“…These programs required psychiatrists and scientists using psychiatric “treatments.” The professionals involved were not peripheral consultants; they were essential architects.
Investigative journalist Gordon Thomas captured the ethical collapse behind these programs in Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse (1989):
“Nothing I had researched before could have prepared me for the dark reality of doctors who set out to deliberately destroy minds and bodies they were trained to heal.”[10]
The 1977 Senate hearings on Project MKUltra revealed that 80 institutions and 185 non-governmental researchers and assistants participated in 149 CIA behavioral research projects.[11] This was not rogue psychiatric activity. It was institutional.
[…]
The question is not merely what occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, but whether institutions have fully reckoned with the behavioral power of central nervous system-acting drugs.
In 2008, the Mitre Corporation conducted a Human Performance Study for the U.S. Department of Defense Research and Engineering Enterprise. The report examined how advances in psychoactive drugs might be weaponized by America’s adversaries. It warned that newly approved drugs would “certainly have extensive off-label use” in the United States and recommended monitoring such use because adversaries might exploit these compounds in training or field operations against the nation.[29]
Yet today, 76.9 million Americans, including 6.1 million children and teens, are prescribed psychotropic drugs. Many carry regulatory warnings for agitation, hostility, aggression, suicidal ideation, and even homicidal thoughts.
Among them is fluoxetine (Prozac), one of the most widely prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which increases synaptic serotonin and indirectly affects multiple serotonin receptors, including 5-HT2A—the same receptor strongly implicated in the psychoactive effects of psychedelics…”