The Cia's Joint Program (MK ULTRA)

The United States government was born in a time of major oppression and turmoil. The founding fathers set out to create a government in which everyone could prosper and grow. In order to do that people had to be allowed to learn and grow, and science had to be funded. One of the major scientific findings of the mid twentieth century was MK ULTRA, an umbrella term for numerous studies of drugs, mental degradation, and mind control. MK ULTRA often considered a black mark on the reputation of the CIA was actually a positive operation because it kept LSD away from our enemies, furthered the important research that would 've been otherwise lost to history, and taught the government that mind control doesn 't work.

MK ULTRA was a joint program

MK ULTRA also helped to advance important research that might have otherwise been lost to history. During World War Two Nazi scientists were able to test new drugs and mind control techniques on concentration camp victims. “In the late 1940’s Project Paperclip was a PR campaign designed to find Nazi scientists in hiding, once found, these scientists were offered the option of prison or continuing their research as a part of the MK ULTRA umbrella.” Even though we look at the atrocities of the Nazi’s and can denounce its methods, the fact still remains that their research was not only cutting edge, but provided the base material for many of the projects under MK ULTRA. Without the development, research, and funding provided by the CIA most of the research would have been lost to history and set back the study of mind control and mental illness by decades. One such doctor, Joseph Mengele, was known as the most feared man of the Nazi Regime, he was able to continue his work towards a master race with the full funding and support of the United States government. This might seem an odd practice through the filter of our current understanding, but without these studies we would never have made it to this point of understanding in the first place. Moral grounds aside, this research furthered what we know about the mind, drugs, and humanity as a

The program was not all peaches and roses however, in 1975 a Senate House Committee found “From its beginning in the early 1950’s until its termination in 1963 the program of administration of LSD to unwitting, non-volunteer human subjects demonstrates a failure of CIA leadership to pay adequate attention to the rights of individuals And provide effective guidance to CIA employees” (Red Ice.) It is clear based on this finding that not only did the government break many of its own standing rules about scientific research, but they also failed miserably to create useable mind control techniques, sleeper agents, or super citizens. Though many of the MK ULTRA documents were ordered destroyed in 1972 by what’s his name, there were countless personal testimonies of things like LSD parties, where guests were served LSD spiked drinks without their knowledge, the testing of LSD on poor, black prisoners, and cases of paying heroin attics, in heroin, to test different drug combinations (Clark 3). These activities, once discovered, were denounced as appalling, but the research information they created was, and is still, being used to direct inquiry into drug abuse and mental illness.

For all of its flaws, the MK ULTRA project demonstrates the lengths to which some Americans were willing to go in order to protect their country and gain understanding. While these methods may be morally reprehensible, they did offer us insight we otherwise never would have acquired. If there were not