CIA mind-control experiments in USA and Canada lawsuit

[ionelv]

This BBC headline reads like is an international cospiracy:

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.

According to her medical files, which she obtained only recently, Ms Ponting had been running away from home and hanging out with friends her parents disapproved of after a difficult move with her family from Ottawa to Montreal.

"I was an ordinary teenager," she recalled. But the judge sent her to the Allan.
Once there, she became an unwitting participant in covert CIA experiments known as MK-Ultra. The Cold War project tested the effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD, electroshock treatments and brainwashing techniques on human beings without their consent.

Over 100 institutions – hospitals, prisons and schools – in the US and Canada were involved.

Comments

[ioplokon]

I had a similar "uhhh wtf" reaction to the Camp X display at the military electronic communications museum in Kingston (which is a pretty good museum. A nice mix of stuff from old men's garages and armoured trucks!)

PS: is this different to the programme from the US v Stanley SCOTUS case? Not optimistic about judicial outcomes here...

[ionelv]

"The lawsuit names the Royal Victoria Hospital, McGill University and the Government of Canada as defendants."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/mk-ultra-depatterning-lawsuit-montreal-experiments-cia-1.7598486

[ioplokon]

TY. Will be interesting to see if Canadian justice is any better...

[ionelv]

I just read up on Camp X on wikipedia and I can't figure out what you found super messed up about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_X

[ioplokon]

Oh just that it seemed really mysterious, like something from a comic book? The museum display also mentioned a bunch of documents they were trying to get declassified. Maybe the display was too exciting?

[ionelv]

From how you’re describing it, it sounds like the target audience was teen boys which tracks given their main audience is probably school trips.