Behind the 1970 Psychedelic Ban – How the CIA Kept Testing in Secret

On 27 October 1970, Congress signed a law declaring that LSD had no accepted medical use. Within a year, the Central Intelligence Agency had wired $37,000 to a military laboratory to keep testing a closely related compound. Both pieces of paper sat inside the same federal government, and neither side knew the other existed.

MKULTRA and the Origins of CIA Psychedelic Research (1947–1969)

Long before any congressman drafted a drug schedule, the Navy was already running people through chemical trials. Between 1947 and 1973, the United States Navy ran five separate human-subject drug programmes under sponsorship from the Central Intelligence Agency. Funding documents state the intelligence interest in the work was classified Secret and ‘must not be revealed’.

At one Public Health Service hospital, a single researcher worked through roughly 800 different compounds on addicted patients. Records show the CIA transferred at least $282,215 to the Office of Naval Research to keep that programme running.

On 13 April 1953, the agency formally authorised its own behaviour control project under the cryptonym MKULTRA (a cryptonym is a classified code name used to hide a project’s true purpose). Its Office of Technical Service eventually launched more than 150 separate testing avenues.

Two months later, the chief chemist approved his LSD subproject.

Then came the template that would carry the work invisibly through the next two decades.

In November 1954, the agency wanted access to clinical patients at Georgetown University Hospital. It paid $375,000 toward construction of the hospital’s new Gorman Annex, routed through a private medical charity acting as a cut-out (a cut-out is a trusted intermediary used to hide where money comes from). In exchange, the agency took one-sixth of the new annex as a safehouse, with the hospital supplying patients and volunteers.

For the next decade, the same template carried the work.

By 1965, leadership had reorganised the work under the name MKSEARCH, with two related tracks called MKOFTEN and MKCHICKWIT. (Earlier drafts of this investigation placed the rename in 1964; the Department of Defense FOIA release dates it to 1965.) Objective unchanged: alter human behaviour predictably through drugs.

By 1968 and 1969, the funding stream had shifted toward Edgewood Arsenal, a United States Army research facility in Maryland, where the military was building computer databases of pharmacological data drawn from prior human volunteers. Classified drug-effects libraries were being assembled at the exact moment public health officials would shortly declare such data did not exist.

The 1970 Controlled Substances Act

In the spring of 1970, the public legislative narrative was already in motion. John Ingersoll, head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, testified in May that the majority of severe narcotic users had previously taken marijuana, hashish or LSD. His phrasing built the gateway argument that would carry into the Schedule I debate.

Then came the statutory language itself.

On 27 October 1970, the President signed the Controlled Substances Act, Public Law 91-513. The law placed LSD, psilocybin and other psychedelics in Schedule I, the strictest legal category for drugs deemed to have a high risk of abuse and no accepted medical use. Schedule I status carried two declarations in particular: ‘no currently accepted medical use’, and ‘lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision’.

Roger Egeberg, Assistant Secretary of Health, had recommended the strictest schedule a few weeks earlier. He acknowledged in writing ‘a considerable void in our knowledge’ of the plants and the active drugs they contained, then pushed for top-tier restriction anyway.

For civilian researchers, the practical effect was immediate. To handle any Schedule I compound, a university lab now needed both Food and Drug Administration approval and a separate Drug Enforcement Administration licence. The Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine has since traced the effective halt of civilian psychedelic trials to that bureaucratic combination.

Egeberg framed the Schedule I placement as temporary, conditional on the completion of certain studies then underway. Those studies never restarted.

Secret CIA Drug Testing Funding After the 1970 Ban

Eight months after the Controlled Substances Act took effect, the intelligence agency was still writing cheques to Edgewood Arsenal. In 1971, it transferred $37,000 there for further testing of a glycolate-class compound logged as EA#3167. The military had previously flagged the chemical as effective.

Most of the 1971 work involved animals rather than people. Animal trials, glass slides, lab benches, all of it running while the public statute was being marketed as the final answer.

Researchers wanted to know whether EA#3167 would soak through human skin from a strip of adhesive tape.

Then the agency’s own chief chemist pulled the plug.

On 10 July 1972, Sidney Gottlieb ordered the behaviour control work halted. He concluded that the effort was ‘probably not a high pay-off’ once the money, labour and security risk were weighed together. Two decades of testing wound up on a single line of internal evaluation.

And then, eleven months after the halt order, the joint testing programme conducted one final human trial. In June 1973, two military volunteers were dosed with EA#3167 at Edgewood. No surviving written authorisation explains why that test went ahead after Gottlieb had stopped the programme.

The finance folders preserve the $37,000 funding line. They do not preserve the names, the doses, the duration or the medical aftermath of the two volunteers.

The 1973 Destruction of MKULTRA Records

In January 1973, the outgoing Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, decided he wanted the entire MKULTRA archive gone before he left office. He gave the order verbally. Nothing was put in writing.

Gottlieb relayed the verbal instruction to the technical staff at the Records Center.

On 30 January 1973, staff began feeding the physical files into the incinerators. The destruction notices logged two specific batches by job number: Job No. 60-746, which held the core MKULTRA operational files, and Job No. 68-256, which contained other material possibly relating to biological and chemical warfare detection. Both batches were physical paper, kept in the Records Center, and once burned they were gone.

Three days later, the Chief of the Records Center filed a formal memorandum protesting the destruction, attaching the destruction notices as evidence. The name of the Chief who signed that memo remains redacted in the released file.

That memo creates a 24-hour problem. Most witnesses later told the Church Committee that the destruction had happened on 31 January. The protest memo, dated 2 February and naming the precise batches, fixes the actual date as 30 January, a day earlier than the date later treated as more commonly accepted.

Then came the second purge.

Five months after the main archive fire, Gottlieb cleared out his personal safe drawer through his secretary just before retiring. The agency’s own destruction file confirms the secretary carried out the order. Contents of the drawer were never logged.

The 2 February memo proves the destruction broke standard archival protocol. No internal disciplinary record connected to that breach has surfaced in any release since.

How Financial Records Uncovered the Secret Trials

In January 1975, the Senate established the select committee chaired by Frank Church. Investigators demanded the drug-testing files. The agency replied that the records had been destroyed in 1973, leaving the committee with little more than the patchy memories of retired officers.

One box of paperwork told a different story.

On 11 March 1974, the Office of Technical Service had formally retired a box of project material to the central Archives. The index noted it contained behaviour modification material. By all visible records, the handoff appeared routine.

The recall is dated 8 January 1975, the same month the Senate began its work. Weeks later, the box came back with the project files inside it missing, and the sign-out signature line in the released file is redacted.

That same January, the Senate established the select committee chaired by Frank Church. Investigators demanded the drug-testing files. The agency replied that the records had been destroyed in 1973, and the committee was forced to lean on the patchy memories of retired officers.

Between September and October 1975, the agency’s own Inspector General investigated the missing 1974 box. The audit concluded that no satisfactory explanation existed for its disappearance, and confirmed the 30 January date for the main 1973 destruction, in line with the protest memo and against the dominant testimony.

Two years later, the accountants saved the trail.

In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act worker searched the retired records centre by Budget and Fiscal Section rather than operational code name. They pulled seven boxes containing roughly 8,000 pages of financial documents. Technical staff who burned the operational logs had never coordinated with the accounting department to burn the receipts.

Those 8,000 pages reconstructed the shape of the operation. They named 80 institutions, 185 outside researchers and 149 active subprojects across the behaviour control work, plus 33 unrelated intelligence subprojects, figures Admiral Stansfield Turner confirmed in his 1977 letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The identity of the officer who emptied the 1974 box before its return remains the single most actionable open lead in the case. Fifty years on, the signature line is still a black bar.

The Geschickter Fund and the Engineered Blindness

Most of the cut-out funding routes the CIA used to put cash on university desks pass through one name. According to the 1995 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Final Report, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research was the principal vehicle the agency used. Its civilian recipients received grants from what looked like an ordinary medical charity.

There was a practical reason for the charity wrapper. Scientists working in physiological and psychiatric research were reluctant to sign agreements connecting them to covert biological warfare work, fearing damage to their professional reputations.

So the agency stopped asking them to sign.

A grant from the Geschickter Fund looked like a grant from any other medical charity. The scientist ran the testing, observed the effects, wrote up the results. Results travelled quietly back to the intelligence officers, and the funded researcher never knew the true sponsor.

The cut-out worked exactly as designed. Findings travelled inward to the Technical Services Division while the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare drafted Schedule I from the open journals alone, concluding in writing that there was ‘a considerable void in our knowledge’ of the active drugs in these compounds.

No 1969-1970 inter-agency memo asking the question has yet surfaced. Whether the silence was engineered or whether the question simply never occurred to anyone in the health department remains the central open question of the case.

Source

Sources include: Department of Defense FOIA release 02-A-0846 regarding military testing; the 1977 Senate Church Committee ‘Report on MKULTRA’; the 1995 ‘Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Final Report’; contemporary declassified CIA Inspector General memorandums documenting the 1973 record destruction; statutory text of the 1970 Controlled Substances Act; and Congressional hearing records from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.