"Dr. Mary's Monkey"

[Adele Edisen]

Peter - I've been rereading sections of Acid Dreams as well.

The known record strongly suggests that the early LSD experiments were on subjects who could be monitored closely, and that LSD was being investigated as a truth serum. This is what is meant by the phrase "a more reliable speech-inducing substance" in the excerpt you include.

As per my posts above, the early LSD experiments were not designed to identify an incapacitant.

Interrogation of, to use Gordon Thomas's phrase, "expendable SS" POWs fits within the framework of human experimentation without ethical constraint. However, this was still science, albeit from the same stable as Strughold's terminal altitude and hypothermia experiments.

It was science without ethical constraint.

If Pont St Esprit was a Bluebird or Artichoke experiment, then it was not science in any sense.

It was simply an act of total recklessness, with no realistic prospect of any scientific knowledge being learnt.

Jan,

I agree with you. It was not an ethical or moral or humanitarian use of knowledge at Pont-St.-Esprit.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1...ond+Within

It would have been known quite early in investigations on LSD that when given the drug, recipients would sit quietly without moving very much because they would be "watching" the movie in their minds, the visual images being created and flying thoughts. So, they were incapacitated in most cases because their attention would be distracted by LSD effects.

And, yes, LSD could have been used as a "truth serum" because it makes the recipient very suggestible to hypnotically presented statements. So a criminal could confess to a crime very easily.

Click on URL above, in reference to a book by Sidney Cohen, THE BEYOND WITHIN, 268 pages, Antheneum Press, 1965. Cohen discusses the use of LSD in hypnotic suggestions.
There were reports in the medical literature of the use of LSD as a hypnotic agent before 1960, but very little had been revealed publicly in the earlier years..

We all know of the work done by a hypnotist at Harvard (?) who succeeded in unlocking the memory of Sirhan Sirhan, alleged RFK assassin, whose memory of events in 1968 had apparently been blocked by a hypnotist who substituted a memory of being at target practice instead of where he really was, in the Hotel Ambassador kitchen. Although many hypnotists had tried, Sirhan Sirhan had remembered nothing of being in the kitchen at the time RFK was killed, nor of being at target practice. Was LSD, or something similar, used on Sirhan Sirhan in 2011 to reveal his thoughts at the time RFK was killed, 43 years later? I have not seen anything on this matter.

Adele