
Mission: Mind Control
A Drug Enforcement Administration film from 1973 lays out what federal investigators had learned about the CIA's secret LSD testing on unwitting subjects. Produced for the Department of Justice and preserved in the National Archives, the film walks through how agencies moved from wartime interest in mind-altering drugs to covert human experiments, using government records and case material rather than dramatization. It stays close to the bureaucratic paper trail: memos, testing programs, and the chain of agencies involved, presented in the flat, procedural style typical of period government filmmaking rather than as an expose built for a general audience. There is no narrator commentary aimed at shocking the viewer, just an official accounting of what was authorized, by whom, and on what basis. As a document, it matters less for style than for source: this is the government's own contemporary summary of a program it was still trying to explain to itself.