THE CASE FOR PRISON'S LSD TESTS

In a science journal essay, the man who experimented on several inmates at
Kingston's Prison for Women defended the importance of his research. Mike
Blanchfield reports.

He saw it as his role as a researcher to cure jailed drug addicts who were
an "enormous wastage of manpower in our own and other countries." And in
the early 1960s, in the basement of the Kingston Prison for Women, he
decided to administer the powerful hallucinogenic drug LSD to at least 30
women who were locked behind bars there.

"We must know more," psychologist Mark Eveson wrote in 1964. "It is the
fundamental responsibility for every professionally trained worker in this
field to carry out such research -- to try to answer in an objective manner
the questions posted by our own inability to effectively and consistently
deal with the offender."

Mr. Eveson was writing in the January 1964 edition of the Canadian Journal
of Corrections. The article details the psychologist's approach to
administering LSD to inmates during research there.

As revealed yesterday in the Citizen, the LSD experiment by Mr. Eveson and
a Kingston psychiatrist caused long-term damage that still plagues at least
two of his study subjects three decades later. A report by a board of
inquiry by the Correctional Services of Canada recommends that women
involved in the study receive an apology and a settlement package for being
included in the study.

Back in the early 1960s, LSD was legal in Canada. It was touted as a
possible wonder drug in treating mental illness. That hypothesis has since
been discredited. LSD was banned in the late '60s.

During an investigation last year, Mr. Eveson said he did his best under
the ethical framework that existed in the early 1960s to conduct his
research with the best of intentions. In their report, investigators said
Mr. Eveson and his colleagues did their best to meet the standards of the
day, but fell short on at least one significant occasion -- when they used
LSD on a teenage girl locked in solitary confinement. She was in no
position to give informed consent, the report concluded.

"It was unethical today and it was unethical 35 years ago," says Arthur
Schafer, the director of the University of Manitoba Ethics Centre.

"Our rules are very much more highly developed now than they were in the
1960s, and it's because of a lot of the abuses that took place then," says
Margaret Somerville of the McGill Centre of Medicine, Ethics and the Law.

Both ethicists agree that it can be a tricky proposition to impose the
moral values of one generation on another when it comes to the use of human
beings as research subjects.

And while the climate was much different a generation ago when the concept
of a written consent form did not exist, both ethicists say researchers
such as Mr. Eveson should have known better.

At the end of the Second World War, the international community drafted a
set of guidelines on the boundaries of human experimentation. They were the
result of the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, at which the world
learned the horrifying human experiments by doctors in the Third Reich. In
1948, the Nuremberg Code was drafted. It said that that consent of all
human subjects was essential.

"This means that the person involved should have the legal capacity to give
consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of
choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit,
duress, over-reaching, or other form of constraint or coercion," says the
code.

Unfortunately in the decades following the war, says Mr. Schafer, the
Nuremberg Code was not widely followed.

Mr. Eveson's LSD study was done with full knowledge of the prison's
superintendent and senior corrections officials in Ottawa.

"Profoundly unethical research was going on, was funded by prestigious
government agencies, the results were published in respected medical
journals for decades after the war."

Mr. Eveson's 1964 article was titled "Research with Female Drug Addicts at
the Prison for Women." He was a staff psychologist at the prison back then.

In the article, he describes choosing 30 addicts and 30 non-addicts at
random from among the prison's 110 inmates. The recent report done by
Corrections says only 23 women received LSD as part of the experiment.

At the time, LSD was the subject of hundreds of academic papers, many of
which claimed it had potential to break down a patient's defences and speed
the pace of psychotherapy.

"Despite much controversy in the literature," Mr. Eveson wrote, "it was
thought that there existed some hope that a single optimal dose of this
drug could effect penetration of appropriate defence mechanisms and give
insight into depressed problems."

Mr. Eveson wrote that the drug could be "a very effective instrument in
this modification of criminal behavior."

Mr. Eveson said he had a problem "establishing a generally acceptable
method of treatment management and dosage." He said further study would be
required. He also said he had a larger scale study in the works "pending
the approval of the Ministry of Health."

Initially, Mr. Eveson found that a single dose of LSD brought "marked
improvement in a minority of inmates."

"Improvement was marked in subjects whose institutional life had been
marked by violence and opposition to custody," he wrote.

One of the women who took part in the study disagrees. Former inmate
Dorothy Proctor was 17 when she was given her first dose of LSD while in
solitary confinement in 1961. A year earlier, she had become the first
woman to successfully escape from the Prison for Women. She spent several
stints in solitary confinements for fighting with other inmates. The first
time she was given LSD she had a traumatic series of hallucinations in
which walls melted and the bars of her cell turned into snakes.

Mr. Eveson noted his LSD subjects experienced a "significant shift towards
introversion." He said this might help "create an atmosphere of treatment
receptiveness not previously possible."

He reported that 90 per cent of his subjects felt cut off from friends "and
expressed a desire for isolation."

Ms. Proctor disagrees. She says she felt cut off -- but not because of the
drug. She had no family or friends outside the prison who kept in touch
with her. If anything, she says, her isolation made her an attractive study
subject -- because if something happened to her, no one on the outside was
likely to raise a fuss.

"Anxiety was also heightened in a high proportion of the group," Mr. Eveson
wrote. "These trends offer powerful possibilities for the minimization of
the role of the delinquent subculture ..."

Mr. Eveson did note that some of his subjects suffered from hallucinations,
or what is called a "bad trip." Ms. Proctor and another former inmate
interviewed for the recent Corrections report complained of such
hallucinations and said they are plagued to this day by flashbacks.

"The hallucinatory effects of the drug detracted from therapeutic value and
dosages were calculated to avoid any gross sensory changes," Mr. Eveson
wrote. "The results of this preliminary investigation appear most
promising."

Three decades later, Corrections would find that Mr. Eveson was not
completely successful at avoiding "gross sensory changes."

One former inmate said in the recent Corrections report she imagined
spiders crawling out of wounds in her body and hallucinated that "spider
semen crawled up my legs and into my vagina and some crawled up my body and
entered through both ears."

In his paper, Mr. Eveson said he hoped to do more research, using up to 90
inmates.

In conclusion, he wrote: "The work described in this paper has, I hope,
given some indication of the research interests of the unit at the Prison
for Women, both in carrying out small scale investigations, and for
proposing experimental hypotheses for more exact study."

Dr. Somerville, of McGill University, says that a prison is too coercive a
setting in which to obtain legitimate consent from a potential research
subject.

Prisoners forfeit some rights, but not all of them. "You don't lose your
right not to be used as an experimental animal," she says.

"It is sometimes said that you can best test the ethical tone of a society
by how it treats its most vulnerable weakest and its most in-need members,"
she says. "It's not how you treat the people you like that tests your
ethics; it's how you treat the people you really despise."

Copyright 1997 The Ottawa Citizen