"Dr. Mary's Monkey"

[Jan Klimkowski]

Jan,

You said:

Adele - whilst I respect Hank Albarelli's work, I remain unsure about the Pont St Esprit incident.

This comment triggered something in my memory. Because of my 1963 experiences, I had begun searching for everything and anything about LSD. While going through old magazines
about to be thrown out, I came across THE BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS to which my husband and I had subscribed. I read the Table of Contents in each issue to see if there was anything that I might want to save. In one of the 1962 issues was an article about LSD and how it could be used in wartime as a "humane" weapon to completely incapacitate a city or town without killing anyone or destroying useful property. I saved that issue for the longest time, but after some household moves, I no longer have it. However, I did a Google search just now and found a reference to it. The article is titled "Psycho-Chemicals as Weapons" by Dr. E.James Lieberman in the January 1962 issue of THE BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS. The referring article is about Michael Hollingshead (British), an early experimenter and distributor of LSD to prominent musicians and others. He developed the spider web-spinning test as a bioassay of LSD, which at the time, was used as the only way to detect the presence of LSD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hollingshead

The Pont-St.-Esprit "experiment" had been done some 11 years earlier, in 1951, while Frank Olson was employed by the military and the CIA. The CIA had purchased the bulk of the Sandoz supply, and had enough for the aerosol and other means of distribution for that little town in Provence.

The article in THE BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS mentioned, as I recall, that members oif Congress knew of the military's plans, and probably also knew that a test experiment had been done by the U.S. All this was Top Secret stuff. And our allies, the Brits, also knew and may have helped in that "experiment". In 1951 both countries were getting ready to have a war with the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe.

The atomic clock on the cover of each issue of THE BULLETIN has a minute hand at various times before the 12 o'clock doomsday time. The closest the minute hand of that clock has been, by the way, was during the 1950s. Now, it is again drawing closer, but not quite as close as it was then. See chart of Doomsday Clock fluctuations over the years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

Adele

Adele - that Bulletin of Atomic Scientists material is a great find. Thank you.

Let me be more explicit about the Pont St Esprit incident. I absolutely believe it could have happened as Hank Albarelli describes, but my reservations are at two levels:

i) technical details such as mode of delivery;

ii) purpose of such human experimentation.

For i) see here, my emphasis in bold

On 23 August 2010, UK's BBC Radio 4 broadcast an investigation by journalist Mike Thompson in which residents of the town, Albarelli, and multiple academics, were all interviewed. Thompson's piece covered the victims' experiences, their treatment at the time, the similarities and differences between ergot and LSD, the feasibility of overseas CIA trials, documentary evidence that 'field trials' had been recommended and that Pont Saint Esprit operative Frank Olson had been mentioned in White House documents with instructions to "bury" the information. After becoming aware of Albarelli's investigation, an 87 year old resident volunteered information that she and a local doctor believed that ergot could not have been the cause. Their view was based upon the doctor's fingertip-only contact with the contaminant, which allegedly resulted in three days' difficulty in speaking. Since LSD is destroyed at baking temperatures, Albarelli posited that the LSD may have been added to the bread after baking

As well as means of delivery of the LSD, there is also the question of dose control. How was the individual dose level controlled? The presumed answer is that there was no attempt to control dosage.

For ii), the issue is as follows. Much of the military (eg soldiers) and covert (eg prisoners and children) testing of LSD was on individuals in controlled conditions where their reaction could be closely studied. Ie this was experimentation to determine the psychological and physiological effects of LSD on an individual who was relatively closely monitored.

Unleashing LSD on a village or a subway provides no such opportunity for close monitoring of individual psychological and physiological effects. So, what would be the purpose of a "field trial" on a large human community?

The most plausible answer is to test the impact of LSD as a mass incapacitant. Or, in the framework of the article you cite above:

In one of the 1962 issues was an article about LSD and how it could be used in wartime as a "humane" weapon to completely incapacitate a city or town without killing anyone or destroying useful property.

The use of hallucinogens in subways is another potential example of such a field trial to test the impact of such drugs as a mass incapacitant.

We know that BZ, another hallucinogen, was used in this fashion during the Vietnam War (US military papers) and in the Balkans conflict of the 1990s (NATO papers).

See also my post #27 here.

One further reservation about Pont St Esprit. Typically this type of experimentation would be carried out on "Third World" populations, in Central America, Africa, South-East Asia. Why would American or British intelligence take the risk of conducting such an experiment in the sovereign territory of France, a major European ally?

I would anticipate the President of France being advised that such an experiment by a foreign power amounted to a declaration of war.

I've articulated my reservations for what they're worth. None of them rule out the possibility that Pont St Esprit happened largely as Hank Albarelli describes.