Unabomber Participated in CIA Drug Tests as Student

by Alexander Cockburn

In fact, the man experimenting on the young Kaczynski (who was given the code name Lawful) was Dr. Henry Murray, who died in 1988 at the ripe age of 95. Born rich in a townhouse on a site now occupied by Rockefeller Center, Murray became preoccupied by psychoanalysis in the 1920s, drawn to it through a fascination with Melville's "Moby Dick," which he gave to Sigmund Freud, who duly made the excited diagnosis that the whale was a father figure. Murray was then analyzed by Carl Jung.

After spending the 1930s developing personality theory, Murray was recruited to OSS at the start of the war, applying his theories to the selection of agents, also presumably to interrogation.

As chairman of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, Murray zealously prosecuted the CIA's efforts to carry forward experiments in mind control conducted by Nazi doctors in the concentration camps. The overall program was under the management of the late Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA's technical services division.

As Harvard students were fed doses of LSD, psilocybin and other potions, so too were prisoners and many unwitting guinea pigs. Sometimes, the results were disastrous. A dram of LSD fed by Gottlieb himself to an unwitting U.S. Army officer, Frank Olson, plunged Olson into escalating psychotic episodes that culminated in Olson's abrupt and fatal descent from an upper window in the Statler-Hilton in New York. At the time of his death, Gottlieb was the object of a lawsuit not only by Olson's children but also by the sister of another man, Stanley Milton Glickman, whose life had disintegrated into psychosis after he had been unwittingly dosed by Gottlieb in Paris.

What did Dr. Murray give Kaczynski? Did the experiment's long-term effects help tilt him into the Unabomberšs homicidal rampages? The CIA's mind- experiment program of those years was vast. How many other human time bombs were thus primed by Gottlieb's doctors? How many of them have exploded?

There are other psychic land mines aplenty, sown in haste, ignorance or indifference to long-term consequences. Amid all the finger-pointing to causes prompting the recent wave of schoolyard killings, not nearly enough clamor has been raised about the fact that many of these teenagers suddenly erupting into mania were on a regimen of anti-depressants. Eric Harris, one of the two shooters at Columbine, was on Luvox. Kip Kinkel, who killed his parents and two students in Springfield, Ore., was on Prozac. There are a number of other instances. Apropos of possible linkage, Dr. Peter Breggin, author of books on Prozac and Ritalin, has said: "I have no doubt that Prozac can contribute to violence and suicide. I've seen many cases. In the recent clinical trial, 6 percent of the children became psychotic on Prozac. And manic psychosis can lead to violence."

A 15-year-old girl attending a very ritzy liberal arts school in the Northeast told me last week that 80 percent of the kids in her class were on Prozac, Ritalin or Dexedrine, either separately or in combo. The pretext used by the school authorities is Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), with a diagnosis made on the basis of questions such as "Do you find yourself daydreaming or looking out the window during school?"

Ritalin is currently being given to about 2 million American school children. A 1986 article by Richard Scarnati in The International Journal of the Addictions lists over a hundred adverse reactions to Ritalin, including paranoid delusions, paranoid psychosis, amphetamine-like psychosis and terror.

Meanwhile uncertainty reigns on the precise nature of the complaint Ritalin is supposed to be treating. One panel reviewing the proceedings on the conference on ADHD put on last year by the National Institute of Mental Health even doubted whether ADHD is a "valid" diagnosis of a broad range of children's behavior and said there was little evidence Ritalin did any good.

Two years earlier, in 1996, the Drug Enforcement Agency denounced the use of Ritalin and concluded that "the dramatic increase in the use of (Ritalin) in the 1990s should be viewed as a marker or warning to society." Indeed. Land mines now litter the terrain of our society, waiting to explode.