Cold War Human Medical Experimentation at Canada's Penetang Hospital Our Hidden History

Steve Smith on interviewed on Black Op Radio — 2001

Announcer Welcome to Black Op Radio, the voice of political conspiracy research. To call in we have a secure line ready. Area code 604-525-XXXX. Again, just call area code 604-525-XXXX. You're listening to Black Op Radio. The show NSA doesn't want you to hear. And now, your hosts Anita Langley and Len Osanic.

Len Osanic Good evening, Anita.

Anita Langley How are you doing?

Len Osanic Not too bad.

Anita Langley Well this is Black Op Radio number 21.

Len Osanic Number 21. Lucky 21.

Anita Langley Twenty-one. October 16th, year 2000. Today we're doing things a little bit differently. We have a guest in the studio with us. Mr. Steve Smith has had some rather traumatic experiences in his life starting at a rather young age and what he has to say should give people nightmares if they have any sense of compassion whatsoever. Steve, how are you doing?

Steve Smith Anita, Len-o, nice to be here.

Len Osanic Thanks for coming. Not too often we get a guest right here in the studio.

Steve Smith It's worth doing. Any opportunity to get this out is good.

Anita Langley Well maybe you could start by just telling us what was going on in your life prior to your encounter with the legal system and how you ended up entering into the Oak Ridge Mentally Hospital....

Steve Smith Go ahead. Go ahead and say it. No problem. Hospital for the Criminally Insane ...

Anita Langley For the Criminally Insane.

Steve Smith ... is what it was. What got me there in fact was stealing a car. What brought that about was being ... Most of this is history. This goes back to 1969, '68, '69. We okay for volume? Okay, good.

It goes back to '68, '69, so it's basically history, but as the story unfolds it comes right up to the present, so it would appear that I was probably in the very beginning in the late 50s and 60s when a lot of research was being done in a lot of places, hospitals, prisons, military bases, a lot of research into brainwashing techniques. Not until year later did I discover but that's very likely what was behind what I went through because it was just so bizarre and unexplainable at the time. Without going into a lot of detail of the whole story suffice to say that I was like any other kid my age, long haired hippie, hitchhiking around the country. Stole a car, mostly out of necessity without the intention of keeping it. It was like use it temporarily and that led into a situation where I was - looking back on it pretty much kidnapped - into a system where I underwent 8 months of torture, physical torture, drug torture, very sophisticated brainwashing techniques done by experts. The results of which were horrifying in so many cases.

Now, after years of research, it took me for the most part I sat on this story for 20 years. Never talked about it. Although it really had a drastic effect on me for some 10 years after which is another story. When I started looking into it and researching, I had no idea of what would be uncovered. One thing led to another. I acquired a lot of clinical records and documents through Freedom of Information that really served to prove what I was beginning to suspect and that is that what happened to me was part of a much bigger picture.

Anita Langley Now, going back to what led you into this system, you were a normal kid going through rebellion. Your home life, you were living with your mom?

Steve Smith Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Anita Langley And you left home, you were living as the hippies were, sort of on the street. You were getting picked up for whatever, vagrancy and you ended up in this healthcare system. Now what actually happened the night or was it early morning that you stole the car? You were with a friend, right? And you were, from what you told me before ...

Steve Smith Anita, really the important part of this, sorry for interrupting but not so much how I got there, what led to getting there. It was a childish, it was a ... in and out of little bits of trouble, no serious trouble, stealing a car wasn't exactly the crime of the century and how I got into the system really isn't as important to the story. Keep in mind this was 30 years ago...

Anita Langley We're just trying to lay down a ground work for how you ended up there and what happened that night because what you told me that you just had a couple hits of acid in your pocket and...

Steve Smith Ah, okay.

Anita Langley That's what I'm getting at.

Steve Smith Okay, this is getting more to the point.

Anita Langley Right, exactly.

Steve Smith Yeah, okay. So, as I was traveling across the country as most hippies were, we were doing some amounts of acid, that's LSD for those that don't remember. And I happened to have two hits in my shirt pocket and rather than throw them away like I should have after I got caught for stealing the car, I swallowed them, so of course the police soon recognized something was wrong and I don't remember the details of it of course. Two hits of acid at that time was really something. This was like, I don't know what it was, windowpane or something, but you see God. At any rate they took me to the hospital and tried to pump my stomach which doesn't really make much sense under the circumstance which only makes it worse and that would be the reason why they thought I was nuts. I think they were thinking battery acid. I don't think they even knew what acid was in this small northern Ontario town.

Anita Langley Somewhere down the line, the term mothballs came into it. You were accused of attempting to commit suicide that night.

Steve Smith Oh, I don't know.

Anita Langley That was the reason why they originally maybe ... whether it was believed or not, I don't know, but the original excuse for ...

Steve Smith None of it matters. None of the excuses or the manipulation of me as a young teenager really matters. The point being they had an agenda.

Anita Langley Okay, but if it does show that anybody could be vulnerable given the wrong circumstances. You're just a kid going through ... and kids make mistakes. So, you know, nobody's saying that you...

Steve Smith I'm not here to defend it or ... defend or to even talk about mistakes I made. I'm here to talk about the mistakes that were done to me. Things that never should have been done.

Anita Langley Exactly and ...

Steve Smith How it came to be isn't my point. Whether I stole a car or whether I didn't or whether I was stoned or whether I wasn't, whether I had long hair or was a hippie or not isn't really, they were looking for people. They had an agenda.

Anita Langley But a person that fit that description.

Steve Smith I fit that bill.

Anita Langley Exactly, but the person that fits the description you just described is the kind of person that they were looking for so whether or not it's really relevant on a personal level because you were just a person like anybody else and it doesn't mean that even somebody who had committed a crime of a serious nature would have deserved what you got.

Steve Smith No.

Anita Langley But if you're separated from society, who's going to notice you going missing and going into a situation where you can be used as a guinea pig.

Steve Smith Well, of course, that's part of ...

Anita Langley You're not close to your family at this point.

Steve Smith ... the profile of what they're looking for.

Len Osanic So yeah. We get to that night where you're incarcerated and this is what happened. You were given a ... were you given a choice or this was just cut and dried that you were put into a program?

Steve Smith Oh, no. It unfolds much more slowly than that.

Len Osanic Oh, okay.

Steve Smith In the beginning, it was recognized quite quickly that this was an LSD trip and not a natural psychosis. I wasn't like talking to God and whatever because I was schizophrenic or psychotic but because I had done a drug. So that was recognized early on. Oh, by the way, they sent me off for 30 days observation, so ...

Len Osanic That's what I was getting at.

Steve Smith So of course, so they want to know if I'm crazy or not. They send me off to be assessed, psychiatrically assessed and that's understandable under the circumstances, if they didn't know about LSD and the effects of it and whatever. This kid is obviously whacko. So they did have a reason to draw me into the system. No doubt about it. They had an excuse or a reason to draw me into the system, but it was soon recognized by the people in the hospital that this was a drug trip, that I was a hippie, they soon understood. They made the assessment and made the call. Now years later uncovering clinical records dealing with that very time in the very beginning, one of the doctors who assessed me said specifically "He is not suffering from any mental illness in any diagnosable sense." Basically, I'm an angry young man and basically I was. They had just kidnapped me and stopped me from my trip across Canada where I was having a great time hitchhiking.

Len Osanic Okay. So, you were there for 30 days, so two weeks into that, they must have realized that, I guess everyone there realized that you were just ...

Steve Smith Exactly.

Len Osanic ... filling out your 30 day term then.

Steve Smith Yeah. So I was waiting to go back to court and in order to get this whole story, one has to go to the website and read the clinical records which we have published.

Len Osanic And we're going to make a link to your website.

Steve Smith It makes it much easier. See, what I understand, the one thing that I have come to understand throughout all of ten years of researching this to find out what happened to me, the only thing that counts is documentation. What I say is only what an involved person with either an axe to grind or some kind of psychological problems or some kind of truth that they feel necessary to expose to the public, whatever. It's still my own opinion. Documentation is what counts, so I feel that to see clearly what happened in the beginning and how I was manipulated into the system. How the decision to send me to Oak Ridge was made before any assessment of, before even any psychiatric assessment, I have letters from the director of Oak Ridge to the administrator in the northern Ontario hospital that I was in, in Thunder Bay asking to trade me like a baseball card. These letters had been published.

Len Osanic I'm sorry. We have one inmate and they would trade them?

Steve Smith Well, more than that. You have to read the documentation.

Len Osanic Okay, sure.

Steve Smith One of the administrators of the hospital says "Did I understand you to say ... " or at the last director's meeting "Did I understand you to say that you were looking for a patient to replace so-and-so" and they mentioned a name. Now these are documents that I obtained through Freedom of Access/Information and they are dated previous to psychiatric assessments by this doctor who made it clear that I was not suffering from any mental illness, but went along with these other doctors after the fact and had me committed and sent to Oak Ridge Hospital for the Criminally Insane which is populated by the way, if you don't know, with the worst of the worst. Murders and arsonists and the people that society just doesn't want to hear or see or think about ever again. They're locked up even without a trial. There's no publicity. They're in there forever... hopefully. Now, this is what I was in with. Mass murders, rapists, arsonists, child molesters and I stole a car and by that point before I even reached Oak Ridge, the car theft charge had been dropped. They didn't even proceed with it. They stayed the charge in order that I could be transferred to this hospital for the criminally insane. They were waiting for me with open arms, make me part of the program.

Anita Langley And right before that happened you actually had been given permission, I mean, you were walking around the other place with your regular street clothes and you could have gone out into the yard. You actually were going to go to a dance.

Steve Smith Yes.

Anita Langley And next thing you know, maybe you'd like to tell, let people know about your introduction to the biases against your clothing.

Steve Smith That wasn't my introduction to it.

Anita Langley Oh, okay.

Steve Smith It was another ongoing scene in what was the establishment against the hippies. I mean, we kind of accept that all kinds of dress and hairstyle and expression of character today without much of a thought, but keep in mind in the '60s there was a lot of attitude about haircuts and hairstyle and clothing and hippies were just thought of as quite strange. There were groups of people that thought that hippies were crazy by nature. Had to be. Just to be that way meant you were nuts.

Len Osanic Archie Bunker used to say they're communists. If you live in a commune, you're a communist.

Steve Smith Yeah, exactly. And a lot of hippies were communes. That's where the ... so they were considered commies and pinkos and there's all kinds of, and it was just the establishment against hippies which to this day I don't really know how you would define a hippie except I had long hair and painted jeans and wore beads around my neck and such and in this hospital, as Anita said, I was at this point when they understood that it was a drug trip and nothing more, I was given back my clothes and I was walking around the grounds. I suppose I could have walked out to the highway and hitchhiked away, but it was pretty clear that this wasn't going to be too much of a problem. I would deal with it, go through the court thing and probably be on my way. I had actually hoped, so I met another young girl of course which I usually managed to do in those times, met a young girl from another ward that she didn't seem to be in any way crazy. She wasn't hallucinating. I think her parents put her there because she had an eating disorder or something like that.

Parents would do that in those times. Oh, yeah. Not unusual. And she invited me to a dance on her ward that night and that was no problem. I had permission to do that. I had been doing that sort of thing already for more than a week and as I was ...

Len Osanic In the original 30 days?

Steve Smith Yeah. Yeah. I'm just waiting to go back to court.

Len Osanic Right. You were already considered a model prisoner.

Steve Smith Yeah. It was fine. It's like he's waiting to go back and I had my clothes back and I'm smoking cigarettes and walking around doing whatever, not under any kind of real close security.

As I was leaving the ward to go to this dance which was a normal procedure, one of the guards, they're not actually guards, they're whatever they would be called, attendants or male nurses or something, decided that he didn't like the way I was dressed and really attacked me, just bigoted as can be. Just red-faced, spitting out of the corners of his mouth and just the sort of thing that as a hippie I just despised and he wasn't going to let me go out the door dressed as I was which I'm sorry, that's all I have. I don't have ... I left my tuxedo at home, so he basically pawed me and pushed me against the wall and I do what I always do and to this day would probably do under those circumstances, pushed back and instantly had guards all over me dragging me to the floor and injecting me with some knockout drug, tossing me naked into a room and slamming and locking the door.

And that was the end of it. Next thing I knew I was on my way to Oak Ridge Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Anita Langley Now, I've seen the documentation around that and that was labeled a suicide attempt, yet I'm looking at a letter to your mother which just said evidence of mental disturbance hence his referral to hospital. Now, obviously somebody wasn't being straight with your family or something or they were being evasive about the whole thing.

Steve Smith Oh, yeah. When you put all the documents together and look at dates and times that this was written to various people, it's really clear that they were following some other agenda. They didn't say things they should have said and they said other things which didn't make sense and fit the facts at all. That's why I say documentation is so important...

Anita Langley And there's plenty of that by the way for anybody who'd like to check that out. This is very well documented.

Steve Smith It has to be. Without it I wouldn't even be here. I wouldn't be talking about this if I couldn't back up everything I said with documents because I understand that what I say is meaningless. If I accuse an organization like that of something, if I can't prove it, I would be much better not to even say it.

Anita Langley Exactly. Now moving on a little bit. Could you just let our listeners know what it was like for you stepping into Penetang [Penetanguishene Mental Health Center] and your experiences there when you first arrived?

Steve Smith Horrifying place. Physically, it's not a hospital. It's a super maximum security prison in a very old, old building. It was built in maybe 1935, I think. No, it was earlier that that. Earlier ... I haven't got the ... very old building at any rate. So, oppressive, narrow corridors, triple barred windows with heavy screens on the inside so very little light comes in. Everything was loud and echoing and slamming of metal gates and doors and noisy, unpleasant environment. As a prison, as a prison for punishment, I couldn't imagine a worse place. Medieval. As a hospital, outrageous.

Anita Langley Okay, so I imagine you must have been not just a little scared, 18 years old, all of a sudden you're finding yourself walking down the hallway of this place being led to your home for the next you don't know how long.

Steve Smith For life.

Anita Langley What was going through your head? Was there even anything? Were you thinking anything or was it just how do I survive this?

Steve Smith You know, this is a long time ago. This is 30 years ago, and one can't be so positive of what they felt yesterday because the quickest thing forgotten is pain. You don't remember pain very long. As soon as it's gone it's forgotten. But my best recollection of that time 30 years ago would have been so scared that you turn yourself off. You just turn off. You just become a piece of compliant meat. Whatever they do, you do. You're only thinking about being alive, staying alive, that's all. So, fear, you can't, if you allow fear you'll just come apart so you just shut down. Never happened to me since in my life but, and I faced some pretty nasty things following all of this, but never have I shut down like I did when I walked in there.

Anita Langley What was it like meeting Dr. Barker for the first time?

Steve Smith Oh, what a relief. It was such a relief. He was so nice. He was so, he called me by my first name. Keep in mind, I've been at that point naked on the floor in a cement room with nothing but a heavy blanket and eating off paper plates with no utensils, not even plastic utensils.

Anita Langley And how long did they leave you like that?

Steve Smith Maybe three days. I'm not sure. It's hard to say. Time has funny ways of going by, but when Barker came in, walked into the room, first time the door actually opened, how nice. He was so nice to me and he was smiling, calling me by my first name and actually made it, well of course, he knew how to approach me. He wasn't going to approach me with a whip. He knew what he was doing.

Anita Langley So he put a carrot out for you.

Steve Smith Of course.

Anita Langley Can you tell us about the carrot?

Steve Smith What you do is you soften them up for a few days by extreme isolation and then approach them in a friendly way and of course, people are crying out for human contact and friendliness. These are typical beginnings steps in the brainwashing process of which he turned out to be probably one of the experts in the field.

Anita Langley So he asked you, asked you if you would like to enter his program, his therapy. It was called Defense Disrupting Therapy.

Steve Smith Yeah. DDT.

Anita Langley DDT. It seems appropriate.

Steve Smith Even that was banned.

Anita Langley What did he tell you this program would entail?

Steve Smith He didn't really tell me very much except it would, he had me sign a piece of paper that agreed to just about everything. That consent agreement is also published and it's really absurd. A list of drugs including LSD, scopolamine, methedrine, mescaline, psilocybin, et cetera. So basically an agreement to hand you soul over to this guy to discourage visits and phone calls.

Anita Langley You didn't know about, you knew about, that you'd be given those things ahead of time? I'm sorry. I'm a little vague there.

Len Osanic Well, let me ask ...

Anita Langley I mean, the consent.

Steve Smith Well, he ...

Anita Langley When he warned you ahead of time. He said we're going to give you some drugs and play around with your head?

Steve Smith No, no. He asked me to sign the consent form to, which of course I did.

Anita Langley Right.

Steve Smith Now, I mean of course, under those circumstances there's no such thing as informed consent. Whether or not I signed that, listen, I couldn't even vote at the time. My signature had no bearing. I couldn't even vote. My signature wasn't a legal ... I was not of age. I was 18. Age of majority was 21.

Anita Langley I just, I guess the point of my question is, you'd been living on the street as a hippie. Did you have any reason to think well, maybe it's not so bad doing a few drugs that are condoned by this doctor or did you actually have any idea what he meant by this program?

Steve Smith No, I had no idea. I had no idea.

Anita Langley So you had no warning what you were walking into, just that you were ...

Steve Smith No, no, no. Just that, I mean, I had even really no thought of it. The only thought I had was of survival. Now, he came into my room being all nice with his arm around my shoulder and using my first name and being the first human contact that wasn't treating me like a dangerous piece of meat. Like a dangerous animal, being careful with me all the time. Handcuffs and billy clubs and I'm going what? What? What? He's the first one that ignored that, so of course I'm going to agree with whatever he says.

Anita Langley And he's been described by people as charismatic. I guess you got ...

Steve Smith Charismatic. That's what made him all the way through his career was his charisma in fact. Which is a sad comment.

Anita Langley So you had no trouble signing a consent that you thought would get you out of there faster. You're surrounded by people who are going to be there as far as you're concerned perhaps for the rest of their lives.

Steve Smith Looks like it. It's not like ... I knew about this place. Everyone in Ontario knows about Penetang, they call it. It's Penetanguishene Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Oak Ridge division. It is this super maximum security. Everyone knows about it. It has a reputation. The word Penetang strikes fear into the heart of the average citizen. They know in Ontario.

Anita Langley Okay. So you obviously knew.

Steve Smith Oh, yeah.

Anita Langley You were scared.

Steve Smith I knew I was there forever. That was it.

Anita Langley When you first arrived there that was your thought. I'm never getting out of here?

Steve Smith Well, yeah. That's what that place is. People went there did not get out of there.

Anita Langley So this doctor comes in. He offers you this ray of hope. We have a way to treat you.

Steve Smith Yeah. Yeah.

Anita Langley Now did he actually try to convince you that you were nuts or ...

Steve Smith Oh, yeah. That's what the whole program, I mean, well, a good part of the program was about kind of like 12 steps to alcoholism. Instead of 12 steps away from it, you're taking 12 steps towards admitting that you are mentally ill and that all of what Barker ... I mean, it's just astonishing. This thing was so well polished to lead people into believing that they were mentally ill, that they were nuts. And driving you nuts as well.

Anita Langley So the first challenge then is getting you to admit that you were crazy...

Steve Smith Yeah. I understand perfectly clearly that no one in a mental hospital is crazy. They're all going I'm not crazy as they're being dragged down the hall and it's a cliché thing. It's almost a joke to say oh, yeah, they tried to make me think I was crazy, but really the only thing I had left was my sanity and I wasn't about to give that up easily. I knew full well that the people that I was with, the rooms I was in, the things I was witnessing was absolute madness, made no sense. I was not a sophisticated kid, but I knew that it made no sense. This is crazy. This is mad ... the crazy people have taken over the asylum and yet I had nothing to do except go along with it if I wanted to survive.

Anita Langley Now this program, actually more than one program really, that you first ended up in the "sun room" but there were other more intensive aspects of this, "the capsule" for example which we'll get into a little bit here. These were environments which were set up which were not considered. I mean, we here, we have this phrase that we hear, the lunatics running the asylum and most people think of that as a joke, but literally, while Dr. Barker and whoever watch in the distance with their cameras and whatever, made notes, there were criminally insane patients getting together in patient committees and it was their job to prescribe dangerous drugs and administer dangerous drugs to each other and to monitor each other, to babysit each other.

Steve Smith Every aspect of your life from morning until night was decided by patient committees.

Anita Langley And over seen from a distance by doctors who never really stepped in. Do you remember the doctors ever boycotting a decision made by a patient committee?

Steve Smith No. No, it didn't work that way. It was all about... it wasn't even really about making right or wrong decisions. The poker game didn't matter. What mattered was the fact that they were playing poker, you see? The people watching and recording all of this really had no interest in the people who were doing it. Their interest was in the experiment. This was not treatment. None of this was recognized treatment. It was all totally experimental. So, although they called it "treatment" and "therapy", it was not. Therapy is a recognized, to use the word therapy you have to follow certain, you have to fall under certain guidelines of conduct of the trade and they simply didn't do that. It was experiments.

Anita Langley Well, actually ... it would be nice to get into a bit of the details of this so called therapy so that our listeners can actually hear for themselves what Dr. Barker was calling therapy back then. For starters ...

Steve Smith Part of what you bring up is the beginning of it. Just setting up an artificial society composed of rigidly defined rules, administered by psychopaths, people who have murdered many people, who would if you turned them loose tomorrow, murder many more. Now, these people are in control of a sophisticated arrangement of patient committees that monitored each other and at the same time monitored the behavior and handed out mostly punishment for infractions of the regulations. An infraction of the regulation could be something as simple as turning your eyes towards the ceiling in a gesture of disbelief or defiance. That would get you, it could get you your smoking privileges taken away for example, and really what else do you have to do except smoke? Whatever pleasure could there possibly be in that environment? So having other patients take away your cigarettes because you had the audacity to turn your eyes to the ceiling or to say no, I won't read this.

Anita Langley A person learns pretty quickly to conform and do whatever is expected of them.

Steve Smith Oh, yeah. They were capable of inflicting a lot more than removing your smoking privileges. As I found out. And administering drugs. Incredible that patients, other patients could recommend that someone get scopolamine or methamphetamine or amytal they called it. Sodium amytal, truth serum. I have a video. In fact, the CBC documentary in a section of the old video that they showed inside the capsule of a group of patients actually recorded on tape saying "I recommend amytal" and another one said "I would agree with that." They're talking like doctors. They're approving of each other's prescription. It's really, it would almost be funny to behold if you didn't realize how serious this was, that they were giving dangerous mind-bending drugs to people in an experimental technique by patients. It's absurd.

Len Osanic Now I have a question. At what point did you realize that there was no goal here. Like, I guess for the first week I guess you figured if you went along, things would start to get better and you would gain more privileges or see a way out. And I guess at some point you realized that there was no goal.

Steve Smith I fought back until ... I resisted being involved. I resisted communicating with these people, with just getting into their circle of activity.

Len Osanic So in the beginning, you did not play along?

Steve Smith No, I didn't. I just sat there quietly. I didn't get involved.

Len Osanic Oh, okay.

Steve Smith Until they decided that I needed methamphetamine, methedrine, speed. So Dr. Barker himself came in. They made the recommendation. Barker himself came in with an attendant and they chased me all over the sun room. It's a small room but I did my best to avoid them. Practically ran up the wall. Had no fear for my own safety. Bounced off the walls, fought as hard as I could to prevent that from happening. They held me down on the floor and Barker injected me mainline, intravenous with methamphetamine, some, what... 30 milligrams of methamphetamine, intravenous and anyone who has ever done speed in their life of which before that I never have. After that I wanted nothing but. You're instantly addicted to that feeling. Any 18 year old kid that mainlines methamphetamine is going to want more and I wondered why I was running. Why was I running away from this guy? This is beautiful. It's instant addiction. Methamphetamine, he introduced me to that. In later years, at the low point of my life, I was shooting speed in the back seat of an abandoned car with a fit that I had made out of a ball point pen.

Anita Langley Thank you, Dr. Barker. So, your first experience, your first drug, massive drug experience was with methamphetamine. Now they just injected you and left you for a few days to see how you'd react or was this, did they persist for a while?

Steve Smith Yeah, it was from that point on, the memory of it isn't really clear what drug followed what, but the clinical record, again published, is only partly there but it does show day after day after day after day for two pages I believe we have or a page and a half which is, in itself, incomplete of scopolamine, methamphetamine, dexedrine, dexamyl, sodium amytal, prostigmine. Prostigmine is interesting. It took me a long time to figure out what that was. It's very closely related to one of the drugs that they gave people in the Gulf ... it may have caused the Gulf War syndrome. Pyridostigmine and prostigmine are similar things. I really haven't gotten to the point of why they would have given me that particular drug but I will and I'm still pursuing that but at any rate, a list of all kinds of ... I mean, you can't help but look at this list and any doctor just goes "Wow, you can't do this."

Anita Langley Even without seeing the LSD on there which of course you got a fair share of that, too.

Steve Smith Yeah. Not recorded. So I'm not making a point of it.

Anita Langley Not recorded. Okay.

Steve Smith But we'll see.

Anita Langley But, but I don't think it's a big secret that Dr. Barker was administering LSD.

Steve Smith Oh, of course. Of course, I have letters. I have several letters obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, although Dr. Barker's signature is blacked out, it's clear who he is and where these letters come from. Requesting through Ottawa through Tunney's Pasture requesting an additional 20 milligrams of LSD as they've used up their last supply. Now, 20 milligrams ... That's a lot of acid.

Len Osanic For how long did this take place?

Steve Smith Months.

Len Osanic Months on end.

Steve Smith Months, and including not just drugs, but brutality. Handcuffs made of seatbelts. Fortunately for Oak Ridge, there was a seatbelt manufacturing plant right next door in the town of Midland, which is very close, or perhaps even Penetanguishene, twin cities. But he got scraps of seat belt material and turned it into a really unique handcuffing situation. The patients, the patient committees had worked out a number of creative ways of tying people up who posed a threat to the continued therapeutic community.

You would be most definitely handcuffed anytime you were on any of the mind-bending drugs, as well. Another patient would often be handcuffed to you. It was his responsibility to monitor you and keep you alive, keep you from falling down and bashing your head, or whatever.

Actually taught to take a pulse and to check for hyperventilating and what to do about it, which is what would happen quite often with scopolamine and methamphetamine, you'd begin to hyperventilate, your muscles would begin to lock up and you could actually die from respiratory failure. It was the responsibility of the patient observer, chosen by one of the committees, to make sure that, that didn't happen.

Now two things that's placing an awful lot of responsibility on someone who may not want it, who may not feel that they're qualified for it. Secondly, it's placing a lot of responsibility on someone who just might like to see someone die, who's already showed pleasure in multiple murder.

Anita Langley Now getting to the subject of patients watching over each other, I imagine there was a lot of discouraging of patients falling asleep when they're supposed to be watching each over?

Steve Smith Oh yeah. Benzedrine was handed out like candy-

Anita Langley To keep people awake...

Steve Smith If it was your job to stay up and observe, you were given candies, bennies, anytime you needed them, pop a ... They were time-released. They were caplets with little time-released balls in it so they would keep you up a long time.

Anita Langley Now some of these drugs that were administered were basically of a sort that would knock a patient out?

Steve Smith Oh yeah.

Anita Langley You didn't know-

Steve Smith Delirium-inducing-

Anita Langley Now if you were being handcuffed to somebody or having somebody watch over you who was a total psychotic, you're left alone in the room with somebody for how many hours? I mean that's very scary to think about.

Steve Smith That's a bad situation. Of course. The curious thing about the situation in Oak Ridge with interaction between patients, following Oak Ridge it really made a mess of me. Of course, for years after that I was in and out of jail, mostly in. I attribute that as a direct result of what happened in Oak Ridge. It's not my character to be that way.

But point being, I'm experienced with jailhouse culture. I know how it is, and everybody is always making, joking in sexual reference, like all sort of gay stuff related, but it's, you ... contrary to popular opinion, you don't see it much in prison, but everybody's always talking about it. Everybody's always, it's on everyone's mind. It's a very sexually tense neighborhood in prison.

In Oak Ridge, no one ever talked about it. There was never any kind of that sort of bantering that you would hear. It was kind of meaningless like, "Ah, suck my dick." "Yeah? Produce it." I don't know if you can say that over the...

Len Osanic Oh yeah, yeah, yeah-

Steve Smith Okay, we're web, we don't follow the FCC, and whatever. You'd hear that kind of bantering among tough guys, always sort of, "Yeah, bend over, asshole," you know? Blah, blah, blah. You hear it all the time. In Oak Ridge, you never heard that. People didn't talk that way, ever, not ever, not even when there was no one around to hear.

It makes one wonder.

Anita Langley There were some much more personally demeaning environments there though, and that actually brings us to the capsules. Maybe there's a very good reason why-

Steve Smith Of course-

Anita Langley People didn't joke about it, because it wasn't funny.

Steve Smith Of course.

Anita Langley Now we have here a page, taken from Elliot Barker's article on the Total Encounter Capsule. I'd just like to read the first paragraph from this article written by Dr. Barker. It does say here, "For the last nine years, on a regular basis, groups of naked mental patients have been locked in a small room for periods ranging up to 11 days. In order to make the Total Encounter Capsule theme, if not a useful form of therapy, at least logical and not perverse, there is need to provide some background information about this particular hospital, its patients, and it's program." Well, Dr. Barker goes on to justify stuffing a bunch of boys and very young men, naked, into a room together and then turning them loose with drugs.

Steve Smith You see he knew what perverse was. He knew in the beginning that it was perverse. He uses the word himself.

Anita Langley I wonder what's happened to all the extensive amounts of video footage that's been taken from... not that I personally want to see it, but I have to wonder what possible use and if it's been archived, and if anybody's wondered or investigated what's been on those tapes and what was tolerated, what was allowed to go, because I personally have to wonder-

Steve Smith Of course-

Anita Langley Myself, seriously, you've got people who've been convicted of rape, various assault-oriented crimes, and you're sticking them in a room like that.

Steve Smith Oh there's no question. We don't even have to speculate. There's no doubt about what was going on here. With a one-way mirror in the ceiling, let me describe "The Castle". It's approximately 12, no, maybe 10 by 10-foot room with about a nine-foot ceiling that is totally padded, floor, ceilings, and wall. There is an open toilet in one corner.

When the door closes, no light comes in and you can't see where the door is. It disappears in with the rest of the room. The door is not opened for sometimes as much as 30 days. You get your food through straws, through the wall. Liquid food. You suck it through straws. Now groups of, as you said, eight or more or less, naked young men in this room being videoed constantly, 24 hours a day, through a camera in the ceiling.

Now, that is perverse. It is definitely. We don't even have to speculate about what went on in there, we know. There's ... one would have to be a fool to assume anything other than videotaping some really nasty sexual behavior being forced upon people and the use of drugs. Now, one thing that I did learn about that videotaping equipment, it was state of the art. It was the best you could get.

CBC, at the time, in 1969, didn't have recording equipment as good as that. I know that because part of my own CBC documentary shows some old footage again of The Castle, and the camera pans past the camera and the recording devices. One of the CBC people working on it pointed out that, that's state of the art equipment. I wonder how he could have afforded that.

Anita Langley He couldn't afford to have doctors and medical staff properly supervised as his writings have indicated that one of the reasons for having patients do so much of the overseeing is that it was much easier on their budget. This is supposed to be a therapeutic community. Obviously, there's no therapy going on. A person has to ask, what is Dr. Barker doing today?

Steve Smith Research. What he's doing today is still pretty scary, in fact. That's one of the reasons why I've spent the last 10 years viligantly [sic] pursuing a lawsuit, College of Physicians and Surgeons complaints that remains unresolved after 10 years. What motivates me to do that is not so much what happened to me, although that's important enough. It's that he's still doing it. He's still up to it.

He runs something called the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, CSPCC. He maintains a web page where a number of his publications can be read. Much about this man I think is very much like it used to be and I say that because of something that I read in one of his more recent publications, called "Ego State Therapy with Street Kids", where he quotes, as best I can I'll quote this, in terms of getting consent, this is what he says in terms of getting consent from these patients, who are referred to him from the courts. Young teenage delinquents that get in some trouble with the law are referred to his private practice by the courts.

To get their permission to use videotapes of the session, he says, "Because these kids are almost without funds for drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or a roof over their head, usually in that order, I find it productive to give them a small amount of cash in gaining their permission to use these videotapes in training sessions," whatever that means. Something, not exactly quoted.

Bottom line is, that's the essence of what, of how he thinks about his present patients. The contempt he holds for them and how he still believes that he can buy consent.

Anita Langley Having read a lot of this documentation, it does appear as though Dr. Barker is just simply off his nut, but there are a couple questions that really bother me. You have mentioned a patient by the name of Matt Lamb [Matthew Charles Lamb].

Steve Smith Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Anita Langley Matt Lamb ended up fighting in a war.

Steve Smith Dying in a war.

Anita Langley Dying in a war, and my understanding was being declared at one point, criminally insane for a murder that he was not ever supposed to be thinking about ending up in any Army, yet would you care to tell us where he ended up and what you know about those circumstances, and how Dr. Barker was involved.

Steve Smith I think, I think probably Matt Lamb will be the key to really uncovering the agenda behind the Oak Ridge experiment. I think Matt Lamb is the, he's the successful Manchurian Candidate. If what I believe they were up to at Oak Ridge is true, and a lot of my documents certainly point in that direction, what they were trying to do is take aggressive people - murderers, psychopaths - and instead of just having to lock them up for life, turn that aggressive, violent, animal-like behavior, that lack of conscience that psychopaths seem to possesses, turn that to a useful purpose. Useful to the government, and to make the psychopath himself, just give him a place to be. Give him a place to shine. Give him a place where his talents are appreciated. That way, there's no loyalty that you can trust more than that of a psychopath that you have bought his loyalty.

That's what they did with Matt Lamb. He was one of Barker's two favored patients during the eight months that I was there. Now let me outline Matt Lamb's background, first. This is a fairly long story but I think the details are important. Matt Lamb, in the early '60s, I'm not sure, '62, '63, '64, walked up to four people on the street in Toronto and shot them with a shotgun. Killed two of them and maimed the other two.

Presumably, they never discovered why he did it. He wasn't psychotic. In fact, he's very intelligent, young, good looking, articulate young guy. There was apparently no reason for it. There was no grudge, no nothing. He just chose these people at random and shot them for no apparent reason.

Now, he was a ward of his uncle, who happened to be a military man. I don't know if there's any connection, but his parents were dead. He was raised by his uncle, who was a military man, who's still alive, living in Windsor, Ontario. Matt Lamb was found unfit to stand trial and placed under Lieutenant Governor's warrant and locked up in Oak Ridge, where he would presumably never get out. End of story.

Along came Dr. Barker after Matt Lamb had been there for several years, and used Matt Lamb and another patient for most of his experiments, as far as I could see. They were the focus of much of the LSD. They seemed to be constantly involved in something with Barker.

Matt Lamb was released from Oak Ridge in 1973, where he went to live with Dr. Barker on his 200-acre isolated farm in Georgian Bay, doing manual labor. Barker himself told me in our email exchange, that while they were digging fence posts for some 400 fence posts, he was surprised that Matt Lamb told him that he wanted to go to Israel.

So, as he put it, "with Matt Lamb's Israeli bonds and my assistance", he went to Israel where he fought in the Yom Kippur War. He returned from there. The Yom Kippur War, by the way, was also in 1973. In fact, Matt Lamb was released directly from Oak Ridge to military training in Israel and directly into a war.

Now that in itself, you have to stop and ask a few questions. How on earth did he get out of the country, legitimately? How did he get a passport, if he did it on his own? Why did he have Israeli bonds? He was locked up in the hospital for the criminally insane up until a year before or less. Why would the Israeli Army want him? They're the most professional in the world. They don't want people fresh out of hospitals for the criminally insane. Most certainly not. You'd be a danger to everyone.

The questions... it's just dripping with questions. Matt Lamb comes back from the Yom Kippur War disillusioned, as Dr. Barker puts it, and moves back onto the farm with him. Then in 1976, I don't know what transpired in the years between, I have no record of it. In 1976, Matt Lamb wound up dying in the Bush War in Zimbabwe, Rhodesia. Now Zimbabwe. End of Matt Lamb. Now, take it from there.

Anita Langley Well, I mean that does say a lot just in itself, because anybody who's, you know think about a criminally insane patient going immediately to fight a war, first of all, somebody's got to accept him.

Steve Smith Not the Israeli Army, I'm sure. What it shows, quite simply, is that there was a lot of government involvement in this. There was some kind of influence. First thing it shows is that Barker had connections. He had connections in Israel. He had military connections. He must've had connections inside of the federal government because Matt Lamb would have to get a passport to travel to Israel.

He was still under a Lieutenant Governor's warrant. If he showed the slightest inclination towards violence, they should have just taken him back immediately and locked him up. They would have been watching him carefully. After all, I know that they watched me carefully until as late as 1980.

Anita Langley Right. You showed me a letter in which you were referred to as being a part of a "special project".

Steve Smith Yeah. A letter from the Ontario, this is the Province of Ontario, Attorney General, Public Trustees Division, dated 1980, anyway. I think it might've been May 1980, inquiring about my whereabouts. This is a full 10 years after I was released. I was, in fact, at that time, according to the passport, the stamp in my passport, I was on the very date that that letter was written, I was in Nicaragua and El Salvador, just passing through.

Now, in the letter they ask, they inquire about my whereabouts. That's where they lost me, by the way, and asked to send any reply to Ontario Attorney General, Public Trustees Office and mark the envelope, "special project, records division". For anyone that would like to pursue that under a Freedom of Information Act, I believe you'll find that special project will probably contain some more enlightening information about who was behind this and why they were tracking me for 10 years. I was not on parole or probation or under anyone's welfare, not anything. No government agency had the right to be asking questions about me.

Len Osanic Do you feel they were keeping track of everyone, then?

Steve Smith Oh yes, they must've been. Why just me?

Len Osanic Right.

Steve Smith I was the least of them. I was only there for eight months. Most were in it for at least two years. The whole circumstance of my being there was kind of a glancing blow. I wasn't really subjected to the brunt of this. Had I been, I probably wouldn't be here to talk about it today, as very few others are.

Len Osanic This is a much darker, sinister, what did you call it, project, isn't it?

Steve Smith Well I, it's clear that there's some government involvement in this. This isn't just one rogue psychiatrist conducting bizarre experiments with naked boys in his own private-

Len Osanic: And we've heard of what the doctor, Ewen Cameron, having [crosstalk 00:19 07]-

Steve Smith Yeah, of course, so we know, I mean we know that these things were happening in Canada, it's documented. It's an interesting note, Anita, that the bit that you read out of the Capsule, the Capsule Project itself was funded, now this is an Ontario government facility, but the Capsule Project was funded by the Donner Foundation.

If you look in the notes in the back of that, you'll see that he got a $30,000 grant from the Donner Foundation to conduct, or something to do with the Capsule experiment. Now, you look at the Donner Foundation.

Len Osanic Do you have any insight as to where, is it American, Canadian?

Steve Smith It's the Donner Canadian. Now, there is the American Donner Foundation, which is one of the most right wing foundations in America. They are as right as it goes. I don't know a lot about the Canadian Donner Association, or Foundation, but I assume that they're somehow related.

The Donner Foundation is very right wing. If you wanted to look for a cut-out organization whereby you could supply money from the CIA-

Len Osanic Right-

Steve Smith To the end user, the Donner Foundation would be a good way to go. Like in the Ewen Cameron situation with the Department for Human Ecology was the cut-out, where the funds went through.

Len Osanic Yeah, yeah.

Anita Langley There was a follow-up study, which might actually lead us back to what special project was really about, why it was keeping track of you. There was a follow-up study that showed that patients that went through this program had a much higher rate of recurrence of criminal activities.

Steve Smith Exactly. I'm not sure the name of that study. The Hurtling Report, something like that, Hurtling Report, I have to look this up. There's a lot of work left to be done in this. They statistically proved that people who went through this Defense Disrupting Therapy Program, now what they said was psychopaths who went through this Defense Disrupting Therapy Program, did significantly worse than those who didn't. They went on to commit murders, rapes, arsons, so the statistical evidence is there also that proves that Barker was way wrong in this. That what he did was actually damaging.

Anita Langley We have here a very major report rom Dr. Brian Hoffman, Chief of Psychiatry, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He was very condemning of what happened and pretty much put it on the line that it was not a very professional situation for you to end up being involved in.

Steve Smith Yes, he did. He in fact deserves a lot of credit, and I think in the future as more is learned about this and more is uncovered about what Barker was and is up to, Dr. Hoffman's position, the courage that he had to come out and the Hoffman report, from my point of view, is the clearest outline of my story. My life story, what happened, why it happened, and what Barker's responsibility is in this.

This is one professional thoroughly panning the work of another, which you don't often see in the medical field. Hoffman deserves a great deal of credit for the courage to come forward with what he says in this report. It's lengthy, it's some 30 pages, 35 pages maybe, and it has to be read to be appreciated and understood. It's published, you must read it.

Anita Langley Now that said, there's just one more point I'd kind of like to gloss over, to some degree. I mentioned that I'd like to talk to you about it just to get your take on it, because I understand that there were an abnormal number of deaths in Oak Ridge. I mean you personally had seen a massive graveyard, which you described-

Steve Smith Yeah-

Anita Langley To me, which I thought that sounded like something out of one of those haunted movie-

Steve Smith Sounds like a Stephen King movie.

Anita Langley: Yeah, yeah. Now you personally witnessed what appeared to you to be a murder and the guy did end up dead, so who knows, now [crosstalk 00:23 33] would you like-

Steve Smith There's some mystery involved, something yet to be uncovered in that, as well. A fellow by the name of Bob Dean, he was a mountain of a man. He was like six foot big and 200 and big pounds. Subject to going off on mad, raving, violent things.

I was locked in a cell, and Bob Dean was down at the end of the corridor, and he went off crazy about something, started throwing furniture around and causing a ruckus, and a bunch of attendants ran down the hall. What I witnessed was them dragging him back down the hall by the neck, by a towel twisted around his neck, which was a common way of rendering people helpless. Anyone who got disturbed that fought back would get a towel twisted around their neck and very quickly render you unconscious, cuts off your air and blood supply, and you're unconscious within seconds.

They were dragging Bob Dean up the corridor, two or three of them, pulling him by way of this twisted towel around his neck. Outside my cell, across the corridor in the next cell, they stripped his clothes off, tossed him into the cell, where I saw him land against a radiator, which I knew was hot. The next morning, maybe not the next morning, sometime later, Bob Dean was taken out of the cell, and as I looked out the window, he looked dead to me. To this day, I believe I witnessed a murder. The OPP did a major investigation of this in perhaps 1991? I'll have to look it up in my records.

Len Osanic It's Ontario?

Steve Smith No. Here.

Len Osanic OPP?

Steve Smith Ontario Prevention Police. Yeah.

Len Osanic Right. That's what I was going to say.

Steve Smith But they actually came out here. They sent two detectives out here to interview me.

Len Osanic In 1990?

Steve Smith I believe it was 1990. I'll have to look up the dates-

Len Osanic Fair enough. Yeah.

Steve Smith So many of these things that ... At any rate, after apparently interviewing some 150 people, and really looking into this case, they decided that I didn't see what I thought I saw. So there's nothing more I can say about it at this point except I believe, and Bob Dean's family ... I've talked to Bob Dean's ... Not talked to but exchanged letters with one of Bob Dean's brothers who lives here in British Columbia. He recalls that the family believes that there was something very strange about this whole thing. Presumably, according to the autopsy, Bob Dean died of a heart attack, and it was right around the time that I witnessed this. I don't know the dates but that he apparently died of a heart attack and that in the autopsy, it indicated that he had a big burn on his back. Now this is hearsay so far. I don't have the autopsy report. I don't know, but it's another area of this. It's another facet of the whole Oak Ridge thing that deserves someone to look into it more.

Further Anita, you were talking about the graveyard on the site. I had been told about this graveyard some, maybe a year before I actually saw it. And quite frankly, I didn't really believe it from the source that I heard about it, a former Oak Ridge patient who was a little strange, still, but free. I didn't quite believe it, but when my wife and I drove across the country on holiday, we made a point of stopping in at Oak Ridge. The first thing I did was go to the front door. Oak Ridge is actually ... The Hospital of Penetanguishine is quite large. It's acreage. Big acreage. There's buildings all over and houses and complexes, all kinds of things. You need to drive around the site.

At any rate, I went to the door of Oak Ridge with my heart in my mouth. Just walking up to the gates was pretty strange. I hadn't seen it since 19 ... Since the time, so I asked someone inside that I understood there was a graveyard on the site and if they knew where it was. The guy at the door said he didn't, but I heard from behind him someone say, "Oh, there used to be a graveyard down so and so," and I didn't catch what he said, but I said to the guy at the gate, "What do you mean there used to be a graveyard? Like a graveyard's a kind of a permanent thing. They're not used-to-bes." He pointed me in a direction. I followed that direction, walked down the hill, walked all over the place. Wound up maybe an hour later on a attaching military base down by the waterfront.

There happened to be a tourist kind of thing on this military base. I asked the lady if she knew anything about a graveyard on the Oak Ridge ground site. She said oh, she did. It was a hospital graveyard, and she said they don't use it anymore, haven't for years. Pointed me in the direction, so I walked down a worn path, a grown over path, trees all around, weeds waist-high, and came across, lo and behold, an area, I don't know, half the size of a football field to describe it, with big trees growing around it in a square. I thought, "Oh, this looks like something," moved some grass aside, and found gravestones just with numbers.

There are at least 300. The field is full of them, and I haven't really gone into a big personal search, but I have not been able to identify anyone in these graves.

Anita Langley That number does make a person wonder because a lot of people who die in institution, their body still gets claimed by family members, so if that many were just in that graveyard ... I realize a lot of years passed-

Steve Smith I don't read too much into it. It's a bizarre kind of graveyard. It's very spooky, and I'm not insinuating that they've been systematically murdering people in there for years and hiding their bodies ...

Anita Langley No, but there have been actual investigations into the large number of deaths-

Steve Smith Yeah, there is-

Anita Langley That have occurred there.

Steve Smith By the nature of the place, it's filled with very dangerous people and the circumstance in there is very dangerous. This is Hannibal Lector times 300, so there's bound to be a lot of deaths in there. That's not in itself unusual, but the kind of hidden aspect of the graveyard, I thought was just kind of creepy. It looked to me like it hadn't been used in a long, long time, but it just fits with the whole spooky atmosphere of Oak Ridge that there would be a hidden graveyard on the site. Perfect.

Anita Langley I don't know if there's anything else that you'd like to add to summarize. I know you've got a legal case in the works right now, and you just got back from Ontario. I guess you've been battling it with a couple of organizations trying to get them to take some responsibility or acknowledge what's happened. This latest one, you seem to have gained some ground.

Steve Smith It looks like it. There's actually a more present that brings this up to the present. This is not just a story of history. The unfolding of this story itself has turned into something else quite interesting, even perhaps more important than what happened to me ... The results of and the more recent things. The email exchange with Dr. Barker is significant. In 1996, following the decision of The College of Physicians and Surgeons, that the complaint that I filed against Dr. Barker didn't actually happen, that none of this was never happened. They didn't have my clinical records at the time, but following that decision, that it never happened, they immediately whitewashed it. Then I backed it up and proved that it did happen with clinical records, so it was sent back to the Health Professions Board, which oversees the decisions of The College of Physicians and Surgeons, so while it was between these two boards, Dr. Barker and I carried on a three month email conversation every day.

According to his own words, he said never in his life has he ever written so much to one person. Never. I as well have never in my life exchanged ... Every morning, I would wait for his email and reply. Volumes of material.

Anita Langley What were you looking for when you ... You initiated the email. Were you looking for some resolution? Were you hoping that he would have some kind of realization that what he did was wrong?

Steve Smith Yeah.

Anita Langley Or were you just hoping he would spill his guts-

Steve Smith Yeah.

Anita Langley And say something to-

Steve Smith I thought-

Anita Langley [to nail himself?

Steve Smith There's two things that I thought. One is there's a little bit of Stockholm Syndrome, I suppose, because I find the man fascinating. When you read his email, you'll see. He's intellectual. He's charming. He's fascinating. He's difficult to decipher. He's a complicated guy, so I wanted to learn more about this guy that tortured me so seriously. Know your enemy. Because I knew that there's a lawsuit going on. I had also filed litigation that he didn't know about, which is a 12 million dollar lawsuit. That's another story. At any rate, while this investigation was going on, he was foolish enough to carry on this conversation with me. I expected that he would try to make some sense of what happened, that we can obviously communicate, so maybe I can make some sense through him before it needs to go to court and all this lawsuit stuff. I want to know what you were up to.

I want to find out what was behind what you were doing. Clearly, I've learned a lot since then, and I know that there's more than meets to the eye to what you were doing. I thought I could find out by communicating directly with him. He made some incredible mistakes, some of which convinced me that really Dr. Bryan Hoffman's assessment of Barker, and that is quite simple, that he's nuts ... In his own words, he said, "He's nuts." His assessment is probably right. Barker probably is nuts. All I can say is the email exchange, of which we have published it all, is truly fascinating. It really tells a lot about the man's character and where he's coming from, but at the same time, it really leaves open some big, mysterious questions and connects him possibly with some other things that are even more frightening.

What's he up to today?

Len Osanic And who's funding him?

Steve Smith Yeah. Canadian Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Children. It's associated with a lot of other organizations. There's something greasy about the webpage. By greasy, I mean just the feeling that you get; a scratching behind your eyeballs. Something when you look at it and you go, "There's something wrong with this webpage and all these people."

Anita Langley Didn't you mention something about somebody he was working with through that organization? One of the-

Steve Smith One of the founding members.

Anita Langley Yeah, it was an ex-patient.

Steve Smith Michael Mason. You go to the webpage and look up ... There's a lot of things printed there. There's one article called "Snug as an Alcoholic in a Rug" as in "snug as a bug in a rug" written by one, Michael Mason, who is listed on the homepage of Canadian Society For The Prevention-

Anita Langley He's listed as a co-author of some of-

Steve Smith He's listed-

Anita Langley Barker's articles-

Steve Smith: No, no, no. He is listed as one of the founding members of this society, and he is a murderer. He was a patient in Oak Ridge, not a doctor. He sounds like ... Although, everything in the webpage sounds like he's a doctor, he is not. He was a patient. He was a killer. He was there under the lieutenant governor's warrant. He published on Barker's webpage. He published privately with him. Any place that you see Michael Mason in Barker's published works, "[inaudible 00:11 55] Behind Bars", "The Insane Criminal as Therapist", "LSD in the Course of Milleu Therapy"...

Anita Langley Got one right here. Defense Disrupting Therapy-

Steve Smith Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Anita Langley By E.T. Barker and M.H. Mason-

Steve Smith And M.H. Mason-

Anita Langley And J. Wilson.

Steve Smith Yeah, well, M.H. Mason is a patient at Oak Ridge. He was a killer, and he's also listed as one of the founding members of The Canadian Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Now I'll tell you this, if I had a kid that was one of Barker's patients right now, I would want to know that ... who ... I would want to know that.

Anita Langley Yeah, I think so.

Steve Smith So, here I am to tell you.

Anita Langley I think so.

Steve Smith There's something about that site that needs to be looked at.

Anita Langley Actually speaking of this "Defense Disrupting Therapy" article, I would like to read the addendum, which was the last note that he published on the subject of defense disrupting therapy, which by the way, this article is very worth getting one's hands on. I'm considering putting the whole thing up. I think I will. I didn't want to get into trouble for publishing somebody else's stuff, but under the circumstances-

Steve Smith Take a risk.

Anita Langley I think I'll take the chance.

Steve Smith It's published in libraries.

Anita Langley Yeah, exactly.

Steve Smith It's available in abstract.

Anita Langley: I'll think I'll just post it and let anybody have a look who wants to get their hands on it, but in the meantime, let me read this addendum

"The author has increasing reservations about the wisdom of publishing this paper. On the one hand, since it describes a rather radical procedure in steady use for some time, it should be brought to the attention of the scientific community, but on the other hand, the misuse of these drugs could be harmful in situations where the stakes are not so high as they seem to be for those incarcerated as criminally insane."

I'd just like to remind our listeners here that it's up to them, I guess, to decide if they think Steve here sounds criminally insane. He has been declared quite sane, and I've had many conversations with him, and he certainly doesn't fall under that category. Frankly, I would wonder about using these techniques on somebody who's criminally insane, let alone somebody who isn't.

Steve Smith What Barker realized is that in indeed what he was doing was dangerous. Why did he think that his hands were the right hands? He does say "in the wrong hands, could be dangerous", but what gives him the idea that his hands were the right hands? After all, it was only an experiment. It was not treatment. It was, in no way, researched treatment, accepted treatment. It was an experiment, and his hands were the wrong hands. The thing is many of the things that Barker published, he really shouldn't have. You can read into it in his own words what his true thoughts were. He understood how dangerous what he was doing was. He knew it at the time. He even said so.

Len Osanic Maybe this agenda came from someone higher up.

Steve Smith Yeah, he's a small potato. He was working for someone. He's a bit of a ... he's a charismatic guy. He's a Timothy Leary sort of guy. He has long flowing white hair, and he's an idealistic ... his feet aren't really firmly connected on the ground. His head's in the clouds. He's a utopian. He sees the world as it should be, not the way it is. Sort of like Hitler did. And he went forward to change it, to make it the way he would like it to be. Barker makes it clear, by most of his publications and by the way he thinks and acts, that he's a utopian.

Now I submit that he was being used by someone. He knew that other people were interested in his research. Other people were funding it, but I think he just felt that he was living in a kind of dream state. He's not one of the big bad guys. He's not one of the real black bag spies in all of this. I think he's just a twisted guy, just like has a lot of problems, has a lot of hang-ups. Maybe some of them sexual.

Keep in mind, he got this position ... This is an interesting thing ... He got this position at Oak Ridge as the assistant director with all of these people he could happily experiment on fresh out of med school. This was his first posting. The director Oak Ridge found a job for his wife, a house for them to live in, a teaching job at the local high school, and then they went on a sabbatical to go traveling around the world to Red China, North Korea, Czechoslovakia, a number of other countries. He lists them to me. Many of them iron-curtained countries. Very hard to get to in 1964, '65 maybe.

His first year ... Then he came back to this posting. That kind of shows that he was chosen right out of med school as the guy that somebody wanted for that position because, I believe, he was suitable, naive enough. He was just the kind of psychiatrist they were looking for that would do this, but today, that makes him a bit of a loose cannon. He talks too much. He published too much. He's too careless, and as Hoffman says, he's crazy. He's nuts. His revelations ... Do you have a copy of Barker's revelations?

Anita Langley Actually, that's a good point. I do have a copy here somewhere. He got a little biblical on you towards the end.

Steve Smith Well, actually it turns out he didn't.

Anita Langley I guess that's the point too. Biblical but not. For anybody who's read the Bible, I'm sure that they wouldn't be able to find this particular verse in there. Let me just see here.

Steve Smith It's maybe the third last page from the end of the communication, so it's right near the end. I think that's too far back. If they're in order, and it's right near the end.

Anita Langley Okay. Just a second.

Steve Smith Right near the end.

Len Osanic Well, if not, we can always post it.

Steve Smith What I can do ... I can just kind of paraphrase and outline what he did. Near the end of our three month email-

Anita Langley Here it is right here.

Steve Smith Conversation, right out of the blue, he came out with this phrase ... Probably I wouldn't read this over the air. You know why? Because if what I've learned about this is true, it's a trigger. It's meant to trigger something. I don't know if I believe in this stuff, but just to be on the careful side, I don't want to risk reading this and actually triggering someone with it because I believe that's how he designed this. What it is is presumably he claims that the other day his trusty Bible fell open on the floor to Revelations Chapter 23-

Anita Langley Of course, there is no Revelations Chapter 23.

Steve Smith There is no Revelations Chapter 23.

Len Osanic Really?

Steve Smith No. It ends in chapter 22.

May be a misprint, we'll give him that, so he claims this, at any rate, so I read the chapter, and it sounds very biblical. It's in the proper language. It's "Lo these 30 years, thou hast-

Anita Langley Until you've read the Bible.

Steve Smith Yeah, it sounds-

Anita Langley And you know that actually those phrases don't fit there.

Steve Smith Yeah, it sounds ... But it sounds biblical to me, when you, yeah, exactly, when you actually go to find chapter 23 and find it doesn't exist and then check through all the rest of revelations and find that it doesn't exist, so I took this to a minister who knew the Bible and asked him about it. His initial reaction was to be really annoyed, like I just committed some crime. He didn't like what he read, and he pointed out to me that this is not Christian in content even. Not only is it nowhere in the Bible, it's not even Christian. This is satanic.

Anita Langley Well, actually people talk about 666, but that's not specifically from the Bible. There is a statement ... One line here I want to read, where he uses that number-

Steve Smith He uses that number.

Anita Langley Yeah. 666 days we talked. Now I'm looking at four verses that he-

Len Osanic He said that?

Anita Langley Yeah.

Steve Smith Yeah. He's very poetic. It took a lot of thinking for someone to write this. Read the poetry. It's wonderful, but don't read it out loud. I don't want to risk ... Because this is bizarre. Look, this thing, this phrase, has bothered me for the last since 1996, for the last five years, this phrase has been on my mind. I can quote it directly, so it's meaningful. I would be careful with-

Anita Langley I understand your concern. There probably aren't too many ex-patients listening to this program, but in any event-

Steve Smith In any event-

Anita Langley We can publish that in words though.

Steve Smith Publish it, and if people want to read it, they can.

Anita Langley Okay.

Steve Smith Suffice to say, it's very bizarre. You'd both agree that this sounds like a quote from the Bible, but it's not. It doesn't exist, so really why on earth would he do something like that. That is so off the wall and yet, it's thought out. It's planned. Carefully planned.

Len Osanic Probably in the business of trying to find Manchurian candidates.

Steve Smith Of course, they were. I have no doubt about it, and anyone who spends the time to go through this story ... I know there's tons of documents, and that's what counts. It's a lot of work, but anyone that cares to put this together front-to-back of which I've made that possible by publishing everything, but you can't select documents. I've spent 10 years on it, so for me, it comes easy. It came a little bit at a time, and I understand when one sees all of this information, it's a daunting task, but when you put it all together beginning to end and correlate who said what to who, who wrote what letters, what documents referred to what, it becomes clearer that Barker was up to creating Manchurian candidates.

He was up to, at the very least, an experience funded by the government in ways of turning aggression towards a government useful purpose.

Anita Langley Actually the term "brainwashing" was carefully avoided as one doctor did indicate. They don't use that term.

Steve Smith Yeah. That was Boyd. He was the director of the place. If you want to know the CIA guy, it was probably him. If there was CIA money in this, or if it was some other black OPS money, not you guys, but the real black ops money behind this stuff, most definitely Boyd would be the guy. He's a secretive guy. He never published much, which is odd. Anyone that got to be the director of Oak Ridge should've published. Doctors publish or perish, but he, very little known about him. I couldn't find anything, except one thing, I believe there may have been contact between him and [Dr. Ewen] Cameron.

Anita Langley Really?

Steve Smith Yeah. There had to be, for one thing, because Cameron would've been the chief or the chairman of the Canadian Psychiatric Association at the time that Boyd was a practicing psychiatrist and appointed to Oak Ridge, so they most certainly had that contact.

Anita Langley Who would've appointed him?

Steve Smith Cameron. Well, he was the chief of the chair of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, so I think an appointment like that would've been government ... I don't know who's involved in that kind of decision, but interesting, at the same time-

Anita Langley But the chances of not knowing each other-

Steve Smith Yeah.

Anita Langley To some degree were pretty slim.

Steve Smith Yeah. Pretty remote.

Anita Langley Okay. That being the case-

Steve Smith Guilt by association-

Anita Langley Yeah.

Steve Smith But then again, I have been a victim of guilt by association.

Anita Langley Yeah, we got to be careful about that. That's true because you can meet somebody, you can talk to them ... That doesn't mean-

Steve Smith Sure.

Anita Langley That you're conspiring with them, but-

Steve Smith But okay, if there was some government funding going on in brainwashing research in Oak Ridge then Boyd probably knew more about it than Barker, but that doesn't absolve Barker from any guilt or responsibility for what he did.

Anita Langley Right.

Steve Smith He should've known.

Anita Langley Of course not. I would suggest that he actually still does know at this point.

Steve Smith I think.

Anita Langley Well, you're going to have your day in court, or they're going to settle out of court to try and keep you from making any more of a publicity statement out of this than you have already. I have to hand it to you. You've taken this a long ways. I understand that your motivation was really just to come to some personal resolution and also concern that Barker wasn't doing this to more people.

Steve Smith Exactly.

Anita Langley Really, you probably would've just dropped this a long time ago if Barker had given you the sign, then people had just acknowledged what happened and let it go, right?

Steve Smith Absolutely. I'm not doing this because I have to. I'm not doing this because... everyone has some traumatic experience in their life, I understand that. Litigation, actually suing people from your past, is a very American kind of thing to do. We don't do that so much in Canada, so I wasn't really strongly motivated towards a lawsuit. It wasn't a question of money and the courts. I would've preferred an administrative look into this where they would deal with their own. I would get to the point, understand what happened to me, and make it clear that they were wrong and that they victimized me. Now it has become litigation. That's really the only way that this thing will ever be resolved is in a court of law, but the bottom line of this is I have already made my case.

I've already proven myself. I already know that it was a mistake. It shouldn't have happened, and everyone that sees the evidence agrees, including the CBC, which is why they did the documentary. They agreed that this was a wrong thing, so I have already redeemed myself. I'm not doing it because I need to for character redemption or for money because I've made my own.

Anita Langley Right, and-

Steve Smith It's not like I'm unsuccessful and need to sue someone to get rich.

Anita Langley For anybody who wonders, despite the fact that Steve was a very severe drug addict when he was dropped back on the street, he was in and out of jail ... This man got his life back together. I have seen where he's set up, and he's got a big, huge beautiful shop, and he's in the plexiglass business, and you've got your own business-

Steve Smith Thank you.

Anita Langley You're doing very well.

Steve Smith I'm not going to give my plexiglass business a plug just here-

Anita Langley No, that's fine-

Steve Smith That's not what I do-

Anita Langley But it does make a point that you really picked your life up and Dr. Hoffman did make a point of saying that it's a credit to your character that after everything you've been through, being in and out of jail and being such a severe drug addict as a result of these experiences, that you actually managed to do something with your life. That says something about you.

Steve Smith That was one of the nicest things that anybody ever said to me. That was resolution. When, in the end of Dr. Hoffman's report, he said, how did he put it, "It's a tribute to my something-or-other to Mr. Smith that he-

Len Osanic Character.

Steve Smith That was resolution. That was the end of it. That's when I said I won. Barker's own contemporary and his superior recognized that what took place here. Now a lot of people have been damaged an awful lot by this sort of thing, but very few of them are around to speak about it simply because they've been so damaged. The only thing I can attribute this to is that it struck me a glancing blow, as I said. Maybe I wasn't in it long enough or maybe I'm just not made of that stuff. They were wrong to begin with. What I think is they just simply picked on the wrong person.

Anita Langley I was just going to say every now and then, you pick on the wrong person, and this is what happen ... Everybody's an individual-

Steve Smith Yeah.

Anita Langley And you can never assume that you're not going to have a fight on your hands if you can pick on a granny who knows martial arts for all you know, right?

Len Osanic ...who knows Kung Fu.

Steve Smith An addendum to all of this is aside from it being my own personal tragedy of which I survived, got my life back together, happily married, business, dog, used to have a sailboat ... All those things, all the trappings of respectability and a decent tax-paying life, in spite of the fact that I've done that, there are other people in my family that have suffered drastically because of it. I have a daughter, now 31 years old, who was born while I was in there. I never met her until she turned 16. She was raised as someone else's child.

I didn't know she existed until 1984, and since then, she's had two children of her own. I have grown grandchildren, which I was fortunate enough to just see last weekend in Toronto. I could hardly believe that this thing has come full circle, but when I talked to my daughter just this weekend in Toronto, she said something ... we went out for dinner, and she said, "Dad, if this had not had happened, maybe I would've grown up with a father or at least knew who my father really was."

Len Osanic Hard to take, yeah.

Steve Smith That's really hard to take.

Anita Langley There is no compensating for that. I realize that this lawsuit is not about money for you, and it's not about personal restitution, but a person does have to wish you good luck just because you deserve to land a knock-out punch here.

Steve Smith Thank you.

Anita Langley Personally, I think you're going to.

Steve Smith Barker deserves what's coming to him. He deserves, at the end of his career, that he thought was an illustrious career and thought ... He honestly believes in himself. He doesn't believe that he's doing anything wrong. He never believes that any of this is wrong, according to his own parameters of belief. It doesn't get into him, but in the end, it will.

Anita Langley He was able to draw parallels between Nazi war experiments and his own writings-

Steve Smith Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Anita Langley And what drew-

Steve Smith He drew the parallels.

Anita Langley In his own words, he did draw those parallels, so somewhere deep down in his brain, he knows-

Steve Smith Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Anita Langley Whether he wants to believe it or not. I have to think, after what I've read, and regardless of what you've told me, after what I read, I have to think he really does know. Whether he wants to own up to it, I don't know, and we'll have to see about that.

Steve Smith He knows this himself that delusion people are impossible to dissuade them from the delusions. You can't. It's fascinating. No matter what you do, they always slip out from under it as slippery as can be. They always have an explanation or an excuse, and Barker doesn't understand that he is delusional about the truth of this. Everyone else that talks about it and looks at it understands it but not him.

Anita Langley Right. Well that said-

Steve Smith He's still in it.

Anita Langley This thing is not finished because you're looking at a court date possibly in spring, it looks like, right?

Steve Smith Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Anita Langley We're going to let people know as things move along what happens there-

Len Osanic We're going to make a link to your website, so people can check out documentation you have. Anita, if you want to add some more on your backup page too as well.

Anita Langley Yeah, actually, well that's basically ... I've been working on that for a couple of months setting up a large website with tons of documentation, and there is another connected website, so we'll link those all in together, and anybody who really wants to investigate this, there's plenty to keep them reading for a long time. Steve, we'd really like to thank you for coming in today. We've gone over time, but there was a lot to talk about here-

Steve Smith Yeah.

Anita Langley And it's good that people actually get to hear this from somebody who's actually been through it. It's nice ... You've got the documents there and everything, but there's a lot more of personal feeling when someone can hear from your own mouth-

Steve Smith Of course.

Anita Langley What you went through-

Steve Smith Yes.

Anita Langley And I'm sitting here looking at a regular, everyday person. He doesn't look like-

Len Osanic You looking at me?

Anita Langley I'm looking at you too, and I don't know.

Len Osanic You looking at me?

Anita Langley Well, anyway, thank you again. This was Black Op Radio, number 21, and we're still on the air.

Announcer You've been listening to Black Op radio, broadcasting weekly from The Fiasco Brothers Recording Studio in Vancouver, Canada. You're listing to The Fiasco Brothers Radio Network.