In the 1950s and 60s, at the height of the Cold War, the CIA launched a secret program called Operation Midnight Climax as part of its notorious MKUltra mind-control research. Operating out of safehouses in San Francisco and New York, agents used sex workers to lure unwitting men, then dosed them with LSD without their knowledge and observed the results through one-way mirrors. The goal was to study whether psychedelics could be weaponized for interrogation, coercion, and control. What unfolded was a chilling abuse of government power, hidden from the public for decades until investigations finally exposed it. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson investigates Operation Midnight Climax, the Cold War paranoia that drove the CIA to experiment on its own citizens, and the disturbing legacy of a program that treated unsuspecting people as test subjects in the search for a mind-control weapon.
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