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Background

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a direct product of Kesey's time working the graveyard shift as an orderly at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California.^[3] Not only did he speak to the patients and witness the workings of the institution, he took psychoactive drugs (Peyote and LSD) as part of Project MKULTRA.^[4] From this, he became sympathetic toward the patients.^[5] Kesey claimed he wrote the first three pages of the novel after ingesting eight peyote plants, and that these pages remained almost completely unchanged through all the book's rewrites.^{[citation needed]}