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Beginning in
the mid 1950s, the house at 225 Chestnut Street on Telegraph Hill was used
by the United States government to test the effects of LSD and sex. With
complete cooperation from the SFPD, unwitting johns were dosed with the
powerful drug before consummating business with hookers here, where they
were monitored by an agent from behind two-way glass. The research known
as Operation Midnight Climax was a spin-off of the CIA program MKULTRA,
in which acid experiments were conducted at top universities including
the Stanford Research Institute. Ken Kesey, one of the icons of psychedelic
culture, took his first acid trip during a Stanford experiment. Agents
also dosed themselves and others with LSD, attempting to determine the
drug's feasibility as a weapon in the spy game. The Telegraph HIll experiments
were conducted on unsuspecting men from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic
backgrounds. After a full decade of acid sex tests, the CIA pulled the
plug on Operation Midnight Climax in 1965 and admitted the project was
unethical. LSD was criminalized the following year. |
