US veterans have sued CIA on charges of drug and mind control experiments, urging Washington to contact all the subjects of the testing.

One of the plaintiffs explained how a few days after getting out of army boot camp he was enticed by notices calling for volunteers to test uniforms and equipment, the Guardian reported Monday.

But instead he found himself in a CIA-funded drug testing and mind-control program, according to a lawsuit that six veterans filed last week in a federal court in San Francisco against the Pentagon and the CIA.

The 60-year-old Frank Rochelle and five other veterans insist that the government needs to contact all the subjects of the experiments and provide them with proper healthcare.

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The testing, which has been the subject of congressional hearings, promoted the US department of veterans affairs to release a pamphlet in 2003, saying nearly 7,000 soldiers had been involved in the program -- codenamed MKUltra.

According to the lawsuit, some 250 chemicals, ranging from hallucinogens such as LSD and PCP to biological and chemical agents had been used on the subjects during the experiments between 1950 and 1975 at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.

Some of the volunteers, according to the complaint, have received implants containing electrical devices that may control their behavior.

The veterans maintain they were assured that the experiments were harmless and that their health would be carefully monitored, not just during the tests but afterward, too.

Despite their promise, the doctors conducting the experiments could not have known whether the drugs were safe because safety was one of the issues to be examined, Rochelle said.

He recalled being administered an aerosol which kept him drugged for two and a half days with hallucinations.

Rochelle said those who just tested equipment were mistreated. "Their idea of testing a gas mask was to give you a faulty one and put you in a gas chamber," he said. "It was just diabolical."

Now rated 60 percent disabled by the veterans affairs department, Rochelle says he has breathing problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, sleeping difficulties and poor short-term memory.