ACHES - MC

With or without LSD, Dr. Scott had a vision in the 1960's which he described in "The Psychodynamics of the Captive". The vision was a controlled city, which he visualized as "his city" (p. 201, INMATE: The Casebook Revelations of a Canadian Penitentiary Psychiatrist, Optimum Publishing International, Inc., Toronto/Montreal, 1982).

"REWARD CITY would be a total prison complex, involving medium and minimum security systems and including a combined service hospital with medical, surgical and psychiatric facilities. There would be a 3 storey peripheral
building for administrative and civic functions; six 3-storey apartment buildings for inmate occupancy; a food services building strategically placed near the living area; a gymnasium and civic theatre with library; and several large service buildings housing the fire department and
building trade shops. There would also be an indoor rink, swimming pool and bowling alley, so important for the physical retraining of inmates.Included in the civic centre would be a chapel. Nearby would be a courtroom with adjoining legal offices. The whole complex would be organized on an oval-based paved road with an urban transit system of transportation around the area. There would be no motor vehicles. Computer-operated transit cars
would be the fixed transportation facility. I visualized my city not only as a living area but also in terms of providing employment for inmates. I can see federally supported corporations setting up shops in a great circle
surrounding the oval. I can see inmates reporting for a wide variety of jobs each day and getting reasonable wages for their efforts. An impossible dream? Not at all. I have worked out the plans in detail. It's a workable scheme. I have even chosen a possible site. I am convinced that the
Millhaven Institution area could be made to function as "Reward City" with the simple addition of shops, civic buildings and labor facilities of Crown corporations."

The Ottawa Citizen
27 September 1998

He has lost his licence. He is being sued. But Dr. George Scott defends his LSD experiments.
George Scott remembered her as a stylish, aristocratic woman in her early 70s. She said she was a pianist, a graduate of Harvard University. She also happened to be a psychiatric patient at the Ontario Hospital in Brockville.  It was 1936 and Dr. Scott was a 21-year-old University of Toronto medical school intern. His fascination with the human mind was about to lead him on a lifelong journey into the brave new world of psychiatry. The piano player from the Brockville mental hospital was one of his earliest stops on that trip. “She would always say to me ‘graduate of Harvard brother, fire in the furnace brother.’ I took an interest,” Dr. Scott recalls. 
He wanted to help the woman, so he looked into the hospital pharmacy and found a chemical derivative of cannabis, “the technical name for the drug that’s in pot.”  “I thought, ‘I’ll give it to the old lady.’ I got permission. It did help her in a way.” For four hours, the woman regained her ability to play the piano and then reverted to her psychotic state, Dr. Scott recalls. He considered it an experiment that “worked all right.” In the decades to come, George Scott would scale to impressive heights in psychiatry before a dramatic fall in 1995 that would see him stripped of his medical licence.  He would open his own private hospital, he would become a senior staff psychiatrist for the Canadian penitentiary service.  
He has worn many faces: author, professor, researcher, academic, expert witness, television performer. Few in Canada would pronounce so authoritatively on the mind of the criminal as George Scott.  At Kingston Penitentiary, he became a key figure in a controversy that only came to light earlier this year. Dr. Scott, the chief of psychiatric services for the prison, was in charge of research projects that relied on prison inmates as test subjects. He supervised a controversial 1961 LSD study involving inmates, an experiment that has landed him, fellow therapists and the federal government in court fighting a lawsuit filed in Ottawa earlier this summer. 
In 1961, Dorothy Proctor was one of 23 female inmates who received the then-legal hallucinogenic drug as part of a study. She has sued Dr. Scott, his fellow therapists and the government, accusing them of using her as a guinea pig. Dr. Scott and the others have yet to file a statement of defence and the allegations against them are as yet unproven in court.  Six months after the Citizen revealed the LSD experiment, a subsequent investigation by the paper has uncovered more widespread use of Canadian prison inmates as test subjects for scientific research. The investigation found federal prisoners served as subjects in numerous questionable experiments throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, including the testing of unproven pharmaceuticals, sensory deprivation and pain studies.  The experiments were legal and approved by the federal government, which actively encouraged research. 
In the early 1960s, George Scott was on the front lines of research involving inmates in Kingston. In some instances, such as studies on sensory deprivation, he designed the experiments. Since then, his fortunes have declined dramatically. In 1995, Dr. Scott was stripped of his licence to practise medicine after pleading guilty before the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons to having sex with a female patient. In 1997, he was successfully sued for $400,000 by a woman who said he had abused his position of trust as her therapist and manipulated her into a sexual relationship. 
The trial described how Dr. Scott used two highly invasive psychiatric treatments on his victim—electroconvulsive therapy (using electricity to induce brain seizures) and narcoanalysis (a rarely used form of drug-induced hypnosis). The woman testified Dr. Scott administered the narcoanalysis against her will. The 83-year-old Dr. Scott denies to this day ever having had a sexual relationship with the woman, despite the court ruling. He says he hopes to one day get his licence back. 
For the record, he says inmate populations should not be used as scientific guinea pigs. He would never use an inmate in an experiment for the good of science, he stresses.  But he does see himself as an innovator, someone who wasn’t afraid to take risks in the name of science. He’s fond of comparing himself to the Wright Brothers, pointing out the ridicule the two aviation pioneers overcame to build the first airplane. “I don’t break any rules, but I sometimes make my own rules,” he says. “You’ll never get to Spain unless you march to Spain.  You’ll never find improvements unless you try things.” 
A book called Pillsbury’s Textbook of Psychology triggered his fascination with the human mind. He was 14 or 15 when he opened the book and saw several photographs of the same bearded man. Each face bore a different expression—hate, anger, frustration, impatience, sadness -- 36 photos in all. The book belonged to a woman named Christine. She was one of the many Queen’s University students to board at the Scott house while he was growing up. “Everybody is capable of this,” young George realized. “One guy is capable of showing all those different faces. The man who is depressed, the man who was happy and so on and so on and so on ... For some reason it clicked with me.” 
Less than a decade later, he was among the pioneers in clinical psychiatry, an era he calls “the time of exploration. I just arrived when hundreds of psychiatrists and neurologists were just getting ready to explore.”  In 1939, he read his first of many research papers on electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). An Italian researcher noticed that mentally ill epileptics seemed a little more lucid several days after suffering violent seizures.  The Italian began to experiment with different combinations of drugs to see whether he could induce a seizure chemically. Dr. Scott read of his work with interest, discovering how a colleague of the Italian researcher—“ a little bit of an electrical bug”—had experimented with electric shocks on animals.  Eventually, the two Italians worked out the proper voltage to induce fits in humans without killing them. 
In ECT, Dr. Scott saw hope in treating some of the lost causes he took care of during his two-year internship at the Brockville hospital. Though it is the subject of much controversy, ECT is an acceptable form of treatment in rare instances and as a last resort for the most unresponsive and life-threatening cases of depression. In the United States, only two per cent of psychiatric patients ever receive ECT. After the Second World War, Dr. Scott returned to Kingston to open a private practice and take up a teaching position at Queen’s University. In 1957, he opened the Institute of Psychotherapy, a two-story private mental-health hospital that is still in operation, run by his son Duncan, one of eight children from three marriages. 
Eventually, Dr. Scott added narcoanalysis to his therapeutic repertoire.  Narcoanalysis is a treatment that involves drugs such as sodium pentathol and Ritalin. The patient is lulled into a half-awake state. The brain’s defences drop and the drugs act as a sort of truth serum in which “the person could let spill out some of the little things that are challenging them all the time.” Dr. Scott was well established in his practice and well versed in the new therapies by the time officials from Canadian penitentiary service recruited him to Kingston Penitentiary in 1960. He had always been captivated with what lay behind the walls of Canada’s oldest prison. He grew up within sight of the Prison for Women. Some of his friends’ parents were guards. The prison stirred “a deeper part of my soul,” he recalls. It held an aura of mystery “like running into the sun; you can’t quite see what’s there.” 
In the late ‘50s, the government, through the Commissioner of Penitentiaries, encouraged research in Canadian prisons. Government policy-makers wanted to uncover and cure the root causes of criminal behaviour. “This was a new practice for the federal penitentiary system, although such experiments had been taking place at American prisons since the 1910s,” says a 1984 working paper on prison medical services by the Ministry of the Solicitor General. “These projects were sanctioned if they were not seen as unduly                  interfering with the routine of the institution involved.” 
Dr. Scott pursued experiments in sensory deprivation, using inmates as his subjects. According to his 1982 book, INMATE, Dr. Scott sought the answer to one question: “Did complete sensory isolation produce any change in man’s psychology and mental functions?” 
With approval and funding from the federal government, he designed an experiment in which 10 inmates “volunteered to engage in a program of complete sensory deprivation for a period of seven days, during which time they were housed in a dark sound-proof cell with limited movement.” His findings were reported in the Journal of the Canadian Psychiatric Association: “There was significant reduction in basic brain rhythm waves producing clinical changes of passivity and disinterest.” Dr. Scott concluded that the brain wave decline was reversible.  One inmate reported that after four days, his fear grew to panic levels. Another hallucinated during the last two days, seeing the face of his dead brother. 
Dr. Scott says the inmates were told what they were in for. “You told them,
‘You’re going to have a shit of a time, brother.’ “ 
In her recent lawsuit, Ms. Proctor accuses Dr. Scott and other researchers of not explaining the risks of taking a dangerous drug such as LSD. There were no signed consent forms. Corrections Canada, in its report of Ms.  Proctor’s complaint last year, agreed that even if she gave verbal consent (written consent forms did not become commonplace until the 1970s), that would be dubious in a coercive prison setting.  Today, Dr. Scott denies using inmates as guinea pigs. “That’s a lot of nonsense,” he says. “People have to understand the quality and the nature of the thing they are getting into, be safeguarded at all levels.
We’ve never made a mistake in protocol yet.” 

He would never bend the rules, he says, in the name of science, not even a little. “You always live within the parameters you think are safe.” 
Over the years, some have disputed Dr. Scott’s judgment of what is safe.  In August 1969, a Kingston Penitentiary inmate named Robert Renaud accused Dr. Scott of giving him electroshock therapy as punishment. Mr. Renaud was serving a four-year sentence for armed robbery. He complained he received the treatment on Nov. 30, 1968 and that it was against his will.  Mr.  Renaud felt so strongly about this that he went to court to file an application seeking a judge’s order to prevent further treatments. The judge dismissed the case. 
At the hearing, Dr. Scott called the application “so frivolous it was just ridiculous.” He told the court that Mr. Renaud was likely encouraged by another inmate who “had knowledge in the writing of writs” to make the application.  An episode of the CBC television program This Hour Has Seven Days, filmed in August 1965, includes vivid footage of Dr. Scott administering ECT to Kingston inmates. In one scene, a prisoner grips the tail of his shirt as he shakes violently. Attendants then carry him to a nearby bed, where he lies motionless.  “I deal with people in trouble,” Dr. Scott tells the interviewer. “I deal with inmates who come to the institution who, first of all, may be mentally sick. Our laws at the moment allow a mentally ill person to come into prison as a prisoner, not as a mentally ill person.”  
Dr. Scott acknowledges today that ECT was performed on inmates, though not indiscriminately. “We would not do that many. We might do one a week. We did very little electroshock. But it was available when people were sick enough.”
George Ducolon Scott was not the heroic Wright Brother he imagined himself to be. The flaws that contributed to his downfall were a mixture of the banal and the extraordinary. Like many fallen men, his downfall involves allegations of breached trust, bad judgment and inappropriate sexual behaviour.  The young woman who brought Dr. Scott to his knees was deeply troubled. Tammy Campbell survived child sexual abuse, date rape and an eating disorder. In 1984, she found out the man she was dating had reunited with a former girlfriend.  She took an overdose of pills and checked into Cornwall General Hospital. Soon after, she checked into Dr. Scott’s Kingston Institute of Psychotherapy. The Scott-Campbell trial heard how from 1985 to 1991, she was Dr. Scott’s patient and sexual partner. Dr. Scott prescribed birth control pills for her while they were having a sexual relationship.  He gave her regular ECT, which caused memory lapses. He forced her into narcoanalysis—she testified he forced her to sign a consent form—and probed her most vulnerable weaknesses.  As Ontario Court Justice Jean Forget said last year before awarding Ms. Campbell $400,000 in damages: “The defendant Scott has taken advantage of his influence over the plaintiff. The defendant Scott knew of the plaintiff’s highly vulnerable state and because of the inequality of power that existed in the relationship between them, he exploited same.” 
Ms. Campbell’s testimony was corroborated by another woman who testified Dr. Scott initiated a sexual relationship with her in the late 1960s while she was in his care. He also denied any sexual relationship with that woman. Though Dr. Scott made no specific diagnosis, she said he administered narcoanalysis—drug-induced therapy—to her. 
These days, George Scott wears another face, that of retired gentleman farmer. He lives with his third wife, Jacqueline, in a 110-year-old stone heritage home just off a busy highway north of Kingston. He spends his days puttering in a barn and taking care of their two black Arabian stallions. A front sitting-room is lavishly decorated with antique furniture, a piano, about 30 paintings, some originals, including a print of a Salvador Dali work entitled MONUMENT TO THE IDEAL DOCTOR bought on a recent Caribbean holiday.  Dr. Scott graciously answers questions, and cracks the occasional off-colour joke. He says it has been a while since he has had visitors.  Today, Jacqueline is upstairs in bed, recovering from a recent fall.  
“There are so many things over the period of a career that are quite tricky, but some of them are quite innocent,” he says.  He says he’s proud of his successes and the many patients he has helped over the years.  If he is the least bit bitter about his recent decline in fortune, he hides it well. “It hasn’t destroyed me in the slightest. I’ve got no tears at all.” Scott often speaks metaphorically. Whether he talks about some of his more heroic moments—successfully hypnotizing a murder suspect or diffusing a prison hostage taking—or his recent legal troubles, he fond of saying, “It’s just part of the passing parade.” 
“People go by when you stand on the street. And you don’t know anything about them. But they go by. And you look at them. You may see the Lord Mayor of London. You may see somebody weighing 300 pounds. You may see a guy with a beard. Whatever.”  What character does Scott see himself playing in the passing parade? He won’t say. The former therapist has built his career on probing the minds and emotions of others. He has made a career of asking the questions, of trying to interpret the faces around him to see whether or not they conceal something. He turns to his questioner and asks, “Now what are you going to do with this information?” 

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Last Updated June 6, 1999