Produced by the I-Land, at WBUR Boston.

Heads up, this is part four of Madness from Endless Thread.

If you haven't heard parts one through three, you should definitely go listen to those first.

Okay, here we go.

Previously on Endless Thread.

Cameron didn't seem to have the slightest hesitation about destroying the lives of his subjects.

The CIA was trying to frame this as a LSD testing program.

And what it really was was a much more serious program to manipulate and control human behavior.

And the LSD made her feel like her bones were melting, like she was a squirrel trapped in a cage.

She wanted to get out of her own skin and she couldn't get out of her own skin.

As one of the CIA sources I interviewed said, we couldn't do this kind of experimentation on housewives in Northern Virginia.

I knew that my grandmother was going after the CIA.

I didn't understand exactly what the CIA was, but I knew that they were big and they were government and they were bad and they were American.

In Winnipeg, Val Orlaco spends a lot of time tending her plants.

It's one of the few hobbies she has left.

She used to devour books and write long letters.

Now she can't concentrate on a book for more than a single page and writing a letter is beyond her.

She's on medication.

This is from a 1984 episode of the CBC program, The Fifth Estate.

Val Orlaco, a former patient of Dr. Uyn Cameron's at the Allen Memorial Institute, is making the media rounds in the wake of a disturbing discovery.

How did you feel when you learned that Dr. Cameron's experimentation was financed by the CIA?

Well, I thought, oh, I can't even use the word that I thought because I thought that bastard.

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