Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

by Tom O'Neill

At first I was inclined to disregard these as the product of my more speculative side—I saw no purpose in linking the behavior of mice in a controlled experiment to the behavior of people in the world at large. But I took another look when I saw that Smith himself had made such a connection. He spoke of his mice as proxies for human beings. His research started with sixteen albino mice. With the assistance of other researchers, he separated these into two groups of eight in “aggregate” settings—small, closely confined communities intended to simulate crowding. Then he injected the mice with amphetamines. Over the next twenty-four hours, they transformed from docile animals into frantic combatants, fighting one another until they died either from injuries, self-inflicted wounds from overgrooming, or simple exhaustion. The violence was unremitting; Smith described “frenzied attacks of unrelenting rage.” Afterward, all that remained in the blood-spattered cages were scattered, dismembered body parts. Simply by confining the animals in close quarters, he’d increased the toxicity of the amphetamines more than four times.