http://www.aches-mc.org/prison.html PRISONER EXPERIMENTATION RICK CARLSON Survivor of Canadian Prision Experiments PRISON EXPERIMENTS HAUNT INMATES By Mike Blanchfield and Jim Bronskill Ottawa Citizen October 13, 1998 OTTAWA Richard Carlson woke up in the East Block of Kingston Penitentiary, a 10-centimetre gash on his neck, another on his right arm, millimetres from a major artery. He had lived through one nightmare, but now another, much more terrifying, was about to begin. Over the previous 10 days, he carved himself with razor blades to end weeks of torment from voices, he said had been piped day and night into his Collins Bay Penitentiary prison cell. The night before, Carlson almost finished himself off in the military hospital to which he had been transferred. The duty officer looked in on him and saw him slashing his throat. The officer called for something to knock Carlson out but the request was denied. Eventually, hospital staff got him out alive. �From the time we were notified the inmate was slashing it took 45 minutes to have him removed from his cell,� notes a January 1974 medical report detailing the incident. As horrific as that ordeal was, it would pale in comparison to Carlson�s next seven months in the psychiatric unit in the East Block of Kingston Pen, a forbidding maximum-security prison on the shores of Lake Ontario, where he now found himself. Carlson says he was given 20 different drugs, including truth serum, that would induce hallucinations. He would imagine his food talking to him. He would see polar bears in his cell, amid wild winds. He suspects he received electroconvulsive shock therapy. Carlson believes he was used a scientific guinea pig. He�s believed that for years. Five years ago he stood up in court and told a judge he was a pawn for researchers. He complained again this past January when convicted of the latest in a long string of armed robberies.Now, because of recent revelations about the federal prison system, the Canadian government is being forced to take Richard Carlson�s complaint a little more seriously. Southam News and the Ottawa Citizen recently disclosed that hundreds of federal inmates were used as guinea pigs in the name of science in the 1960s and �70s. Volunteers took part in experiments involving the hallucinogenic drug LSD-25, trials of untested pharmaceuticals and food additives, sensory deprivation and electric shock studies. The federal prison service banned such research in 1978.Carlson and other inmates say they can recall the East Block experiments. �The East Cell Block, this place was the house of horrors of Kingston Penitentiary,� says Bob McDonald, a Kingston inmate from 1963 to 1970. There was always stories of people coming out of there on drugs and shock treatments.� Carlson is currently in jail in Thunder Bay, Ont., awaiting sentencing later this month for armed robbery. Crown prosecutors have filed an application to have him declared a dangerous offender, which would effectively lock him up forever. Since he first went to prison in 1964, Carlson has been a free man all of three years. He is a habitual hold-up artist who has done time in several of the institutions that dot the Kingston area. But the government is taking notice of more than Carlson�s criminal past. In March, the Citizen disclosed details of a 1961 experiment in which 23 inmates at Kingston�s Prison for Women were given LSD. As a result, an advocacy group for survivors of human experimentation (ACHES-MC Advocacy Committee for Human Experimentation Survivors) appealed on Carlson�s behalf to Solicitor General Andy Scott. Suddenly, bureaucrats of the federal prison service were not so quick to brush off Carlson. On March 10, Assistant Corrections Commissioner Jerry Hooper wrote to his boss, Commissioner Ole Ingstrup, about Carlson�s case. �You may wish to request we conduct a formal review of the matter. No doubt, we can expect many more such calls given recent publicity,� says Hooper�s memo, obtained under the Access to Information Act. In April, the Correctional Service of Canada wrote Carlson, requesting patience. The letter explained the service had asked the McGill University Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law for advice concerning the long-term effects of LSD as well as help in developing guidelines for addressing cases brought forward by individual inmates. The government had turned to the Montreal university because of a complaint from ex-inmate Dorothy Proctor, who spoke out about her involvement in the 1961 LSD test at the Prison for Women. Eventually, Proctor filed a lawsuit against the federal government and prison officials. She maintains researchers used her as a �lab rat,� giving her an overdose of LSD while a 17-year-old prisoner in solitary confinement. The 200-page McGill report, completed last month, is being studied by corrections officials. The department won�t say how many inmates other than Carlson and Proctor have come forward. Though it deals primarily with Proctor�s complaint and the LSD experiment, the report will help determine how the government handles complaints from other inmates. While a full picture of Kingston Pen�s East Block is just emerging, Canadians have had occasional glimpses behind its walls, notably through the work of award-winning jailhouse author Roger Caron. In his gritty account of prison life, Go-Boy!, Caron painted a brutal portrait of the wing�s psychiatric ward as he remembered it upon arriving in 1962. �In those days the ward was a real loony bin where everything could and did happen,� he wrote. �Both the medical and the custodial staff seemed powerless to do much more than keep a semblance of order; this was done by handing out tranquilizers like candy, in the hope of slowing the patients down to the point where they didn�t kill each other. �Retribution and banishment were the catch words then, certainly not rehabilitation or cures.� Caron graphically describes one procedure that �was used more as punishment than anything else� - electroconvulsive therapy, a controversial treatment involving the application of electricity. He recalls nurses fastening electrodes to his head and placing a stick between his teeth. �Start counting backwards from one hundred, slowly,� ordered the doctor as he squeezed medication into my blood system. My voice was barely audible by the time I ticked off �ninety-two�. That was when the switch on the machine was activated! My brain seemed to explode inside my skull as I bit down convulsively on the stick and my body jerked about spasmodically on the table. A few more jerks and I suddenly went limp.� Caron awoke three hours later with a bad headache, sore neck muscles and parched throat. �If their purpose was to drive the devil from my soul then I was more than willing to tell the shrinks that they had succeeded and not to submit me to any more shocks. In actuality the doctors were just as mystified as I was as to what the shocks were really supposed to accomplish.� Former inmate Bob McDonald was aware of what was going on in the East Block and did everything he could to avoid it. But the promise of rewards led McDonald to volunteer for experiments in other parts of the prison. He recalls announcements on prison loudspeakers that regularly solicited volunteers for various studies. McDonald dipped his hand in cold water, placed his palm on a bed of sharp tacks and allowed electrodes to fire shocks into his body. The experiments were intended to determine how much pain an inmate could withstand. The tests left no ill effects and were worth taking because of the payoffs, he says today. �They might give you a couple of packs of tobacco. In those days, you didn�t have big canteens, so an extra pack of tobacco was a big score.� McDonald says it was also routine for inmates to receive 30 to 60 days off their sentences - an account that contradicts government policy of the time. A 1963 prison service code prohibited academic or commercial researchers from offering subjects incentives to participate in experiments. McDonald says the tests in the East Cell Block were far more serious than any in which he took part. �They were definitely chemical,� he recalls, �because you�d see people come out of ECB . . . it was a horrific joke. You�d see someone with the shakes and someone would say, �He�s just done one of those tests for 30 days (off his sentence).� Inmates in the East Block were separated from the rest of the prison population. Guards would sometimes allow inmates from the two sides to talk to each other through the fence - but not always. �You�d go over there and they�d say, �Not today, today is treatment day.� They�d keep you right away from the fence for a few days,� said McDonald. �I don�t know if they were curing them or wrecking them, or whether they were experimental or thought they were doing the right thing.� McDonald, 54, first met Carlson in the Kingston Pen when both were serving time for armed robbery in the 1960s. He believes the East Block made Carlson what he is today. �They drove him nuts. They made him one bad dude.� By age 16, Richard Carlson had serious problems. According to his prison files, which he allowed Southam News and the Citizen to view, Richard Albert Carlson was born in Thunder Bay to an alcoholic father who abused his mother and his six siblings. Richard, born in 1948, was the Carlsons� fourth child. The beatings often landed Richard�s mother in hospital. Once, his father=20 dunked her head in a slop pail. At age 12, Richard was wetting the bed. By 16, he was in Kingston Pen, serving his first of many sentences for armed robbery. Despite spending most of his life behind bars, he has found time to finish his high school equivalence, get married, father two children, get divorced and further his education; he took training as an electronics technician, and apprenticed in plumbing and upholstering. �I found Richard a warm, honest and open person,� wrote a prison psychiatrist in 1979. �Considering his remarkable educational achievements and his good personality, he could make a very valuable citizen.� It was not to be. Carlson nearly succeeding in killing himself in the 1974 slashing incident. He says he was driven to injure himself by the incessant bombardment of voices into his cell. The phrases, piped in by a speaker, would be repeated over and over, at all hours of the day and night. �How many bank robberies have you committed?� �Ever hurt anyone?� �Ever kill anyone?� �How many people have you killed?� Carlson believes someone was trying to brainwash him. The experiences he describes are, in fact, similar to the �psychic driving� experiments of the disgraced Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in the late 1950s and early �60s. Cameron used a combination of drugs, such as LSD, along with sensory deprivation and repetitive taped messages to reprogram the minds of his patients. In late 1970s, it was disclosed that Cameron�s work was funded not only by the Canadian government but by a front operation for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. He was among several prominent researchers the CIA covertly supported in a Cold War battle to unlock the secrets of manipulating the human mind. After his attempted suicide, Carlson was transferred to the East Block of=20 Kingston Pen. For seven months, Carlson says, he was a guinea pig for psychiatrists and staff. He says they allegedly pumped him full of strange drugs, including scopolamine, a truth serum. He believes they zapped him with electric shocks. He hallucinated non-stop, he says. �Food was actually talking to me - I�m not kidding you - eyes in the potatoes were actually talking to me. I know it sounds bizarre.� Not to ex-inmate Bob McDonald. �I have my reservations about all of this,� he says, �but if this happened to somebody, it happened to Rick Carlson.� By 1976, Carlson had been transferred from Kingston Pen back to Collins Bay where, he says, he was locked in solitary confinement and subjected to more questionable experiments. In one, cell walls were extended out a metre or so prisoners in adjacent cells couldn�t see each other. Each cell was painted a different colour. He says psychologists told him they were trying to measure the effects of sensory deprivation and colour stimulus. A year or two later at Millhaven Penitentiary, Carlson says, he was injected with other chemicals that induced more hallucinations. �I saw a polar bear come right into the cell, I nearly had a heart attack . . . 80- or 90-mile-an-hour winds coming crosswise in the cell just driving stuff in.� Carlson suspects researchers were trying to program his behaviour. �This is what I believe was going on - they were starting some kind of a test thing to see if they could trigger a guy to do something. You follow me?� Carlson wonders if something more exotic, perhaps even the CIA, is behind what happened to him in Canadian prisons. There is no known evidence to support these theories, but considerable documentation to support some of his other claims. Last month, Carlson was returned to the Thunder Bay jail after 60 days at the Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre, the country�s maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. He was sent there for a mandatory assessment. Under the provisions for determining dangerous offender status, suspects must be examined by two psychiatrists, one for the Crown, one for the defence. An August assessment from Penetanguishene reads in part that there is �no compelling evidence� Carlson now or ever suffered from a psychotic illness such as schizophrenia. Over the years, many doctors have debated the state of his mental health. Carlson, however, asks what one should call someone who, in the name of science, zaps an inmate with electric shock or gives them hallucinogenic drugs. �The people who say that I�m nuts, would you say (they�re) sane?� for the rest of the articles on Rick Carlson see: http://www.aches-mc.org/prison.html *** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Feel free to distribute widely but PLEASE acknowledge the source. *** http://www.angelfire.com/mi/smilinks/thirdeye.html <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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