At 16, I was experimented on by the CIA and now I’m suing

The first thing Lana Bunting remembers about the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, is the smell — almost medical.

“I didn’t like the look of the place,” she told the BBC from her home in Manitoba. “It didn’t look like a hospital to me.”

This hospital – once the home of a Scottish shipping magnate – became her home for a month in April 1958, after a judge ordered the then 16-year-old to undergo treatment for her “disobedient” behaviour.

There Ms. Bunting became one of thousands of people experimented on as part of the CIA’s top-secret mind-control research. She is now one of two plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit for Canadian experimentation victims. A judge on Thursday dismissed the Royal Victoria Hospital’s appeal, paving the way for the case to continue.

According to her medical files, which I only recently obtained, Ms. Bunting had been running away from home and hanging out with friends her parents disapproved of after her difficult move with her family from Ottawa to Montreal.

“I was a normal teenager,” she recalls. But the judge sent it to Alan.

Once there, she became an unwitting participant in secret CIA experiments known as MK-Ultra. The Cold War Project tested the effects of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, electroshock treatments, and brainwashing techniques on humans without their consent.

More than 100 institutions – hospitals, prisons and schools – in the United States and Canada participated in the project.

In Alan, Dr. Ewen Cameron, a researcher at McGill University, anesthetized patients and made them listen to recordings, sometimes thousands of times, in a process he called “probing.”

Dr. Cameron will make Mrs. Bunting listen to the same tape hundreds of times.

“It was repeated over and over again, ‘You’re a good girl, you’re a bad girl,'” Ms. Bunting recalled.

The technique was a form of “psychological leadership,” says doctoral student Jordan Torbay, who researched his experiments and their ethical implications.

“The patients’ minds were basically manipulated using verbal cues,” she says, adding that he also looked into the effects of sleeping medications, forced sensory deprivation, and induced comas.

Medical records show that Ms. Bunting was given LSD, as well as medications such as sodium amytal, a barbiturate, and dioxin, a stimulant, as well as nitrous gas, a sedative known as “laughing gas.”

“By April 30, the patient made explorations… She became extremely agitated and extremely violent when given nitrous oxide, threw herself out of bed and began screaming,” Dr. Cameron wrote in one of her medical files, which Ms. Bunting obtained through a freedom of information request.

The harsh truth about the MK-Ultra experiments first came to light in the 1970s. Since then, several victims have tried to sue the United States and Canada. Lawsuits in the United States were largely unsuccessful, but in 1988, a Canadian judge ordered the US government to pay $67,000 to each of the nine victims. In 1992, the Canadian government paid 100,000 Canadian dollars (about $80,000 at the time) to each of the 77 victims – but did not admit responsibility.

Ms Bunting was not among them, she says, because she did not yet know she was a victim

For decades, Ms. Bunting said she felt something was wrong with her, but she did not learn the details of her participation in the experiments until fairly recently.

She says she remembers little of what happened at Alan, or in the years that followed.

Mrs. Bunting eventually married and moved to Manitoba, where she had two children and remains close to them. She is now a grandmother to four grandchildren. But she says she suffered lifelong repercussions from her time at Alan.

“I’ve felt that way my whole life, because I’ve been wondering why I think that way, or you know what happened to me,” she said.

She says she has had to take a range of medications throughout her life to deal with mental health issues, which she attributes to her time at Alan, as well as recurring nightmares.

“Sometimes I wake up at night screaming because of what happened,” she said.

The Royal Victoria Hospital and McGill University declined to comment because the case is before the courts. The government referred the BBC to its previous settlement in 1992, which it said was made for “humanitarian” reasons and did not accept legal responsibility.

For Ms. Pointing, the lawsuit is a chance to finally get some closure.

“Sometimes I sit in my living room and my mind goes back, and I can think about things that happened to me, you know,” she says. “Every time I see a picture of Dr. Cameron, I get so angry.”

Although Dr. Cameron’s work has since become synonymous with the MK-Ultra experiments, Torbay says her research shows that he did not know he was receiving CIA funding at the time. His work with the CIA ended in 1964, and he died shortly after of a heart attack in 1967.

But regardless of whether he knew where the money was coming from, Ms Torbay says he should have known that the experiments he was conducting were unethical.

She says she hopes the lawsuit moves forward and the victims will get some measure of justice.

“It’s not really about giving patients back what they’ve lost, because that’s not possible, but kind of making sure that their suffering isn’t in vain, and that we learn from this,” she says.