Brain Implants

[Jan Klimkowski]

PSYCHOSURGERY is an apt and resonant phrase.

Here's the text of the SDS flyer protesting Dr West and Governor Reagan's lobotomization base:

Flyer from Bruin Walk dated July 17, 1973

Stop Psychosurgery and the UCLA Violence Center
Demonstrate Thurs., July 19th , Noon, Murphy Hall

Despite protest across the state, the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence officially became part of the UC System on July 1st. The Center is now functioning at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI).

The Violence Center has been established to develop ways of suppressing violent behavior, including ghetto rebellions and “hyperactivity” in children. Chemical and physical methods of control will be tested on prisoners in penal facilities throughout the State, including Vacaville and Camarille. The basic assumptions of the research are racist. They include considering fighting back against rotten conditions a disease, and naming the correlates of violent behavior as being, "young, male, urbanized, and BLACK."

One of the projects for Center research is called "Violence Prediction and Brain Waves." The description of this project states that the SURGICAL REMOVAL OF PARTS OF THE BRAIN has been somewhat successful in controlling violent behavior in epileptics. (The violence and the epilepsy are not necessarily related.) It can hardly be a coincidence that the NPI has recently hired Dr. Frank Ervin, co-author of Violence and the Brain which deals with exactly the same topic as this project. Dr. Erwin is the foremost psychiatric advocate of "psychosurgery," or surgery on the brain to modify behavior.

Another project will involve applying behavior modifying techniques used on "marginally retarded and emotionally disturbed children" at the UCLA NPI to "violent young offenders" at Camp Kilpatrick. Experiments on these children can be done without parental consent, because all of them are made wards of the Court before they are put in the camp.

The campaign against the Violence Center is accelerating. It has already resulted in the California Commission on Criminal Justice (CCCJ) and the State Senate Committee on Health and Welfare refusing to fund the Center due to its controversial nature.

Join the campaign and help us shut this racist Center down!
For more information call Kathy, ***-3246 or Leene, ***-7571.
Coalition Against Psychosurgery and Human Experimentation
S.D.S.

Here's some context and background.

The Facilitators and Mechanics are a noteworthy bunch.

The Sponsors can be guessed.

One of the fascinating aspects of the scandals that plague the U.S. Government is the fact that so often the same names appear from scandal to scandal. From the origins of Ronald Reagan's political career, as Governor of California, Dr. Earl Brian and Edward Meese played key advisory roles.

Dr. Brian's name has been linked to the October Surprise and is a central figure in the government's theft of PROMIS soft ware from INSLAW. Brian's role touches from the Cabazon Indian scandals to United Press International. He is one of those low-profile key figures.

And, alas, his name appears again in the nation's behavior modification and mind control experiments. Dr. Brian was Reagan's Secretary of Health when Reagan was Governor. Dr. Brian was an advocate of state subsidies for a research center for the study of violent behavior. The center was to begin operations by mid-1975, and its research was intended to shed light on why people murder or rape, or hijack aircraft. The center was to be operated by the University of California at Los Angeles, and its primary purpose, ac cording to Dr. Brian, was to unify scattered studies on anti-social violence and possibly even touch on socially tolerated violence, such as football or war. Dr. Brian sought $1.3 million for the center.

It certainly was possible that prison inmates might be used as volunteer subjects at the center to discover the unknowns which triggered their violent behavior. Dr. Brian's quest for the center came at the same time Governor Reagan concluded his plans to phase the state of California out of the mental hospital business by 1982. Reagan's plan is echoed by Governor Pete Wilson today, to place the responsibility of rehabilitating young offenders squarely on the shoulders of local communities.

But as the proposal became known more publicly, a swell of controversy surrounded it. It ended in a fiasco. The inspiration for the violence center came from three doctors in 1967, five years before Dr. Brian and Governor Reagan unveiled their plans. Amidst urban rioting and civil protest, Doctors Sweet, Mark and Erin of Harvard put forward the thesis that individuals who engage in civil disobedience possess defective or damaged brain cells. If this conclusion were applied to the American Revolution or the Women's Rights Movement, a good portion of American society would be labeled as having brain damage.

In a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, they stated: "That poverty, unemployment, slum housing, and inadequate education underlie the nation's urban riots is well known, but the obviousness of these causes may have blinded us to the more subtle role of other possible factors, including brain dysfunction in the rioters who engaged in arson, sniping and physical assault.

"There is evidence from several sources that brain dysfunction related to a focal lesion plays a significant role in the violent and assaultive behavior of thoroughly studied patients. Individuals with electroencephalographic abnormalities in the temporal region have been found to have a much greater frequency of behavioral abnormalities (such as poor impulse control, assaultiveness, and psychosis) than is present in people with a normal brain wave pattern."

Soon after the publication in the Journal, Dr. Ervin and Dr. Mark published their book Violence and the Brain, which included the claim that there were as many as 10 million individuals in the United States "who suffer from obvious brain disease". They argued that the data of their book provided a strong reason for starting a program of mass screening of Americans.

"Our greatest danger no longer comes from famine or communicable disease. Our greatest danger lies in ourselves and in our fellow humans...we need to develop an 'early warning test' of limbic brain function to detect those humans who have a low threshold for impulsive violence...Violence is a public health problem, and the major thrust of any program dealing with violence must be toward its prevention," they wrote.

The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funded the doctors $108,000 and the National Institute of Mental Health kicked in another $500,000, under pressure from Congress. They believed that psychosurgery would inevitably be performed in connection with the program, and that, since it irreversibly impaired people's emotional and intellectual capacities, it could be used as an instrument of repression and social control.

The doctors wanted screening centers established throughout the nation. In California, the publicity associated with the doctors' report, aided in the development of The Center for the study and Reduction of Violence. Both the state and LEAA provided the funding. The center was to serve as a model for future facilities to be set up throughout the United States.

The Director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, Dr. Louis Jolyon West was selected to run the center. Dr. West is alleged to have been a contract agent for the CIA, who, as part of a network of doctors and scientists, gathered intelligence on hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, for the super-secret MK-ULTRA program. Like Captain White (see part three of the series), West conducted LSD experiments for the CIA on unwitting citizens in the safehouses of San Francisco. He achieved notoriety for his injection of a massive dose of LSD into an elephant at the Oklahoma Zoo, the elephant died when West tried to revive it by administering a combination of drugs.

Dr. West was further known as the psychiatrist who was called upon to examine Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin. It was on the basis of West's diagnosis that Ruby was compelled to be treated for mental disorders and put on happy pills. The West examination was ordered after Ruby began to say that he was part of a right-wing conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy. Two years after the commencement of treatment for mental disorder, Ruby died of cancer in prison.

After January 11, 1973, when Governor Reagan announced plans for the Violence Center, West wrote a letter to the then Director of Health for California, J. M. Stubblebine.

"Dear Stub:

"I am in possession of confidential information that the Army is prepared to turn over Nike missile bases to state and local agencies for non-military purposes. They may look with special favor on health-related applications.

"Such a Nike missile base is located in the Santa Monica Mountains, within a half-hour's drive of the Neuropsychiatric Institute. It is accessible, but relatively remote. The site is securely fenced, and includes various buildings and improvements, making it suitable for prompt occupancy.

"If this site were made available to the Neuropsychiatric Institute as a research facility, perhaps initially as an adjunct to the new Center for the Prevention of Violence, we could put it to very good use. Comparative studies could be carried out there, in an isolated but convenient location, of experimental or model programs for the alteration of undesirable behavior.

"Such programs might include control of drug or alcohol abuse, modification of chronic anti-social or impulsive aggressiveness, etc. The site could also accommodate conferences or retreats for instruction of selected groups of mental-health related professionals and of others (e.g., law enforcement personnel, parole officers, special educators) for whom both demonstration and participation would be effective modes of instruction.

"My understanding is that a direct request by the Governor, or other appropriate officers of the State, to the Secretary of Defense (or, of course, the President), could be most likely to produce prompt results."

Some of the planned areas of study for the Center included:
Studies of violent individuals.
Experiments on prisoners from Vacaville and Atascadero, and hyperkinetic children.
Experiments with violence-producing and violent inhibiting drugs.
Hormonal aspects of passivity and aggressiveness in boys.
Studies to discover and compare norms of violence among various ethnic groups.
Studies of pre-delinquent children.

It would also encourage law enforcement to keep computer files on pre-delinquent children, which would make possible the treatment of children before they became delinquents.

The purpose of the Violence Center was not just research. The staff was to include sociologists, lawyers, police officers, clergymen and probation officers. With the backing of Governor Reagan and Dr. Brian, West had secured guarantees of prisoner volunteers from several California correctional institutions, including Vacaville.

Vacaville and Atascadero were chosen as the primary sources for the human guinea pigs. These institutions had established a reputation, by that time, of committing some of the worst atrocities in West Coast history. Some of the experimentations differed little from what the Nazis did in the death camps.

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