Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead

The two men who did most to bring LSD to the counterculture both got it first from government research. Kesey was a guinea pig at the Menlo Park veterans’ hospital; Hunter was paid by a Stanford study. [1][2] Some go further: that the agency wanted LSD on the streets, to study it or to defuse the antiwar movement.

On the Media’s 2018 account says the Menlo Park trials were “marketed as research for treating mental illness, but we know today that they were part of Project MK Ultra”. Kesey was given several drugs, including LSD, in 1959 or 1960. [1]

Robert Hunter told Fresh Air in 1988: “They paid me $140 to take – first, LSD, second, psilocybin, I think, third, mescaline.” He did not know the project was funded by the CIA. [2]

The surviving MKULTRA records list 44 colleges and universities and 12 hospitals, but researchers’ names are largely withheld. [3] This file found no released subproject record naming the Menlo Park trials. Journalists say they were MKULTRA-linked; that remains disputed.