PART II
From that point on, he was regarded as a pariah and he spent the rest of his life believing he had committed a serious crime for which he’d never be forgiven. Then Sidney Gottleib — who was the head of the MK-ULTRA program — died. And in his obituary, it mentioned that he was supervising the administration of LSD to unwitting American citizens. [ed: The CIA also dosed unsuspecting attendants at office parties, as documented in Acid Dreams and elsewhere.] And so the light went on in his head at that point, and Wayne realized, or believed, that that’s probably what happened to him. So a case was eventually brought to court, and I was asked to testify on behalf of Wayne. I spent two-and-a-half days on the witness stand, mostly answering questions from CIA lawyers. Ultimately the outcome was not favorable, unfortunately. The judge didn’t feel convinced, and neither did the Appeals court. The judge said, in effect, “If you can explain this man’s criminal behavior with LSD, then I suppose you could blame anyone’s criminal behavior on LSD.” And this really wasn’t very logical and didn’t fit the facts, but that’s how it ended up. It was a rather unhappy ending to an unhappy story.
The Ward
RU: A number of your volunteers in the LSD experiments expressed feelings of having had a profound experience. More frequently than not, they expressed a sort of regret in coming down and having the experience end.
JK: Yes. We were primarily interested in measuring performance on a systematic basis. But, of course, clinically it was pretty hard to ignore the differences in the responses to LSD that we observed. Some individuals would become very frolicsome and laugh a great deal. Some would become depressed and withdrawn; some became paranoid. Seeing the spectrum of responses in otherwise normal young men was quite interesting. One individual in particular, I believe, actually had a therapeutic experience. He was in a group of four, and we held a televised discussion after the test, and he admitted finally under pressure from his buddies that he had had some unacceptable erotic thoughts about the nurses that he was reluctant to reveal. And they told him that was all right, there’s nothing wrong with that. And when he went back to his unit, I heard indirectly that his personality was different. He became more sociable and outgoing. I have to give LSD some of the credit in that case.
RU: Also a frequent response from some of the volunteers was to find the tests just silly and absurd and to just laugh at the things they were asked to do.
JK: Yeah, under LSD, they perceived the absurdity of being asked to solve as many arithmetic problems as they could in three minutes. Sometimes they refused to do it all together. But in other cases they did their best, but couldn’t do as well as they did before the drug. I took it once and I had precisely the same difficulty solving arithmetic problems, but I didn’t have any of the wonderful visions and fantasies. I guess because I was thinking of the psychopharmacology of the LSD going through my raphe nucleus and so forth.
RU: You took 80 micrograms. It’s a little bit shy of a trip.
JK: Yeah. But it was chemically pure, U.S. Army-grade, 99.9 percent…
RU: Got any of that stuff left?
JK: Well, there was 40 pounds left in my office one day in a big black barrel…
RU: Oh yes! Do tell the story of the canister.
JK: I was chief of the department at that point. When I came into work one day, I noticed that there was a big, black, sort of oil barrel-type drum in the corner of the room. And no one said anything, or told me anything about it. So after a couple of days, my curiosity overcame me. After everyone had gone home, I opened it up and pulled out a jar. And I looked and saw that it was about 3.41623 kilograms of LSD. And so were the rest of the jars.
RU: Drop that baby on Iran and see what happens.
JK: But after another couple of days, the barrel was gone! I never heard anything; I never got a receipt for it. The LSD there was probably worth about a billion dollars on the street. And it just stayed there for a few days and went away.
SR: Speaking of getting onto the street, I’ve never heard of BZ, I guess it didn’t penetrate the black market?
RU: That’s really not the sort of thing people tend to want to take.
JK: Well, as I say, it’s similar to atropine or belladonna, which some people have taken for trips, and it’s been used through the ages for ceremonial purposes, for various purposes.
RU: I remember Durk Pearson saying it was interesting.
JK: It lasts about 72 hours in a dose that is just sufficient to incapacitate someone. It can last longer if you take more, but we kept the doses as low as we could. Delirium is not something that anyone particularly wants to go through. It’s more of a shipment than a trip, I would say.
RU: You don’t remember much. It’s probably more fun to watch other people take it.
JK: Right. Not too much intelligent insight emerges under its effects.
RU: Let’s get back to the purpose of this research. What you were hoping for?
JK: I felt I was working on a noble cause because the purpose of this research was to find something that would be an alternative to bombs and bullets. It could also be helpful in reducing civilian casualties, which have increased ever since the Civil War from almost zero percent to the eighty percent now or maybe higher — 90 percent perhaps in Iraq, because you can’t really avoid “collateral damage” if the enemy is going to hide among the civilians. Perhaps it’s a good time to rethink our use of incapacitating agents as a humane alternative.
The Russians did very well with this. When the Chechnyan terrorists took over an auditorium filled with attendees at a Moscow concert and held them captive for three days, the Russians brought in an incapacitating agent. It happened to be a morphine derivative of high potency, and they pumped it in through the ceiling and the floor, waited for a while, and then rushed in. And those terrorists did not detonate the bombs they had strapped to their bodies; they did not fire their weapons; they were all down on the floor unconscious, as was most of the audience. They were able to save about 80% of the audience.
RU: Do you feel that maybe they could’ve used a better incapacitating agent that would’ve allowed them to save everybody or nearly everybody?
JK: No, I don’t think there was anything better they could’ve used. This was a quick-acting drug, which is what it had to be. If they’d used BZ or some drug like that, the effects would have come on too gradually. The terrorists would have had time to figure out what was going on. So this was a knockout effect, and it worked very well. And I credit the Russians for doing this, although they seem to be embarrassed about giving out the details, because in the United States and the rest of the world in general, chemical warfare in any form is a no-no.
RU: It’s illegal internationally, isn’t it?
JK: A number of treaties were drawn up, the last of which was the chemical warfare convention. And it’s now illegal to use any drug that can either cause death or seriously disturbed behavior. And I think it’s unfortunate that we went in and agreed to this treaty because we’re now in a different kind of war from anything we’ve been in previously.
SR: I wonder what effect of LSD would have in either dislodging — or maybe even reinforcing – the beliefs of real serious believers, like fanatical Islamists, for example.
JK: Well, LSD was discarded pretty early on as an incapacitating agent when it was realized that it produced highly unpredictable effects and that people could still retain the ability to fire a rifle or push a button on a bomb-release mechanism. So I’m pretty sure LSD would not be used. It would have to be something in the opiate category, like what was used in Moscow; or perhaps one of the rapid-acting belladonna-like drugs. Incidentally, although BZ was adopted briefly and even packed into munitions, as far as I know, it was never used, despite rumors to the contrary. And later on we found rapid-acting compounds in the same category — short-acting, rapid-acting compounds that would’ve worked much better. But by this time, the whole notion of militarizing incapacitating agents had lost its window of opportunity. That’s one reason that all this research was kind of left in file cabinets.
RU: We’ve talked about psychedelics, and we’ve talked about deliriants. But what about disassociatives like ketamine and PCP? Do those hold any potential in your opinion, and do you know if they were looked into at all?
JK: A little work was done with PCP before my arrival. They had a complication. One individual became psychotic and required hospitalization. And this kind of scared them. In fact, that’s one reason I was asked to go there. So PCP would probably be an unacceptable drug.
SR: That’s not an uncommon reaction to PCP, right? Violence…
JK: It definitely can produce aggressive and resistant behavior that’s very hard to overcome.
RU: The 1970s was a time of great revelation of government crimes, and Edgewood Arsenal and your work got roped into the general attitude in the media towards the establishment, towards the military and so forth. Talk a little bit about how you feel the media misinterpreted your work.
JK: It grew out of the Congressional hearings, the most famous of which was the Kennedy hearings. The CIA was investigated. Congress attempted to find out just what they did with LSD in the early 50s. The CIA had destroyed all their records and the people who were still around claimed they couldn’t remember anything. But as a result of that, the army was asked to look at its work with similar agents. The Inspector General held a very comprehensive review, the National Academy of Sciences was asked to do a review of the work with BZ, and although they produced follow-ups finding no harm, somehow in the public mind, the CIA work and the U.S. Army work became interwoven. I believe that’s an unfortunate thing.
Another mistake was that the media characterized BZ as a super-hallucinogen, which really is not a good way to describe it. It’s a deliriant, basically — pure and simple.
RU: You’ve indicated the effects of some of today’s potential chemical weapons have been exaggerated in the media. You’ve spoken about the potency of VX, for example
JK: That’s right. This is in relation to nerve agents. I wasn’t an expert on that — that work was going on next door. But people have been told that a couple of drops of VX on the floor of Macy’s would wipe out the entire customer population. And things of that nature have been represented in programs like 24. (It’s a great series but…). People have a morbid fear of anything chemical, which has been encouraged by the media. Many inaccuracies have been brought out. As a matter of fact, ironically, nerve agents are a good antidote for drugs like BZ, and vice versa. Atropine’s used to treat nerve agent poisoning, and nerve agents can be used to treat atropine or BZ poisoning. We found this out in the lab. Of course anyone who heard that they were going to be treated with a nerve agent for their atropine or BZ poisoning would probably be very unhappy and nervous. But it works very well!
RU: So tell people how they can get a hold of this book. It’s an independent publication, with a unique design. It’s almost like a coffee table book.
SR: I thought you were going to say, “Tell people how they can get a hold of that black barrel!”
RU: Yeah. Where did you hide that black barrel?
JK: Here.
LINK -
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/01/...mical-warfare/