"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.

[Peter Lemkin]

My thinking is that 'they' thought they could hide it as a case of ergotism [which has similar, although milder, symptoms by and large]. I think there was an advantage to doing it in a developed country over and undeveloped one in that there would be doctors, psychiatrists, and other professionals [naive or planted / in-on-it] and infrastructure around with which to report on the effects. Also, better support for those affected adversely. Rye and other grains subject to the growth of ergot are not used as much in most developing nations, but are in Europe in breads, etc.

[Jan Klimkowski]

My thinking is that 'they' thought they could hide it as a case of ergotism [which has similar, although milder, symptoms by and large]. I think there was an advantage to doing it in a developed country over and undeveloped one in that there would be doctors, psychiatrists, and other professionals [naive or planted / in-on-it] around to report on the effects. Also, better support for those affected adversely. Rye and other grains subject to the growth of ergot are not used as much in most developing nations, but ae in Europe in breads, etc.

Peter - I'm sure you've seen reports of covert testing of new drugs in Yankee colonies such as Panama, Costa Rica and Haiti.

See eg my post #6 here.

It would be possible to flood a particular area of, say, Panama with security cleared doctors to run a mass incapicitant experiment on a community. The presence of foreign doctors with clipboards would not be reported.

The presence of a large number of foreign doctors in a small French village such as Pont St Esprit would surely attract attention. Sandoz doctors may have been used as cover, but to do any kind of "meaningful" science, British and American "MK-ULTRA" doctors would need to be in the vicinity in the immediate aftermath.

Also, why not do it in Germany? In 1954, there would have been very little risk of a public outcry - even if the "experiment" was discovered.

[Keith Millea]

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.

My bolding in the quote above:

This does not sound at all like an LSD experience.I must be missing something.........

[Jan Klimkowski]

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.

My bolding in the quote above:

This does not sound at all like an LSD experience.I must be missing something.........

Keith - agreed.

In addition, LSD is an incredibly potent drug at very low levels of dosage.

Below is some street experience as to the effects of dosage, taken from shroomery.org:

20 mics- threshold, and some people see visuals, some dont. I personally do very easily.

30 mics- threshold, same

40 mics- obviously tripping a little bit but again, some people wouldnt see visuals.

60 mics- = The typical low quality blotter. Tripping, but in my opinion nothing like even one gram of shrooms. It makes for a good time though. Lasts longer than a gram of shrooms.

90 mics- This is where it starts getting weird, because it is most certainly more intense for some people than a gram of mushrooms.

110 mics- like a gram and a half of mushrooms. A hit of some really good lsd.

150 mics-For alot of people this is quite amazing and intense. Obvious and interesting for anyone who is not a vegetable.
----------------------------------------------------------------
(incraments I mention will stay the same but the effects of upping it 50 mics becomes more intense than above the line.

200 mics- equal to about an 8th of mushrooms, (or more for some people).

250 mics- scares the living daylights out of some people, yet some people handle it really well, much like an 8th of mushrooms. This is the dose at which I have witnessed someone become very confused. He could "see" but he didnt know where he was(in his best friends driveway). When the comedown started, he was fine, and he became a rockstar. It was one of the best experiences of his life. (thats what I get for tripping with people around for the first time in a long while) Me and one friend had to talk this guy down for about a half hour.

300 mics- your getting into heavy territory. Still not considered by most to be a heavy dose, but thats only because they know where most people including themselves draw the line if they are experienced. Its alot like 250 mics though.

400 mics- most people would never take this much unless they knew the acid they have in their possesion and really wanted to get pretty far out there.
This is why you dont see 200+ mic hits around.

500 mics- pretty much where even some of the most experienced people draw the line. Your vision is almost completely enveloped by fractal patterns, and if you were to stare at some pavement or something, it looks like you can see to the end of eternity. Miles and miles of visual depth.

700 mics- most people who talk of taking a ten strip usually dont have very potent acid(though it is good), so 550 to 700 is where they end up. This is also where "more acid" becomes less important because the effects are very similar to an even higher dose.

1000 mics- Most people will never go there. If you had a "two hits and you are floored" type of lsd, or 100 mics and up hits, this is where a ten strip would put you. You basically cant see anything but visuals, your mind as a whole is infinately connected with its self and your external environment. Amazing things happen on this dose no matter what. It would scare most people shitless. Some people will think they are dieing. Many would end up dialing 911 if they were alone and could read the numbers on the phone.

1500 mics- is almost exactly like 1700 mics. 1700 mics being the most I have ever done. Very few people have used this much lsd.
It is VERY psychologically dangerous for some people to do this. You can no longer really see your own hand in front of your face. Your cognition and vision are both bathed in the same light. Some people forget to breath frequently, and id imagine alot of people would pass out. You will loose your ego, but you will meet many organizers of human cognition in this egoless place. They are much smarter than human beings. "they" *are self conscious neurology.
They are the mathematicians behind consciousness and even the visuals themselves.
A dose 700 mics and above will show anyone some very profound things. Doses like 500 mics and above have changed many lives in both positive and negative ways. Still, it is no more threatening than mushrooms. So dont get me wrong.

Will I ever take 1000+ mics again? Hell no....But I wouldnt give up those ridiculously heavy experiences for anything.

[Keith Millea]

Jan
Okay,so I think you are saying that these people probably took a massive dose.That short description about having trouble speaking for three days,reminds me more of what I read about BZ.

Here's another description chart from shroomery.org:

"This really makes me rethink previous doses. I used to assume a decent one hit of liquid was between 75 and 100 mics.

My experiences have been:

1.One hit of weak liquid: no visuals, some dreaminess, flashy stuff, mild spacial exansion. I had estimated 50-75 mics.

2.One strong hit of liquid: lots of get-up-and-go, mild to medium visuals, unconscious process, archetypes, tracers, really flashy, episodic time, obvious spacial expansion. Estimated 100 mics.

3.Two hits of weak(er) liquid: very visual, but more like one hit compounded further. Like being in a painting and floating above or out of my body. Estimated 150-200 mics.

4.One hit of strong white fluff: Between one strong and two weak hits of liquid. I thought this was 125 mics.

5. 2 hits of white fluff (mini-blotter paper): Extremely intense, really loud, came on in less than 30 min, lasted for almost 15 hours with effects going on for over 24 hours. Massive episodes of time dilation, complete boundary dissolusion, "x-ray" type vision where you see people's bones and skull, fish eye warping, everything melting and morphing to the degree that there is no reference point, thus nothing is a visual because it is total. Everything is in motion. Heavy emotional intensity, repressed emotions, human and prehuman genetic archetypes/symbols, extreme spacial expansion/boundlessness, mushroom like empathy with plants and animals but the scope is far greater. People's features seem caricatured.
Believed this to be 250-300.

6. 1/3 hit of extremely strong fluff (different batch): lasted 7-8 hours, strong stimulant, mild to medium visuals, lots of after-images, medium boundary dissolving. 100-125.

I'm pretty confident that was all real acid because of certain qualities such as spatial depth, flashy motion, boundary dissolving and color spectrum that seem very characteristic of LSD and not other psychedelics.

I wonder if I estimated on the high side. I actually (at the time) could not fathom anything stronger than that two hit. It seemed liked I had transcended biological life, lived an entire lifetime in the trip, and could see a total reality of everything being energy and a dream. I felt I was so far out that there were no objects or reference points. From that perspective it seemed there wasn't any farther to go because I was already in nothingness."

My bolding above:

That's an estimated 250-300 mics.No larger doses needed unless you want to "tempt the hands of fate".:loco:

[Jan Klimkowski]

Jan
Okay,so I think you are saying that these people probably took a massive dose.That short description about having trouble speaking for three days,reminds me more of what I read about BZ.

Keith - what's clear is that the impact of LSD is reliant on many factors, including the dreaded set and setting. However if "MK-ULTRA" goons somehow placed LSD into the environment of a village, such as Pont St Esprit, they would have zero ability to control the dose absorbed by individual villagers.

Now I know that Jolly West allegedly killed an elephant by giving it a lethal dose of LSD, but there are doubts about that story, especiallly since the MK-ULTRA Godfather also administered another classic MK-ULTRA drug, namely Thorazine. See eg here.

The dosage issue is not particularly whether there's a lethal human dose level of LSD, as this is unclear. It's more that some villagers may get no LSD dose at all, whilst others could absorb literally massive amounts if, as per Albarelli's hypothesis, it was distributed via already baked bread.

Some villagers would be tripping off their heads, whilst others would be going about their normal daily lives.

[Keith Millea]

what's clear is that the impact of LSD is reliant on many factors

Yes,says it all.

And I understand your point Jan.If dosing the village was a real scientific experiment,it could never prove anything to be scientific.Maybe someone was just being "A Merry Prankster!"

[Ed Jewett]

[quote=Adele Edisen]
.... 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.


snip


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?


snip

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.

I have selected three comments for purposes of discussion and articulation. I'm not an expert on the topic, the chemical (honest, I never inhaled it), or the incident (alleged), nor Albarelli.

But let me suggest three points:

1) How can anyone be sure there were no previously-placed-and-safely-secured observers? Can we be sure that there wasn't someone put safely and unobtrusively in place to monitor? It is not irrational to think that locals could have been recruited as monitors. See 2C) and 2D) .

2) It seems perfectly reasonable to attempt this "trial delivery" inside France, for several reasons:

A) Locals and/or Allied operatives might have a better chance of squelching any news coverage. I refer you to the book (specifically Essay Six) "A Certain Arrogance" and its notations about the extent and depth of psy-op control of the European press.
B) Locals spoke, at least historically, languages that were not easily or at least widely mastered:
"... Occitan was the language spoken in Languedoc, and Catalan was the language spoken in Roussillon...". [I had the occasion to scout for wines from that region just last night.]
C) The site is not terribly far from the Pyrenees whose Basque peoples and operatives sustained "The Freedom Line" (see the book by that name by Peter Eisner), where certainly Wild Bill Donovan and the OSS were involved.
D) It is also not terribly far from Marseille, home port of a criminal league allied with the Allies, the OSS and the CIA.

If the intent of the use of this psychoactive were to make dysfunctional any local military or gendarmerie or even great masses of the populace, certainly a small handful of observers adept at moving in secrecy in darkened places could observe what needed to be observed. Discreet surveillance is the modus operandi noted repeatedly by Albarelli in his book in terms of the early history of the CIA nee OSS in its clandestine monitoring of post-psychoactive-dosing psychosocial experience in bordellos pre-wired with microphones and cameras and attended/frequented by known agents.

3) Finally, the question is asked as to what the purpose of such human experimentation might have been. I think it erroneous in general, and perhaps in this case, and certainly in reference to the Albarelli book (which I own and have read) to suggest that there need be a purpose of any reasonable merit. The repeated themes in Albarelli's tale were, as also suggested in "Fleshing Out Skull and Bones" (that society that gave us so many key and leading intelligence agency operatives) that the CIA's efforts were driven in great part by a bunch of elite, spoiled/protected "fraternity boys" engaging in whatever pranks they could invent. Indeed, the frontispiece to the book (after the publisher's foreword) is the following quote from a key player in the tale of the book, George Hunter White, who appears frequently (the index cites 71 mentions, including seven multi-page sections):

"Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?"

My own hand-scrawled notation underneath that quote, which names my own personal example from my days (blessedly short-lived) in an elite American prep school, says "giving license to puerile, sophomoric behavior reminiscent of unsupervised, rich, privileged prep school kids like ____".

You can't expect these folks to act and make decisions based on the same logic or values used by others.

[Adele Edisen]

Jan, Peter, Keith, Ed,

I miss a day of reading Forum and this one subject exploded with posts!

The Pont-St.-Esprit "experiment" was never intended to be scientific, but merely to see if crazy people could resist an invasdion of their little town. There may have been 'observers' planted, but most of the results were tabulated from witness reports, weren't they?

Ed, in quoting Albarelli on the types of minds that cooked up these ideas and carried them out, it demonstrates that the CIA and their ilk had no knowledge or understanding of what they were doing. Remember the CIA plan to project a huge holographic image of Jesus Christ on the horizon so the Cubans, most being religious, might think Jesus was coming to earth and to them? Or, filling a radio broadcast studio with LSD aerosol when Fidel Castro would deliver one of his hours-long speeches to the Cuban people, so that he would appear crazy and silly? They did not know or have any idea of how good Castro's intelligence and security people were. How many times did they try to kill Castro and didn't succeed once? JFK should have had that kind of protection.

It's important to know that ergot, produced by a fungus which lives on grain grasses, such as rye, does not contain LSD. LSD-25 was synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938 from ergotamine. He was creating compounds for medical use and this was the 25th one he had made. The chemical name of LSD is Lysergic acid diethylamide. Not much was done with it until 1943. LSD can be decomposed by high heat, as in baking bread, but ergot is not. In the Middle Ages, ergot toxicity affected people in towns and villages because the rye or other flour was tainted with ergot. The last such event occurred in Russia in 1926-1927.

I think bread loaves in Pont-St-Esprit may have been deliberately baked with ergot, or sptinkled with LSD to give the impression to the town's people that they had suffered from ergot poisoning and nothing more. The symptoms of ergot poisoning, as Peter noted, generally are less severe than those of LSD.

The human lethal dose has been estimated to be in the range of 200 micrograms per kilogram of body weight to 1 milligram per kilogram of body weight. A milligram is one-thousandth of a gram; a microgram is one-millionth of a gram. A gram is the weight of I milliliter of water (or 1 cubic centimetetr of water, ml. = cc.). A kilogram is 2.2 pounds of weight.

Tusko received 297 milligrams total of LSD, and weighed 3000 kilograms, or 9 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. I believe this animal was to be euthanized because of age and illnesses, but it also received a barbiturate and a tranquilizer, which may have also compromised its breathing mechanism. By estimates of human lethal doses, 9 milligrams per kilogram was an exceptionally high lethal dose.

Thank you for sharing your experiences with LSD. Did you know that in animal studies with radioactive LSD, exceptionally small amounts were found in the brain, mostly in the
occipital cortex which is where visual images are perceived? Greater concentrations of LSD were in the liver, kidneys, and urine, the main excretion route.

Adele