John Lisle

So that was at least the concept.

But there were, I mean, dozens and dozens of different kinds of drugs they were testing just to see how people reacted to them and if any of them could be used as a potential truth drug.

The heroin one actually makes sense.

I never thought of that.

Yeah.

Well, one of the ironies as well about this experiment that I mentioned, you know, Harris' Bell,

and giving these prisoners all these drugs.

The prisoners are in this place.

It's called the narcotic farm because they're supposed to be getting off drugs.

You know, they're supposed to be, you know, curing them of their addiction.

At the same time, they're giving them all these drugs to test them out.

And then as a reward for participating in these trials, they had two options.

Either they could get like a positive letter in the parole board and like 100 bucks or something, or they could go to the drug bank window, stick out their arm, and they would get a needle full of heroin as a reward.

So they were supposed to be getting off drugs and yet you're incentivizing them to participate in these drug trials by giving them drugs.

Yeah, so that's one of 149 subprojects.

No, no.

I was just going to say, one of the ironic things, too, with some of these MKUltra subprojects, they're interested in finding these supposed truth drugs that could get someone to tell the truth during an interrogation.

But it turns out even just the threat of giving someone a truth drug turned out to be a lot more effective than any drug that they actually tried out.

So, for instance, in an interrogation, if you tell someone that this is a truth drug and I'm going to give it to you and it's going to make you tell the truth,

That can lower their defenses a bit in the sense that the person who takes this, that might give them kind of the permission to be able to talk because it makes them think, well, I couldn't have stopped myself.