each of these sessions. There was no ‘debriefing,’ no explanation of what was happening or why this was being done to us. Why I did not refuse to
participate after I first experienced it, I don’t know. But as an adult
and later as a professional medical ethicist, I recognized this lack
of resistance as a function of childhood itself. Most children who are
victims of parental abuse do not know how to resist. They fear
rejection by parents more than they fear the abuse, it seems. The ‘power
differential’ is huge between parents and children and the dependence
on parents is virtually absolute. We were also, living in London at the
time, away from our friends. My sister and I had been told not to talk
about what we were doing. We were Catholics, obedient to parents, etc.
Our father was a doctor, after all – it was hard to grasp that he
would do harm to us or that our mother would. Children just don’t think
this way initially. A child’s dependency usually means trusting one’s
parents or caregivers.

“Although each individual session was often terrifying, any lasting effects of the LSD unfolded gradually. In the weeks immediately following the final session, I experienced frequent nightmares –
visions of crawling insects, horrible masks, etc. I couldn’t sleep. I
was afraid to shut my eyes. I became afraid of the dark. My parents
were dismissive and unsympathetic. Their attitude was, in some ways,
more disturbing to me than the experiments themselves because it meant
that my parents had known full well that the experience would very
likely be frightening – and hadn’t cared.

“I discovered that my parents were dishonest and unfeeling in ways that I could not comprehend. They told my sister and me never to talk about the LSD experiences, never to disclose what had happened in
London. This further ruptured our relationship with them, a
relationship that was, by then, permanently damaged. I was still
dependent on them, however and so was my sister.

“Two years after these experiments, during her freshman year in college, my sister suffered a nervous breakdown. I don’t know the extent to which the LSD may have precipitated this. But my parents’
response to what was probably a mild breakdown from which my sister
could have recovered, was coercive and drastic. She had been asking
questions about the LSD at this time. She was angry about it. We both
were. We talked about it together, but I was afraid to confront our
parents. My sister was not. The angrier she became, the more she was
‘diagnosed’ as a ‘psychiatric’ case and the more medication she was
given. To this day, my sister is heavily medicated. She never fully
recovered from that first episode.

“Our parents responded to my sister’s anger in a way that frightened me further. I also felt tremendous guilt for not being able to prevent the horrors that my sister endured. Once she was ‘classified’ as a
psychiatric patient, she was lost. Everything that was done to her in
the name of ‘treatment’ seemed to me to be a form of ongoing abuse and
torture.

“The fact that our father was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected physician – and his brother, who had introduced us to this LSD horror, was a prominent, internationally known and widely
respected psychiatrist – made it impossible to expose them or go
against them. Their reputations were more important to them than the
health and well being of my sister.

“My own response was simply to leave home. I never trusted my parents again after the London LSD experience. I discovered many other ways in which my father and my uncle lied, covered up, dissembled and
eventually threatened me, in order to keep this story from being told.

“On a positive note, the experience informed my career choices in both human rights and medical ethics, but it also made me alert to the ways in which academic medicine was – and is – corrupted by the drug
industry itself and by the continuing abuse of human subjects to
further the development of drugs as weapons – both for interrogation
potential and also, more subtle behavior control on a massive scale. My
own experience also sensitized me to the special vulnerability of
children and teenagers in the medical environment.

“Even when I subsequently confronted my father with the evidence that LSD had been tested by the CIA for use as a military weapon in the 1950s and 1960s, he dismissed his participation by saying that it was
an ‘enlightening experience, like visiting an art gallery.’ When I
pointed out that this was not my experience as a child, he dismissed
it, including the presumption that I must be a ‘conspiracy theorist’ to
propose such a thing. At the age of 91, he finally admitted that it
had perhaps not been a very good idea to subject my sister and me to
LSD.

“Dr. Buckman and Ling were knowing participants in ongoing intelligence-based work with mind altering drugs. I ‘met’ Buckman in London when I was 13, but encountered him again years later at the
university medical school in the United States where he was on the
faculty.

“I went to see Dr. Buckman in his office. I asked him what he thought about the ethics of using children in an LSD experiment. At first, he didn’t seem to realize who I was. I identified myself as one
of his ‘subjects’ and gave him my business card as a Medical Ethicist
and lawyer. He was clearly shocked, stood up, refused to talk to me and
told me to leave his office. Shortly thereafter, I received a phone
call from my father. His brother, the psychiatrist and colleague of Dr.
Buckman, had been alerted to my impromptu visit. Subsequently, both my
uncle and my father threatened me, saying they would make sure I lost
my university faculty position if I disclosed anything publicly about
the LSD experiments in London.

“‘You will never work in bioethics again,’ they said.

“The response of all these men to the threat of disclosure indicates their lack of ethical scruples, their lack of empathy, their own pathology. I don’t know what the exact term would be, but I suspect
there is a form of psychological ‘doubling’ at work – the sort of thing
that was described in [Robert Jay] Lifton’s book, The Nazi Doctors who
were able to ignore their Hippocratic oath to ‘first, do no harm,’ and
to inflict unimaginable horrors on their fellow human beings.

“The loss of my sister has been a life long source of sorrow for me. I attribute it to the LSD and its cover up, whether the chemicals themselves ’caused’ her disintegration or not. In law this is called a
‘contributing cause.’ I learned that people cover up the most awful
things, not just within a family but within communities, within
universities, within ‘polite society.’ There is probably no absolute
barrier that will prevent these things from being done, but they have to
be exposed and called out for what they are, whenever they occur.”

Dr. Bender’s LSD Experiments on Children

Shortly after deciding to initiate her own LSD experiments on children, Bender attended a conference sponsored by a CIA front group, the Josiah Macy Foundation. The conference focused on LSD research and
featured Dr. Harold A. Abramson as a presenter. In 1960, Abramson
conducted his own LSD experiments on a group of six children ranging in
age from five to 14 years of age. A few short months after the Macy
Foundation conference, Dr. Bender was notified that her planned LSD
experiments would be partially and surreptitiously funded by the
Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (SIHE), another CIA front
group then located in Forest Hills, New York. The Society, headed by
James L. Monroe, a former US Air Force officer who had worked on
top-secret psychological warfare and propaganda projects, oversaw about
55 top-secret experiments underwritten by the CIA. These projects
involved LSD, ESP, black magic, astrology, psychological warfare, media
manipulation, and other subjects. Apparently, Bender’s work with
children and LSD raised some concerns at the CIA’s Technical Services
Division (TSD). A 1961 TSD memo written to Monroe questioned the
“operational benefits of Dr. Bender’s work as related to children and
LSD,” and requested to be kept “closely appraised of the possible links
between Dr. Bender’s project and those being conducted under separate
MK/ULTRA funding at designated prisons in New York and elsewhere.”

In 1960, Dr. Bender launched her first experiments with LSD and children. They were conducted within the Children’s Unit, Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York. The LSD she used was supplied by
Dr. Rudolph P. Bircher of the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. (Dr.
Bircher also provided Bender with UML-491, also a Sandoz-produced
product, very much like LSD but sometimes “dreamier” in effect and
longer lasting.) Her initial group of young subjects consisted of 14
children diagnosed schizophrenic, all under the age of 11. (Because
diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, autism, and other disorders have
changed over the decades, one cannot assess what actual conditions
these children really had.) There were 11 boys and three girls, ranging
in age from six to ten years old.

Jean Marie is almost seven years old. She came here nearly a year ago after her parents abandoned her to the care of an aunt who had no interest in raising her. Marie, who prefers to be called Jean, is shy,
withdrawn, and distrustful of most adults she encounters. There are
reports she may have been sexually molested by her uncle … Despite her
withdrawn nature she smiles easily, and enjoys the company of other
children. After receiving LSD on three occasions earlier this month,
Marie ceased smiling at all and lost any interest in others her age …
In the past week, she seems to have become easily agitated and has lost
any interest in reading, something she seemed to very much enjoy
before treatment.

In a published report on her 196 LSD experiments with 14 “autistic schizophrenic” children, Bender states she initially gave each of the children 25 mcg. of LSD “intramuscularly while under continuous
observation.” She writes: “The two oldest boys, over ten years, near or
in early puberty, reacted with disturbed anxious behavior. The oldest
and most disturbed received Amytal sodium 150 mg. intramuscularly and
returned to his usual behavior.” Both boys were then excluded from the
experiment.

The 12 remaining children were then given injections of 25 mcg. of LSD and then days later were each given 100 mcg. of LSD once a week. Bender’s report states: “Then it was increased gradually to twice and
three times a week as no untoward side-effects were noticed…. Finally,
it was given daily and this continued for six weeks until the time of
this report.”

Bender’s findings and conclusions concerning her LSD experiments indicated she found the use of the drug promising. Bender reported: “In general, they [the children] were happier; their mood was ‘high’ in
the hours following the ingestion of the drug … they have become more
spontaneously playful with balls and balloons … their color is rosy
rather than blue or pale and they have gained weight.” Bender
concluded: “The use of these drugs [LSD, UML-401, UML-491] … will give
us more knowledge about both the basic schizophrenic process and the
defensive autism in children and also about the reaction of these
dilysergic acid derivatives as central and autonomic nervous system
stimulants and serotonin antagonists. Hopefully these drugs will also
contribute to our efforts to find better therapeutic agents for early
childhood schizophrenia.”

In an article published in 1970, Dr. Bender reported on the results of LSD dosing upon “two adolescent boys who were mildly schizophrenic.” She reported
that the boys experienced perceptual distortions. They thought the
researchers were making faces at them, that their pencils were becoming
“rubbery,” and one boy reported the other boy’s face had turned green.
The boys began to complain that they were being experimented upon. Even
so, Bender and her associate continued the two male adolescents on a
regimen of 150 mcg. per day, in divided doses, of LSD. While one of the
boys supposedly “benefited very much,” Bender reported that he later
returned to the hospital as “a disturbed adult schizophrenic.” The other
boy kept complaining that he was being experimented upon and they
stopped giving him LSD, not because of the drug’s effects itself, Bender
explained, but “because of the boy’s attitude towards it,” which she
attributed to “his own psychopathology.”

Dr. Bender’s LSD experiments continued into the late 1960s and, during that time, continued to include multiple experiments on children with UML-401, a little known LSD-type drug provided to her by the
Sandoz Company, as well as UML-491, also a Sandoz product. Bender’s
reports on her LSD experiments give no indication of whether the
parents or legal guardians of the subject children were aware of, or
consented to, the experiments. Without doubt, parents or guardians were
never informed that the CIA underwrote Bender’s work. Over the years,
there have been multiple reports that many of Bender’s subject children
were either “wards of the State” or orphans, but the available
literature on the experiments reveals nothing on this. The same
literature makes it obvious that the children had been confined to the
Creedmoor State Hospital for long periods of time and that many, if
discharged, needed “suitable homes or placements in the community.”
There is also no evidence that any follow-up studies were conducted on
any of the children experimented upon by Dr. Bender. Today, Dr. Bender
is best known and highly regarded in some circles as the creator of the
Bender-Gestalt Test, which measures motor skills in children.

On Bender’s use of LSD on children, Dr. Leon Eisenberg said years later: “She did all sorts of things. Lauretta Bender reached success in her career long before randomized controlled trials had even been
heard of. She didn’t see the need for trials of drugs because she was
convinced she knew what worked.” (See: “A History of Autism:
Conversations with the Pioneers” by Adam Feinstein, Wiley-Blanchard,
2010.) Many other physicians speaking privately were far less
diplomatic in condemning Bender’s LSD work, but, still today, many are
reluctant to criticize her, and, remarkably, many of the aging
stalwarts of the arguable “virtues” and “potential” of LSD continue to
cite her work with children as groundbreaking science.

Today, nearly 60 years beyond the horrors of Dr. Bender’s CIA-sponsored experiments on children, few people are aware that they were conducted. For most people, regardless of their awareness of the
experiments, it is difficult to fathom how intelligent, highly educated
physicians and scientists could partake in such brutal, uncaring,
unethical and illegal experiments on children. What was the basis of
their motivation? Was it the quest for some sort of elusive medical
grail? Was it for economic gain? Or was it simply the result of a
misguided search for knowledge that appeared so infinitely important
that any sense of compassion and respect for human rights and dignity
was cast aside in the name of a higher goal or good – a search at times
so exhilarating with the sense that one is at the precipice of a
momentous discovery that any semblance of respect for humankind was
thrown aside?

One can easily come to any and all these conclusions simply by reading the professional papers of such scientists and researchers. Not once do any of these papers express concern for the subjects at hand
or denote any pangs of conscience at violating any oaths, codes and
statutes regarding patient rights, human rights or human dignity. That
America’s most shameful period of human experimentation, the years 1950
through to about 1979, came on the heels of the making and adoption of
the Nuremberg Codes only adds to the shame and hypocrisy. Today, human
experimentation is still aggressively conducted by US
government-sponsored and employed physicians and scientists regardless
of those codes, which came directly out of the shocking madness of the
Nazi era. That government-sponsored experimentation still occurs makes a
mockery of any governmental efforts, however valid, to protect people
from science run amok – and a nation that uses its young, its children,
for such pursuits is a nation whose commitment to human rights and
democratic principles should be seriously questioned and challenged.

(The names Marion McGill and that of her sister Trudy, are pseudonyms. Marion is a highly respected attorney and college professor, who asked that her real name not be used in this article.
All other names in this article are real.)