WE'RE REAPING TRAGIC LEGACY FROM DRUGS

Culture: From government LSD experiments to overuse of drugs like Ritalin,
the consequences are overwhelming.

It turns out that Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, was a volunteer
in mind-control experiments sponsored by the CIA at Harvard in the late
1950s and early 1960s.

Michael Mello, author of the recently published book, "The United States of
America vs. Theodore John Kaczynski," notes that at some point in his
Harvard years--1958 to 1962--Kaczynski agreed to be the subject of "a
psychological experiment." Mello identifies the chief researcher for these
only as a lieutenant colonel in World War II, working for the CIA's
predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. In fact, the man
experimenting on the young Kaczynski was Dr. Henry Murray, who died in 1988.
Murray became preoccupied by psychoanalysis in the 1920s, drawn to it
through a fascination with Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," which he gave to
Sigmund Freud, who duly made the excited diagnosis that the whale was a
father figure. After spending the 1930s developing personality theory,
Murray was recruited to the OSS at the start of the war, applying his
theories to the selection of agents and 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 control of the late Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA's
technical services division. Just 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, which culminated in Olson's fatal descent
from an upper window in the Statler-Hilton in New York. 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 being unwittingly given a dose of LSD by Gottlieb.

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

There are other human time bombs, primed 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 exploding into
mania were on a regimen of antidepressants. Eric Harris, one of the shooters
at Columbine, was on Luvox. Kip Kinkel, who killed his parents and two
students in Oregon, was on Prozac.

There are a number of other instances. Apropos 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% of the children became psychotic on Prozac.
And manic psychosis can lead to violence."

A 15-year-old girl attending a ritzy liberal arts school in the Northeast
told me that 80% of the kids in her class were on Prozac, Ritalin or
Dexedrine. The pretext used by the school authorities is attention deficit
disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, with a
diagnosis made on the basis of questions such as: "Do you find yourself
daydreaming or looking out the window?"

Ritalin is being given to about 2 million American schoolchildren. A 1986
article by Richard Scarnati in the International Journal of the Addictions
lists more than 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 that
Ritalin is supposed to be treating. One panel reviewing the proceedings at a
conference on ADHD last year even doubted whether the disorder is a "valid"
diagnosis of a broad range of children's behavior, and said there was little
evidence Ritalin did any good. In 1996, the Drug Enforcement Administration
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.

Alexander Cockburn Writes for the Nation and Other Publications