"Dr. Mary's Monkey"

[Peter Lemkin]

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.

Ir it was done [Pont St. Esprit] by the CIA or one of its proprietaries it was likely under Bluebird [or one of the first of Artichoke]. You are correct that much of this 'science' was done unethically. Reading what you said above reminded me that once when I was researching some scientific literature I found a debate in that literature whether it was ethical to publish the work the Nazi 'scientists and doctors' did on concentration camp victims. In fact, most of it has made its way into the current literature [often not by the original 'experimenter' - although at times by them, especially when rehabilitated through Paperclip and similar], as it is considered so important scientifically/medically - this despite the ethics involved [actually the total lack of ethics!] While the Nazi's systematic torture and brutality and working to death has little equal in modern times [the Japanese before and during WWII did a good job of second place on a smaller scale - as did Stalin in his Gulag], the Americans and the Western Powers were capable and there is documated evidence they also engaged in unethical experimentation - as I'm sure you can cite as well as I - before, during and after WW2. They felt they had a 'get out of jail and ethical responsibility-free card' and they used it. Pont St. Esprit could have been one such time. That they were [according to Acid Dreams - a great book, but not the last word] looking for a truth-serum at the time doesn't rule out that they were looking for incapacitants [which have a history back to before WWI] or what the effect of their truth-serum could/would be on an unwitting population in a real-life setting. Sadly, one can get knowledge, scientific and medical and military from unethical experiments in the lab, hospital, detention or death camp, and in real-life settings. As mentioned above much of the Nazi experimentation is still used - though it has been 'laundered' so to speak. Personally, I think it is unethical to publish such results - as unethical as the original 'experiments', but I'm obviously in a minority in the scientific world - or part of an unempowered majority. Behind the shield of 'national security' all kinds of horrors have been and continue to be perpetrated. On Pont St. Esprit, the definitive answers likely lie still in the denied vaults of the intelligence services of the CIA and perhaps the French intelligence services. It doesn't seem like ergotism to me, so what does that leave?!