Isegoria

Despite the furtive nature of “Jolly” West’s research, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), he could be surprisingly garrulous

Among the press clippings in his file were two items from Portland, Oregon, newspapers, both dated October 1963—the murky period between his Oklahoma hypnosis studies and the Haight-Ashbury Project. West had given an address to the Mental Health Association of Oregon, letting it slip that he was inducing insanity in the lab. He framed these studies as positive developments: they might someday cure mental illness.

“We are at the dawning of a new era,” West told the crowd, “learning for the first time to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.” The Oregon Journal noted that West “listed the new hallucination drug LSD, along with other drugs, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation as some of the things that [he was] using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal people.” Reporting that West had done “extensive work” with LSD, the Journal continued: “The most important contribution of the drug so far is in producing model mental illnesses.”

Almost fifteen years later, besieged by reporters after the New York Times alleged that he’d taken part in MKULTRA’s secret LSD experimentation program, West insisted that all of his LSD work “had been confined to animals,” denying any CIA affiliation. When reporters pointed out that he’d received an awful lot of money from the agency, he retorted that he’d had no idea that the Geschickter Fund and other sources were CIA fronts. Legally, the CIA was obligated to tell the University of Oklahoma that one of its faculty had been on the agency payroll. Oklahoma revealed a heavily redacted memo saying that an unnamed professor—West, I confirmed through financial records—had been investigating “a number of dissociative phenomena” on humans “in the lab,” including an exceptionally rare clinical disorder known as “latah,” “a neurotic condition marked by automatic obedience.”

None of the allegations harmed West’s reputation. By then he’d left Oklahoma for UCLA, where he offered a steady stream of denials and continued to thrive through his retirement in 1988. Irascible and arrogant, he was quick to threaten lawsuits when anyone brought up the charges. Sometimes he threw in diversionary tactics: in a 1991 rebuttal, he claimed, “My secret connection to Washington, D.C. is not as a spook, but rather as a confidential advisor to Presidents… From Eisenhower to Bush, Democrat and Republican Presidents alike have freely sought and received my counsel.” In a 1993 letter to the editor of the UCLA Bruin, he had the temerity to compare his accusers to Nazi propagandists “in Goebbels’ tradition of the Big Lie.” West added, “I have never taken part in ‘mind-control’ experiments funded by the CIA or anybody else”: a statement belied by his own files.

Even before his CIA connections came out, West’s experiments got him in plenty of trouble. In 1972, he announced plans to build a lab in an abandoned Nike Missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains. He would call it “The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence,” or the Violence Center, for short. There, in perfect isolation, he could study the origins and control of human violence by experimenting on prisoners. Governor Ronald Reagan gave the Violence Center a full-throated endorsement.

But West’s proposal for grant money landed him in hot water. He planned to test radical forms of behavior modification, implanting electrodes and “remote monitoring devices” in prisoners’ brains. A federal investigation concluded that the program involved “coercive methods” that threatened “privacy and self-determination.”

The committee’s disclosures stymied the Violence Center before it got past the planning stages. The California legislature vetoed the project; UCLA’s student body rose up in protest of West. And this, to reiterate, was before anyone had a clue about his CIA work.

Posted in Policy, Science | 2 Comments »