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People have discovered a recently declassified CIA document that reveals some rather horrifying plans, as it outlines an operation that would have seen entire populations become drugged by the government.
There's much that we still don't know about the government's secret operations, as large portions of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) actions have remained hidden and classified for the general public.
Documents have been drip fed over the years, however, revealing a number of fascinating details — including information never before seen regarding President John F. Kennedy's assassination.
It's often not hard to understand why many of these documents were classified in the first place though, as they frequently contain frightening information that the government would rather keep under wraps.
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As reported by the Daily Mail, one recently declassified document relating to a program known as 'Operation Artichoke' has left many on social media feeling stunned, indicating drug-related programs that serve as a precursor to human experimentation programs like MKUltra in the mid 20th century.
The document, titled 'Special Research for Artichoke', was originally declassified in 1982 and added to the CIA's reading room last year but has recently been picked up on social media as people begin to realize what it outlines.
Across its seven pages it indicates a program that would develop chemicals for the purpose of altering human behavior, which would then potentially be used in large scale operations across entire populations.
These drugs had both immediate effects and long-term consequences, including things like truth serums that could even be applied within food, cigarettes, and even otherwise innocuous medical treatments.
We aren't able to see the full extent of this program as many files were destroyed in the 1970s – around 20 years after the initial plans were proposed – but it appears as if it was spurred on by the belief that rival nations were developing similar behavioral control drugs.
The team behind Artichoke worked to "evaluate claims that the USSR and/or its satellites may have developed new and significant techniques for this purpose," but none were discovered through this process.
However, as we would see later within the aforementioned highly controversial MKUltra program, drugs like LSD were used to alter the behavior of experimented individuals, alongside hypnosis, neurosurgery, and electric shock treatment.
An additional purpose of Artichoke – perhaps to display its potency for behavioral control – was to "give an evaluation of a hypothetical problem, namely: Can an individual of ****** descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?"
The notion of this occurring over half a century ago certainly hasn't been lost on people across social media, as many on Reddit have speculated what the CIA could be capable of all these years after.
"This is the s*** they were up to 70 years ago, imagine what s*** they get up to now? After the MKUltra s*** became public, I'm sure they stopped leaving paper trails," one commenter speculated.
Another added: "So the CIA was doing horrible s*** in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, but there is a large amount of people in this country who think they have stopped doing horrible s***?"
