At 16, I was experimented on by the CIA and now I’m suing

The first thing Lana Ponting remembers about the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, is the almost medicinal smell.

Speaking to the BBC from her home in Manitoba, the woman said, “I didn’t like the look of this place. It didn’t look like a hospital to me.”

Once the home of a Scottish shipping magnate, the hospital would become his home for a month in April 1958 after a judge ordered the then 16-year-old to receive treatment for “insubordinate” behavior.

Ms Ponting became one of thousands of people experimented on as part of the CIA’s top-secret research into mind control. He is now one of two plaintiffs named in a class-action lawsuit for Canadian victims of the experiments. A judge on Thursday rejected the Royal Victoria Hospital’s appeal, clearing the way for the case to proceed.

According to recently obtained medical records, Ms. Ponting had been running away from home and hanging out with friends her parents disapproved of after a difficult move with her family from Ottawa to Montreal.

“I was an ordinary teenager,” he recalled. But the judge sent him to Allan.

Once there, he unwittingly participated in secret CIA experiments known as MK-Ultra. The Cold War project tested the effects of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, electroshock therapies, and brainwashing techniques on people without their consent.

More than 100 institutions (hospitals, prisons, and schools) in the United States and Canada participated in the project.

McGill University researcher Dr. Allan. In a process he called “exploration,” Ewen Cameron drugged patients and had them listen to recordings, sometimes thousands of times.

Dr Cameron was making Ms Ponting listen to the same tape recording hundreds of times.

“It was repeated over and over again, you’re a good girl, you’re a bad girl,” Ms Ponting recalled.

PhD student Jordan Torbay, who researched his experiments and their ethical implications, says the technique is a form of “psychic driving.”

“Essentially, patients’ minds were being manipulated using verbal cues,” he says, adding that he also looked at the effects of sleeping pills, forced sensory deprivation, and induced coma.

Medical records show that Ms. Ponting was given drugs such as sodium amytal, barbiturate, desoxin, stimulants, as well as LSD, as well as nitro gas, a tranquilizer known as “laughing gas”.

Dr. “By April 30, the patient was examined… When Nitrous Oxide was administered he became quite agitated and extremely violent, threw himself half way down on the bed and began screaming,” Cameron said in one of Ms Ponting’s medical files, obtained through freedom of information. he wrote.

The harsh truth about the MK-Ultra experiments first came to light in the 1970s. Since then, multiple victims have attempted to sue the United States and Canada. The lawsuits in the US were largely unsuccessful, but in 1988 a Canadian judge ordered the US government to pay nine victims $67,000 each. In 1992, the Canadian government paid CAD$100,000 (about US$80,000 at the time) to each of the 77 victims but did not accept liability.

He says Ms Ponting was not among them because she did not yet know she was a victim.

Ms Ponting said she had felt there was something wrong with her for decades but did not learn the details of her involvement in the experiments until recently.

He says he has little memory of what happened at Allan or in the years that followed.

Ms. Ponting eventually married and moved to Manitoba, where she had two children with whom she is still close. She is now the grandmother of four grandchildren. But he says his time at Allan left him with lifelong repercussions.

“I’ve felt that my whole life because I was wondering why I was thinking that way or you know what happened to me,” he said.

He says he has had to take a cocktail of medications throughout his life to cope with mental health problems, which he attributes to his time at Allan and recurring nightmares.

“Sometimes I wake up at night screaming because of what happened,” she said.

The Royal Victoria Hospital and McGill University declined to comment as the case is pending in the courts. The government reminded the BBC of the previous agreement it made in 1992, which it said was made for “humanitarian” reasons and did not accept legal responsibility.

For Ms. Pointing, the case is a chance to finally find some closure.

“Sometimes I sit in my living room and my mind goes back and I can think about things that happened to me,” he says. “Every time I see a picture of Dr Cameron it makes me so angry.”

Although Dr Cameron’s work has since become synonymous with the MK-Ultra experiments, Ms Torbay says his research shows that he did not know at the time that he was being funded by the CIA. His work with the US intelligence agency ended in 1964, and he died of a heart attack shortly thereafter in 1967.

But whether or not she knew where the money came from, Ms. Torbay says she should have known that her experiments were unethical.

He says he hopes the case moves forward and the victims gain some sense of justice.

“It’s not really about giving patients back what they’ve lost, because that’s not possible, but kind of making sure their suffering isn’t in vain, and we’re learning from that,” he says.