by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and ALEXANDER COCKBURN
On June 17, 1999 the state of Texas put to death by lethal injection John Stanley Faulder, a Canadian who had been convicted in 1977 of murdering Inez Phillips, an oil heiress. Faulder’s case received more press attention than most executions these days, mainly because the Canadian government tried to intervene on his behalf and urged Texas governor George W. Bush to spare his life. Unmoved by arguments that after his arrest Faulder had been denied his right to consult with officials from the Canadian embassy, Bush sent him to the death chamber.
What went entirely unmentioned by the American press was that 37 years ago Stanley Faulder had been the unwitting victim of medical experiments partially funded by the CIA. According to Faulder’s sister, Pat Nicholl, who lives in Jaspar, Alberta, “At 15 Stanley was arrested for stealing a watch and sent to a boys’ home for six months. At 17, another theft got him six months in jail. At 22 he was caught in a stolen car and sent to jail in New Westminster, B.C. for two years. There, he asked for psychiatric help and was put in an experimental drug program which involved doses of LSD”.
Faulder was one of hundreds of Canadian prisoners who were experimented upon by psychiatrists in the 1960s and 1970s. The prison LSD program was run by Dr. George Scott, a staff psychiatrist for the Canadian Federal Corrections, who had served as director of the Canadian Army’s psychological rehabilitation department during World War II. After the war, Scott teamed up with shrinks from Allan Memorial Institute, including the notorious Ewen Cameron, to launch a variety of drug, electroshock, sensory deprivation and pain tolerance experiments, using prisoners and patients at mental hospitals as guinea pigs. The LSD for some of the experiments as well as funding for the research was provided by the CIA and the Canadian Defense Department.
Scott was stripped of his license to practice medicine. The sanction was not for dosing prisoners with psychotropic drugs, but for emulating Sandor Ferenczi by making passes at female patients. Even here Scott used drugs and electroshock to aid his seductions. According to court records, Scott used a technique called “narco-analysis” to manipulate one of the women into having sex with him. Narcoanalysis involves heavy doses of sodium pentothal and Ritalin. Scott used the pentothal, in combination with electroshock, to take his victim into a near comatose state, implanted erotic suggestions, and then roused her to consciousness with shots of Ritalin. This continued for a period of five years. Scott even prescribed birth control pills for the woman.
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In 1969, Robert Renaud, an inmate at the Kingston Penitentiary, claimed that Scott had given him ferocious jolts of electroshock as a punishment for not cooperating with the doctor. Like Faulder, Renaud was in jail for theft and was not considered violent. Scott dismissed Renaud’s allegation, though films of the psychiatrist shocking prisoners from that time have recently surfaced. In response, Scott said he only performed electroshock once a week on prisoners who “were sick enough”.
Scott was sued by 24 women inmates who say they were subjected to his LSD experiments. One of the women who brought the suit is Dorothy Proctor. She was given LSD at the Kingston women’s prison in 1961–the same year Faulder was drugged. Proctor was a 17-year-old black woman, serving a three-year sentence for robbery, when Scott diagnosed her as a sociopath and put her in his experimental program, which included sensory deprivation (a 52-day stint in the Hole), electroshock and mega-doses of LSD. [The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2002.]
In a 1998 interview with the CBC program “This Morning” Proctor vividly described the first time she was offered LSD as she was in the middle of a long stint in solitary:
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