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One Flew Over the CIA: How MKUltra Accidentally Built the Counterculture
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The CIA dosed Ken Kesey with LSD in 1959, expecting a test subject — instead, it funded the man who would ignite the American counterculture. This chapter traces how MKUltra's most catastrophic unintended consequence reshaped a generation.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What the CIA didn't anticipate, when it handed a young Oregon writer a dose of LSD in nineteen fifty-nine, was that it was funding its own opposition. The counterculture that would spend the next decade challenging government authority, rejecting institutional power, and demanding radical transparency wasn't born in a coffee house or on a university campus.
In the late nineteen fifties, Ken Kesey was a graduate student at Stanford. He was twenty-four years old, a wrestler, a writer, and by his own account, always looking for experience that went beyond the ordinary.
Kesey liked the work at the hospital so much that he took a job there as a night attendant on the psychiatric ward. He kept taking drugs.
After "Cuckoo's Nest," Kesey didn't settle into a comfortable literary career. He gathered a group of friends around him, bought a bus painted in Day-Glo colors, and drove it across America in nineteen sixty-four with a man named Neal Cassady at the wheel.
By the mid-nineteen sixties, LSD was no longer a classified compound. It was a cultural phenomenon.
Kesey was aware, at least in broad terms, that government money was involved in the early experiments. He spoke about it publicly in later years.
The nineteen sixty-eight Democratic Convention. Vietnam protest marches.
At the two thousand and twenty-six congressional hearings led by Representative Anna Paulina Luna, the question of MK-Ultra's victims was central. Researchers and advocates presented evidence of the program's reach.
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