Sidney Gottlieb Admitted Patients Were Kept on LSD for 77 Days

By Miriam Adler · August 9, 2026

Psychiatric patients and prisoners suffered pharmacological assault and state-sponsored coercion while the CIA used secret funding mechanisms to shield its architects and purged key files.

On May 17, 1983, Sidney Gottlieb sat for a deposition in a civil action brought by Velma "Val" Orlikow and others against the United States. Orlikow had been a patient at the Allan Memorial Institute, a site where staff, backed by the CIA, performed what the archive's curated description of the record calls "horrific experiments" on psychiatric patients during the 1950s and 60s. Gottlieb, a chemist and spymaster who the public record identifies as the head of MKUltra, was tasked with answering for a legacy of pharmacological assault.

In the transcript described by the National Security Archive, Gottlieb’s strategy is a calculated oscillation between admission and amnesia. When asked about "domestic field experimentation" with LSD, he provides a semantic pivot: if field experimentation meant work taking place outside of Washington, D.C., and if his involvement meant being aware of or instigating such work, the answer was "yes." He later admitted to having personally conducted "between one and five" interrogations, though the record notes he initially claimed confusion when presented with a document proving the fact.

Funding Mechanisms

To maintain the secrecy of these operations, Gottlieb describes a system of financial camouflage. He identifies the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology as a "funding mechanism" designed to ensure the CIA’s organizational identity would not be apparent in the projects it funded. This was not an isolated tactic. The curated description records that the Geschickter Fund operated under a similar mandate, serving as a "mechanism to funnel funds" for research where the agency wished to remain anonymous.

This layers of obfuscation were not merely administrative; they were the essential shielding for experiments that would have been unthinkable under any standard of medical ethics. By erasing the grantor's identity, the agency could outsource the violation of human subjects to academic and medical institutions, leaving the victims to face the consequences while the architects remained invisible.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

Lexington and Atlanta

While Gottlieb remained evasive regarding the "psychic driving" and "depatterning" experiments conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute—repeatedly claiming he could not remember key details—he was more forthcoming about the agency's reach into the American carceral system.

According to the archive's description, Gottlieb admitted visiting the NIMH Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, "at least three or four times." There, Dr. Harris Isbell conducted "early and basic work" on the relationship between LSD dose and response. The subjects were prisoners from the Narcotics Division Hospital. Gottlieb admitted he was aware that Isbell offered these inmates drugs in exchange for their participation.

The pattern extended to the Atlanta federal penitentiary, where the plaintiffs' attorneys questioned Gottlieb about the work of Dr. Carl Pfeiffer. The use of prisoners—individuals whose capacity to refuse was already compromised by the state—transformed medical research into a form of state-sponsored coercion.

The Manchurian Candidate

There is a tension in the record between the cinematic myth of mind control and the banal cruelty of the actual research. Gottlieb denies that the CIA intended to develop techniques to improve U.S. interrogations, and he specifically rejects the idea that the program sought to create a "Manchurian Candidate." He dismisses this notion as a "fiction" indulged in by Mr. Marks, noting that the topic was a "sensitive area" in his mind.

Yet, the reality described in the deposition is more unsettling than the fiction. When asked if it was consistent with Dr. Cameron’s research to keep subjects on LSD for 77 consecutive days, Gottlieb answered that it was. He noted that Cameron had an interest in the "quantum effects of LSD, repeated ingestion."

This is the gulf where the truth of MKUltra resides: not in the sci-fi fantasy of programmable assassins, but in the prolonged, systematic chemical saturation of human beings. Whether it was the "quantum effects" of a two-month drug binge or the use of "psychosurgery research projects"—which Gottlieb remembers the CIA did employ—the objective was the dissolution of the self.

Destroyed Files

When the questioning turned to the safehouses operated by narcotics agent George White, Gottlieb offered a definitive end to the trail. He stated that the files on those houses "were all destroyed" and "don’t exist anymore," claiming they were specifically purged in 1972 and 1973.

He was asked about White's reported use of "prostitutes to test methods of slipping drugs to unwitting persons." Gottlieb’s response was to frame this not as a specific policy of cruelty, but as a reflection of the "modus operandi of this whole drug culture."

The deposition leaves a void where the full accounting of the Orlikow case should be. Between the destroyed files of the 1970s and Gottlieb's selective memory in 1983, the record provides a glimpse of the machinery of the program without ever fully exposing the ledger of its victims.