LSD EXPERIMENTS 'GOOD RESEARCH BACK THEN'

Prison's former head of psychiatry stands behind testing on inmates

Back in the early 1960s when he was the head of psychiatry at Kingston's
Prison for Women, George Scott saw the arrival of LSD as one more tool in
what he believed was a heroic struggle to treat the deviant criminal mind.
In his own mind, he was not unlike the Wright Brothers, the builders of the
first airplane.

A lawsuit filed yesterday in court by an ex-inmate offers a much different
description of the experiments Mr. Scott approved a generation ago. It
calls them "callous and reckless." Mr. Scott and other prison staff, the
lawsuit claims, were motivated by the need to use the woman now suing them
for "experimental purposes, as opposed to a desire to promote the
plaintiff's health and well-being."

"It's a lot of bull---t," Mr. Scott, 83, said yesterday when contacted by
the Citizen. "It was good research back then. It was good research with
good motivation, with good supervision, and the government supplied the
bucks for the whole thing."

Dorothy Mills Proctor is suing Mr. Scott, the federal government, another
prison psychiatrist and a psychologist for $5 million, claiming LSD
treatments given against her will when she was a teenage inmate in Kingston
still affect her to this day. Ms. Proctor suffers from acid flashbacks and
other hallucinations.

Ms. Proctor is suing the government because she says it has taken too long
to deal with her complaint. Last year, Corrections Canada investigated and
a board of inquiry determined she was one of 23 women who were subjected to
the LSD experiment. The board concluded it was "a risky undertaking."

It recommended an apology and compensation. It concluded Ms. Proctor could
not give proper consent in the coercive prison setting. At 17 and serving a
three-year robbery sentence, she received at least one treatment in a
1.5-metre-by-2.5-metre windowless basement segregation cell, lit by a
single bulb with only a mattress and a hole in which to pass bodily waste.

Corrections Canada has since shelved its own report and referred the matter
for further study to the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and the law. It
did not meet its May deadline.

Advocates for prisoners' and human rights have joined Ms. Proctor in
criticizing the government for the delay. "The need for compensation and
the responsibility of the government has been well documented in the first
report," said Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Association of
Elizabeth Fry Societies.

"What kind of informed consent was Dorothy Proctor able to give?" asked
Rubin Freidman, director of government relations for B'Nai Brith's League
for Human Rights. "Giving someone an LSD trip in solitary confinement
doesn't seem to be an ethical use of drugs."

Last year, the Corrections report said of LSD's potential to be a
psychiatric wonder drug: "This promise was considered more of a hypothesis
than a proven fact."

Reached yesterday at this home outside Kingston, Mr. Scott, the former
prison psychiatrist, adamantly maintained he had done nothing wrong.

He said the government fostered a climate of research, which medical
professionals such as himself embraced. If a new wonder drug presented
itself, its potential had to be explored. LSD was no different.

"That's why we did it, to see what would go on, to see if this would
unearth suppressed memories in small doses, maybe help abused kids."

That bold research approach was not unlike what drove the Wright Brothers,
who built the first successful airplane, he said. "Everybody laughed at them."

Mr. Scott says he is not worried by the lawsuit.

"She's entitled to sue anybody for the moon if she likes. But it's a
sucker's game, that's all," said Mr. Scott.

"What can anybody prove, what can they disprove? This girl -- whoever she
is, I don't remember her at all -- some people have nothing better to do
than to raise hell.

"And after 30 years it's very difficult to say, 'Well, 'if you hadn't fed
me pea soup, I would have been feeling better.' "

Yesterday, Mr. Scott said he had no direct involvement in the LSD
experiments. He said he did approve the study, but that he was not the
person who administered the drugs.

Mr. Scott reviewed the LSD project and concluded: "No harm could be done in
any situation whatsoever as long as the people being given it had a
reasonably stable background, had no evidence of mental illness, had no
evidence of neurological illness, no evidence of violence."

Unfortunately, this did not suit Dorothy Proctor's profile. She was born in
Nova Scotia, abandoned by her mother, and raised in foster homes where she
was sexually abused. She eventually took to the streets as a runaway before
her arrest.

When reminded that last year's board of inquiry could find no evidence of
written consent, Mr. Scott replied, "Well, they had to agree, whatever. I'm
sort of like the guy in the ivory tower wondering what's going on in the
basement."

Mr. Scott said he had no memory of Ms. Proctor. "Their names are as sticky
as postage stamps, as far as I'm concerned," he said. "That's probably
30,000 patients ago."

Mr. Scott has no plans to offer any apologies to the women involved.

"That's the government's problem, not mine," he said. "To hell with it."

The retired ex-doctor says his biggest concern these days is spending time
with his horses and travelling with his wife. They've travelled recently to
Ireland and Puerto Rico, on the spur of the moment.

"We disappear from time to time," he said with a laugh.

Copyright 1998 The Ottawa Citizen

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski