> Once Project MKUltra officially got underway in April 1953, experiments included administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes—"people who could not fight back," as one agency officer put it. In one case LSD was administered to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days. LSD was also administered to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S. agreed to follow after World War II. The aim of this was to find drugs which would irresistibly bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program him or her as "a robot agent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra#Drugs

I can't even imagine what it would be like to be administered a hallucinogen surreptitiously in a age where zero recreational use of said hallucinogens gave literally no one a chance to be prepared to explain what the hell was going on in their brains.

I'm reasonably certain that if someone slipped me something now, thanks to youthful experimentation I'd at least catch on to what was going on pretty quickly, but I can't imagine experiencing that with literally no frame of reference.

Consider non-drug-related psychosis. It happens to people (young people) all the time, and they're in exactly the position you refer to: no way to describe it or to perform reality tests.

That's two variables — caffeination and the psychedelic.

How are you controlling for which compound has which effects?

EDIT: Leaving aside the whole, you know, "Dosing your unsuspecting coworkers with acid" thing. Not very cool. Or legal (beyond the drug, itself).

Well, first of all, you need to somehow administer the LSD dose. From a tactical perspective, the coffee makes sense.

Second of all LSD, has a bit of a stimulant "excitable" effect. So you might want to give them Decaf to compensate. You're right that it's a confounding variable though, and there's a good chance that people like me would be less productive because of the decaf, especially if the LSD dose was too small. https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_effects.shtml

The variable is just the lsd. Caffeine is constant in both control and experimental groups. Plus the organisms would most likely exhibit caffeine seeking behavior anyhow.

> One group gets decaf coffee with an LSD microdose > One group gets normal coffee.

Fun fact: The first time the Beatles did LSD, they were unknowingly dosed by their dentist.

Fortunately (according to [0]) they were told about it before the dose kicked in.

0) https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-oral-history-of-the-b...

Yep. In their coffee, in fact.

Finally, someone provides an explanation for what's going on at Uber.

Pretty sure that's meth.

Cocaine seems more likely to me. Meth is certainly gaining some popularity (particularly on the west coast), but cocaine is most definitely the goto asshole-bro drug