From Healing to Hell

Chapter 11

a free society’s best defense against unethical behavior modification is public disclosure and awareness … The more vigilant we and our representatives are, the less chance we will be unwitting victims.

—John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”

mother finally decided she had had enough of living in Blakely, a place with far too many painful memories for her. She had worked long enough to qualify for a teacher’s pension and paid off every cent of the loan on the house. now she told me she was moving to a nice retirement community in her hometown of Americus and wanted Anne and me to sell the Flowers Drive house as soon as she selected the pieces of furniture she wanted to take with her. i was relieved to see her settled where she would be happier and well looked after, but getting her moved and disposing of everything she and Daddy had accumulated over the years took a lot of time and energy. Through the lean and traumatic years, their house had fallen into considerable disrepair; it was a good thing we didn’t know that twelve years would pass before the place sold.

about that same time, I became involved in a lawsuit, having to do with my biotechnical patents, which was a tremendous financial drain and took up far more time than I liked. and if all that weren’t enough, my marriage had gone permanently sour. The problems between us were such that no amount of counseling would help, so for the children’s sake, rather than deprive them of the security of a two-parent home, I turned a blind eye to one intolerable event after another and resolved to tough it out until our youngsters were grown. What would happen at that point I didn’t think about and couldn’t have said.

With the normal demands of a houseful of active, growing children and the abnormal ones of an increasingly hostile wife, each new day brought such plentiful conflicts and challenges that I had little time to dwell on the troubles of the past.

Yet Marks’s discoveries and revelations kept coming back to my mind. What Isbell and the other MKUltra participants had done to American citizens was unconscionable. my father was only one of countless numbers of victims, and he at least had come out of it alive. How many others had committed suicide, or ended their days confined to mental hospitals once their brains were completely fried? most of the guilty parties were still alive; they had to be called to account.

eventually, I resumed my research. I discovered that Time had reported LSD experiments between 1955 and 1958 at Michigan’s Ionia State Hospital—experiments similar to those in Lexington and likewise funded by the CIA. at Ionia, LSD and marijuana were tried out as “truth drugs” on criminal sexual psychopaths.

i learned that CIA-paid experimenters in Providence, Rhode Island, preyed on both staff and mental patients at Butler Memorial Hospital. other experiments were organized by a Dr. Carl Pfeiffer at the New Jersey reformatory in Bordentown. a pharmacologist, Pfeiffer had left the University of Illinois to join the faculty at Emory University, where I would later graduate in dentistry, running experiments at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. So if we had succeeded in getting Daddy transferred to Atlanta when he begged us to, we would only have put him into a new tormentor’s hands.

a Scots-born naturalized American citizen, D. ewen Cameron, carried out the most horrendous tortures of all at Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry in Montreal. men, women, and even teenagers consigned for mostly minor problems to his sadistic care deteriorated into blithering idiots, for lack of a better term. a rapaciously ambitious man like Isbell, Cameron was considered one of the foremost North American physicians in his field. Professor of psychiatry at McGill University and psychiatrist-in-chief of Montreal’s prestigious Royal Victoria Hospital as well as director of Allan Memorial, he would in time hold the presidencies of four psychiatric associations: American, Quebec, Canadian, and World, having been a founder of the latter. one of three North American psychiatrists to evaluate the Nazi prisoner Rudolph Hess at Nuremberg, he had published a paper about his Nuremberg experience. like Isbell, he was named to the Psychomimetic Advisory Committee.

at Allan Memorial, Cameron plied his victims with mind-ravaging drugs, subjected them to unbelievably cruel sensory deprivation, and forced them to listen to endless taped hours of brainwashing programming—again, all in contravention of the Nuremberg Code, and funded by the CIA.