The first thing Lana Ponting remembers about the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, is the smell - almost medicinal.
“I didn’t like the look of the place. It didn’t look like a hospital to me,” she told the BBC from her home in Manitoba.
That hospital – once the home of a Scottish shipping magnate – would be her home for a month in April 1958, after a judge ordered the then-16-year-old to undergo treatment for “disobedient” behaviour.
It was there that Ms Ponting became one of thousands of people experimented on as part of the CIA’s top-secret research into mind control. Now, she is one of two named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for Canadian victims of the experiments. On Thursday, a judge denied the Royal Victoria Hospital’s appeal, paving the way for the lawsuit to proceed.
Image Description:
The image shows a character wearing a Nazi uniform, a black SS officer’s hat, with a perplexed and concerned facial expression. This is from a scene in the comedy TV series “Look Around You”, where the character humorously questions, “Are we the baddies?” — a reflection on his realization of the moral implications of his actions.