He was a Total Acid-Head
If you delve into American conspiracy theories at all, you’ll quickly encounter MK-ULTRA. The name alone is bad-ass (it sounds like it could be a Gatchaman-esque anime fighting team). But the facts are even more strange and sinister.
MK-ULTRA was a secret CIA research project. Its details are murky, as the director of the CIA ordered its records destroyed in the ‘70s, after the CIA had spent two decades and six percent of the agency’s budget on it. Conflicting reports from testimony and surviving documents suggest MK-ULTRA involved mind control experiments, psychedelic drugs, (maybe) torture and more.
Among its known participants was Whitey Bulger.
While serving a 20-year prison sentence at Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, Whitey took government LSD in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. Whitey was one of 10 guys in the program who, for 18 months, were fed LSD and other drugs. In return, they received three days off their prison sentence for every month they spent as human guinea pigs.
He got 54 days shaved off his sentence. His brother Billy said he suffered from nightmares and sleeplessness for the rest of his life.
I don’t know if details about the Leavenworth experiments are available, but I would love to see them. The CIA had prisoners who volunteered for the study as test subjects. They must have drugged them without mercy. I don’t think dropping acid in prison would be that bad—it would pass the time, at least. But having CIA goons poke at you while you’re tripping for a year and a half sounds pretty awful.
Still, if he uses that as part of his criminal defense (the drugs made me do it!), we should all point and laugh at him for not being able to handle his shit.
Mister Bulger 