Date of Award
Spring 2015
Document Type
Capstone
Degree Name
<-- Please Select One -->
Department
Historical & Political Studies; College of Arts & Sciences
First Advisor
Dr. Geoffery Haywood
Abstract
For my senior thesis project, I researched the CIA's LSD experiments on unwitting human subjects in the 1950s and early 1960s. I asked why the CIA carried out these experiments, what the impact on the victims was, and how the CIA was able to get away with breaking the law in this egregious way. These government-funded experiment were code-named MKULTRA. My thesis is that the CIA conducted these experiments as part of the American's Cold War struggle with world communism. This is also the reason why they were able to get away with these tests. The fallout for the human test subjects was often negative. It was not until the early 1970s, when American's distrust in the government was at an all time high, due to the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, that these experiments would come to the attention of the public. The congressionally appointed Church Commission researched the evidence, held hearings, and set up committees to monitor the treatment of human test subjects, all in order to prevent anything like this from happening again.
Recommended Citation
Grant, Brittanny, "Was It All Just A Hallucination? The CIA's Secret LSD Experiments" (2015). Senior Capstone Theses. 13.
https://scholarworks.arcadia.edu/senior_theses/13