Gerald D. Klee Dies At 86

Gerald D. Klee, a retired psychiatrist and medical educator who made public the secret LSD experiments involving American servicemen in the late 1950s, has died. He was 86.

Klee died Sunday of complications after surgery at the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Md., his family said.

In 1975 Klee confirmed reports of secret research in the effects of LSD on U.S. military personnel. The experiments, conducted between 1956 and 1959, stemmed from a contract between the U.S. Army and the University of Maryland Medical School’s Psychiatric Institute for physiological and psychological tests on soldiers. Hundreds of soldiers were given LSD, usually slipped into cocktails at a party in the soldiers’ honor.

“The university’s role was to conduct scientific experimentation,” Klee told the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1975. The test subjects “were mostly enlisted men – there were a few commissioned officers – but they were mostly unlettered and rather naive. … They were told it was very important to national security.”

Klee himself tried LSD prior to the Army experiments. “I felt obliged to take it for experimental reasons and also because I didn’t think it would be fair to administer a drug to someone else that I hadn’t taken myself,” he said in his interview with the Evening Sun.

Klee later led an unsuccessful effort to get President Nixon to renounce the use of LSD as a chemical weapon.

Klee died of complications from surgery at the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson.