MESCALINE
There are many different times in history where mescaline is tested on patients without consent. Researchers set up their own criteria for how to handle patients, one of the rules read that medication must be administered without the knowledge of the subject. The military was mainly responsible for most of the administration of the drug, in effort to find the most promising mind controlling drug. While the military is responsible for testing mescaline, psychiatrists also had piqued their interest in the drug for schizophrenics.
Paul Hoch was a psychiatrist who first landed a job in America at the Manhattan State Hospital and eventually became a national leader in schizophrenia research. Throughout his research, Hoch and many other psychiatrists ran into the challenge of finding a good model for schizophrenia; like many other classified diseases had at the time. Due to this, he decided to use mescaline and LSD to draw out the hallucinations in the ill in effort to find a clear explanation for the chemical imbalances related to experiments on patients with psychosis.
Over the course of three years, Hoch experimented with over sixty mentally ill patients. Not only did he use mescaline on these patients though, he was testing mescaline alongside lobotomy and electroshock. Specifically, he detailed a thirty-six-year-old patient who had no prior display of schizophrenic symptoms. When induced with the drug mescaline, he developed a different taste in his mouth, he had trouble swallowing and had some hallucinations. After giving the mescaline, he lobotomized the patient, and then following the procedure injected mescaline again to observe the effects. Hoch was interested in the effects of the drug before and after a lobotomy. But absolutely nobody stood up to question the ethical implications of these experiments.
Sources:
Albarelli HP. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments. Trine Day: Walterville, OR; 2009.
“Get Smart About Drugs.” Peyote and Mescaline | Get Smart About Drugs, www.getsmartaboutdrugs.gov/drugs/peyote-mescaline.
Hoch, Paul. “Experimentally Produced Psychoses,” American Journal of Psychiatry 107 (1951):607-611.
“Merck's Mescaline Sulfate Bottle.” Herb Museum, herbmuseum.ca/content/mercks-mescaline-sulfate-bottle.
Passie, Torsten, and Udo Benzenhöfer. “MDA, MDMA, and Other ‘Mescaline‐like’ Substances in the US Military's Search for a Truth Drug (1940s to 1960s).” Wiley Online Library, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 5 Dec. 2017, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/dta.2292?casa_token=vp2BceEiuGEAAAAA:gpV3VWfkb3m7PWHEJu4IPgSPFkwZ2o5StGBcPabz-pu1dK6End4_3dhv2V1aK3ukP57RoDU2oZ8.
Whitaker, Robert. Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub, 2002. Print.