© lamy Stock PhotoThe experiments took place at the Allan Memorial Institute. The site is seen here in 1901.
Sarah Anne Johnson had always known the broad strokes of her maternal grandmother's story. In 1956, Velma Orlikow checked herself into a renowned Canadian psychiatric hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, hoping for help with postpartum depression.
She was in and out of the clinic for three years, but instead of improving, her condition deteriorated - and her personality underwent jarring changes.
More than two decades passed before Johnson and her family had an explanation, and it was much stranger than any of them could imagine: in 1977 it emerged that
the CIA had been funding experiments in mind-control brainwashing at the institute as part of a North America-wide project known as MK Ultra.
At the time, the US agency was scrambling to deepen its understanding of brainwashing, after a handful of Americans captured during the Korean war had publicly praised communism and denounced the US.
In 1957, this interest brought the agency north of the border, where a Scottish-born psychiatrist, Ewen Cameron, was trying to discover whether doctors could erase a person's mind and instill new patterns of behaviour.
Orlikow was one of several hundred patients who became unwitting subjects of these experiments in Montreal in the late 1950s and early 60s.
Comment: Cannabis most likely fell "out of favor" for a number of reasons, many of them relating back to politics and profit. The pharmaceutical industry had yet to isolate the compounds and so could not patent them; it was not administered through syringe and so was contrary to their preferred method which required equipment and a doctor; it was a natural product which could actually be grown quite easily by the patients themselves; its other uses such as for clothing, paper and construction rivalled other established, powerful monopoly industries; and finally, in the US it was used recreationally, similar to alcohol, by certain groups of society, particularly blacks and latino's, who were prime targets for the ruling class at the time.
As the article notes, BigPharma is again back in the market looking to develop 'synthetic cannabis-like drugs' which they will, this time, be able to patent, even though they may prove to be less effective and will have perhaps the litany of side-effects common in pharmaceutical drugs. Many natural medicines tend to rely on the 'whole-plant', or at least many co-factors found within the plant itself, to work.
It is criminal that something so beneficial has been withheld from the public for over a century, and is reflective of the corruption and ignorance within mainstream medicine which is clearly beholden to the political class: