What do you think?
Rate this book
Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten: a Personal Story of Medical Testing of Army Volunteers with Incapacitating Chemical Agents During the Cold War
Chemical warfare watchers, from scientists to policy advocates, often wonder what went on at the Army Chemical Center during the 1960's. It was a decade in which thousands of Army enlisted men served as volunteers for the secrets testing of chemical agents. The actual historical record, however, has until now remained disturbingly incomplete. What Chemicals was the Arm studying? Why was the program never fully documented in books available to the public? Who planned and carried out the tests, and what was their purpose? How and by whom, were the volunteers recruited? How adequately were they instructed before giving their informed consent? What long range effects, if any, have been found in follow-up studies? Written by the physician who played a pivotal role in psychoactive drug testing of hundreds of volunteers, the story breaks an official silence that has lasted almost fifty years. Dr. James Ketchum may be the only scientist still equal to the task. His book goes a long way toward revealing the contents of once classified documents that still reside in restricted archives. The author spent most of the decade testing over a dozen potential incapacitating agents including LSD, BZ and marijuana derivatives. His 380-page narrative, loaded with both old and recent photographs, derives from the technical reports, memoranda, films, notes and memories. Written primarily for the general reader but supplemented by a voluminous appendix of graphs and tables for the technically inclined, Dr. Ketchum's book combines a subjective diary with an objective report of the external events that shaped and eventually terminated the program. Informal and autobiographical in style, it includes numerous amusing anecdotes and personality portraits that make it simultaneously intriguing and informative.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
360 pages
First published January 1, 2006
173 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 19, 2022
this was quite the extraordinary bit of literature. definitely required reading for anyone with a bizarre fascination for chemical weapons or even just recreational chemistry.
September 16, 2016
Re-reading this for a pharmacodynamics course.
The American Ken Alibeck reveals his experiences in the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Several myths popularized by iconic kino "Jacob's Ladder" are refuted. Ketchum's rolicking good humor also softens the deadly-serious nature of his experiments, making otherwise dry scientific reporting accessible to laymen. Would be five-star pop-sci, if not for the cheesy and woefully uninspired cover art. Short aesthetic criticism aside, "Almost Forgotten" is a must-have for military buffs and pharmas alike!
The American Ken Alibeck reveals his experiences in the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Several myths popularized by iconic kino "Jacob's Ladder" are refuted. Ketchum's rolicking good humor also softens the deadly-serious nature of his experiments, making otherwise dry scientific reporting accessible to laymen. Would be five-star pop-sci, if not for the cheesy and woefully uninspired cover art. Short aesthetic criticism aside, "Almost Forgotten" is a must-have for military buffs and pharmas alike!
December 18, 2010
Review Written by Bernie Weisz, Historian December 16, 2010 Pembroke Pines, Florda, USA Contact: BernWei1@aol.com
Title of Review: THC, LSD and BZ Chemical Warfare Research:Selecting Volunteer Astronauts Ready to Go Into "Inner:" Rather Than Outer Space" James S. Ketchum's book "Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten" is the first and only account that exists revealing the U.S.Army's research into Chemical Warfare that occurred in one of the most tumultuous settings the United States ever has experienced. It is, however, a taboo topic and Ketchum states with chagrin that when he mentions to people that he is a psychiatrist that worked during the 1960's studying chemical methods for "subduing" normal people, most react politely by changing the subject. Perhaps this reflects the times in which these experiments occurred. Ketchum boldly proclaims the goal of his book is as follows: "Many books and articles have been published about the shady and nefarious activities of the CIA in relation to LSD, supposedly contemporaneously with our own officially approved medical research. I have read several of them and it is distressing how often our clinical research program has been confused with the CIA's covert use of LSD. Some authors do not refer to drugs we studied by their correct names, and attribute properties to them that are quite fanciful. A primary purpose of this book, therefore, is to provide truthful, comprehensive, accurate information about the Edgewood Arsenal medical research program, and what we actually learned from our studies." As a historical reviewer with zero psycho pharmacological foreknowledge, I intuitively understood Ketchum's comment when he wrote: "Medical experts enjoy using pedantic language that underlies their erudition, and I must admit I was not immune to this affliction."
James Ketchum elaborates in this book the colorful story of how Major General Creasy, being neither a doctor nor pharmacologist, sold congress his hypothesis of "War without Death" with chemical incapacitating agents. Ketchum wrote: in 1958, Major General Creasy was invited to engage this august branch of government in a lively session. Captivated and at times even amused by vivid images of a cloud of LSD that could disable well-trained troops without causing them physical harm, senators and congressmen voted unanimously to endorse Creasy's proposal to triple the Chemical corp's budget and proceed with studies of this and similar agents in army volunteers. When asked if he could incapacitate members of congress in a similar manner, Creasy cavalierly quipped that so far he had not considered this necessary!" Ketchum points out that congress made up a set of guidelines to be followed in this research. The entire protocol was followed except for one: to keep the public informed of what they were doing at all times. Ketchum points out that by failing to do this, the Army lost all credibility. Ketchum left the Army in 1971 to go into teaching and private practice, and then blissful retirement, the current status quo. Needless to say, Ketchum strongly expressed his reasons for writing this book. the most pressing was misinformation. So much erroneous information exists that the public holds to be true that Ketchum felt that this book was a way of setting the record straight. An example of these falsehoods was that the Army was in collusion with the CIA. This was totally false. Another distortion of the truth was the public's false conception about "BZ". Supposedly, as the movie "Jacob's Ladder" ridiculously portrayed to show the erroneous "super-potent-hallucinogen" effect of BZ, it was a horrible drug that would cause anyone subjected to it to permanently become insane. Ketchum sets the record straight: Such inaccurate descriptions put an unfair Dr. Strangelovian stamp on Army chemical research. Once again, BZ is not a diabolical potion, hidden in some science fiction pharmacy full of mind-bending substances. Boring as it may sound, BZ is just another deliriant. It is, however, a potent and long lasting deliriant. Half a milligram can render a soldier incapable of functioning in a simulated military environment for 2 to 4 days."
Another reason is because of the "9/11 Disaster". The September 11, 2001 attacks were a series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the U.S. On that morning, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings. Both buildings collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others. The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania after some of its passengers and flight crew attempted to retake control of the plane, which the hijackers had redirected toward Washington, D.C. There were no survivors from any of the flights. This caused increased interest in chemical weapons, as the anthrax attacks occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001, one week after the September 11 attacks. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic U.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others. The ensuing investigation became "one of the largest and most complex in the history of law enforcement." Ketchum felt that many people feared the U.S. would be a victim of future chemical weaponry.
Jim Ketchum does make some conclusions about the future of chemical warfare. According to the author, it is not a very practical form of warfare. It is almost impossible to get concentrated lethal gas on a large area. As an example of the logical impracticality, Ketchum cites the 1995 Japanese Sarin attack. Aum Shinrikyo is a Japanese "new religious movement". The group was founded by Shoko Asahara in 1984. The group gained international notoriety in 1995, when it carried out the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. On the morning of March 20, 1995, Aum members released sarin in a coordinated attack on five trains in the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Some estimates claim as many as 5,000 people were injured by the sarin. In terms of a BZ attack, an antidote, now a standard in emergency rooms for atropine poisoning, i.e. physostigmine, has been developed as a result of Ketchum's research. Jim Ketchum felt that this book was necessary. All the time consuming research he did in the 1960's was relegated to file cabinets in a back room. The Army no longer wants to talk about it. All the laboratory studies that were classified are now declassified, but no one is interested in publicizing it. In the 1960's over 7000 volunteers passed through Edgewood's doors and the public doesn't even know about it anymore. Without this book, it would be in the ashes of forgotten history.
As a final example of this Government imposed veil of silence, Jim Ketchum participated in a study in the 1990's where he assisted a criminologist in Sacramento, California. It was noticed that in the collection of blood samples of drivers caught while driving impaired, 11% had THC in their bloodstream. The Dept. of Justice wanted to know if marijuana was decriminalized, would it compound problems? Forty volunteers were tested on a California Highway Patrol "crash course" under different conditions, e.g. alcohol alone, alcohol and marijuana simultaneously, marijuana alone, etc. Surprisingly, the conclusion was that marijuana alone was not a major problem on America's highways. If anything, it counteracted the effects of alcohol. However, not only did this study fail to get any publicity, it was never published in the open literature and Jim Ketchum's contract ended. Ketchum's conclusion, that marijuana alone is not really dangerous on drivers, is not what the government wanted to hear, so because of that it was thrown into the trash can. Ketchum felt that anything contrary to the government's fight against the drug war and doubling the amount of people in jails is against it's best interests. To Ketchum, that is an industry in itself. If marijuana was legalized, it would take the place of the big drug companies pain killers and anti depressants, therefore it's legalization would cause economic hardship untenable to the interests of America's Fortune 500. There is so much more in this book that is impossible to cover within this review. Regardless, this 360 page history lesson of the 1960's is essential reading to any understanding of Americana. Thankfully, the secrets in this book, thanks to Jim Kechum, will never be forgotten!
Title of Review: THC, LSD and BZ Chemical Warfare Research:Selecting Volunteer Astronauts Ready to Go Into "Inner:" Rather Than Outer Space" James S. Ketchum's book "Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten" is the first and only account that exists revealing the U.S.Army's research into Chemical Warfare that occurred in one of the most tumultuous settings the United States ever has experienced. It is, however, a taboo topic and Ketchum states with chagrin that when he mentions to people that he is a psychiatrist that worked during the 1960's studying chemical methods for "subduing" normal people, most react politely by changing the subject. Perhaps this reflects the times in which these experiments occurred. Ketchum boldly proclaims the goal of his book is as follows: "Many books and articles have been published about the shady and nefarious activities of the CIA in relation to LSD, supposedly contemporaneously with our own officially approved medical research. I have read several of them and it is distressing how often our clinical research program has been confused with the CIA's covert use of LSD. Some authors do not refer to drugs we studied by their correct names, and attribute properties to them that are quite fanciful. A primary purpose of this book, therefore, is to provide truthful, comprehensive, accurate information about the Edgewood Arsenal medical research program, and what we actually learned from our studies." As a historical reviewer with zero psycho pharmacological foreknowledge, I intuitively understood Ketchum's comment when he wrote: "Medical experts enjoy using pedantic language that underlies their erudition, and I must admit I was not immune to this affliction."
James Ketchum elaborates in this book the colorful story of how Major General Creasy, being neither a doctor nor pharmacologist, sold congress his hypothesis of "War without Death" with chemical incapacitating agents. Ketchum wrote: in 1958, Major General Creasy was invited to engage this august branch of government in a lively session. Captivated and at times even amused by vivid images of a cloud of LSD that could disable well-trained troops without causing them physical harm, senators and congressmen voted unanimously to endorse Creasy's proposal to triple the Chemical corp's budget and proceed with studies of this and similar agents in army volunteers. When asked if he could incapacitate members of congress in a similar manner, Creasy cavalierly quipped that so far he had not considered this necessary!" Ketchum points out that congress made up a set of guidelines to be followed in this research. The entire protocol was followed except for one: to keep the public informed of what they were doing at all times. Ketchum points out that by failing to do this, the Army lost all credibility. Ketchum left the Army in 1971 to go into teaching and private practice, and then blissful retirement, the current status quo. Needless to say, Ketchum strongly expressed his reasons for writing this book. the most pressing was misinformation. So much erroneous information exists that the public holds to be true that Ketchum felt that this book was a way of setting the record straight. An example of these falsehoods was that the Army was in collusion with the CIA. This was totally false. Another distortion of the truth was the public's false conception about "BZ". Supposedly, as the movie "Jacob's Ladder" ridiculously portrayed to show the erroneous "super-potent-hallucinogen" effect of BZ, it was a horrible drug that would cause anyone subjected to it to permanently become insane. Ketchum sets the record straight: Such inaccurate descriptions put an unfair Dr. Strangelovian stamp on Army chemical research. Once again, BZ is not a diabolical potion, hidden in some science fiction pharmacy full of mind-bending substances. Boring as it may sound, BZ is just another deliriant. It is, however, a potent and long lasting deliriant. Half a milligram can render a soldier incapable of functioning in a simulated military environment for 2 to 4 days."
Another reason is because of the "9/11 Disaster". The September 11, 2001 attacks were a series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the U.S. On that morning, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings. Both buildings collapsed within two hours, destroying nearby buildings and damaging others. The hijackers crashed a third airliner into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. The fourth plane crashed into a field near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania after some of its passengers and flight crew attempted to retake control of the plane, which the hijackers had redirected toward Washington, D.C. There were no survivors from any of the flights. This caused increased interest in chemical weapons, as the anthrax attacks occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001, one week after the September 11 attacks. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic U.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others. The ensuing investigation became "one of the largest and most complex in the history of law enforcement." Ketchum felt that many people feared the U.S. would be a victim of future chemical weaponry.
Jim Ketchum does make some conclusions about the future of chemical warfare. According to the author, it is not a very practical form of warfare. It is almost impossible to get concentrated lethal gas on a large area. As an example of the logical impracticality, Ketchum cites the 1995 Japanese Sarin attack. Aum Shinrikyo is a Japanese "new religious movement". The group was founded by Shoko Asahara in 1984. The group gained international notoriety in 1995, when it carried out the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. On the morning of March 20, 1995, Aum members released sarin in a coordinated attack on five trains in the Tokyo subway system, killing 12 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Some estimates claim as many as 5,000 people were injured by the sarin. In terms of a BZ attack, an antidote, now a standard in emergency rooms for atropine poisoning, i.e. physostigmine, has been developed as a result of Ketchum's research. Jim Ketchum felt that this book was necessary. All the time consuming research he did in the 1960's was relegated to file cabinets in a back room. The Army no longer wants to talk about it. All the laboratory studies that were classified are now declassified, but no one is interested in publicizing it. In the 1960's over 7000 volunteers passed through Edgewood's doors and the public doesn't even know about it anymore. Without this book, it would be in the ashes of forgotten history.
As a final example of this Government imposed veil of silence, Jim Ketchum participated in a study in the 1990's where he assisted a criminologist in Sacramento, California. It was noticed that in the collection of blood samples of drivers caught while driving impaired, 11% had THC in their bloodstream. The Dept. of Justice wanted to know if marijuana was decriminalized, would it compound problems? Forty volunteers were tested on a California Highway Patrol "crash course" under different conditions, e.g. alcohol alone, alcohol and marijuana simultaneously, marijuana alone, etc. Surprisingly, the conclusion was that marijuana alone was not a major problem on America's highways. If anything, it counteracted the effects of alcohol. However, not only did this study fail to get any publicity, it was never published in the open literature and Jim Ketchum's contract ended. Ketchum's conclusion, that marijuana alone is not really dangerous on drivers, is not what the government wanted to hear, so because of that it was thrown into the trash can. Ketchum felt that anything contrary to the government's fight against the drug war and doubling the amount of people in jails is against it's best interests. To Ketchum, that is an industry in itself. If marijuana was legalized, it would take the place of the big drug companies pain killers and anti depressants, therefore it's legalization would cause economic hardship untenable to the interests of America's Fortune 500. There is so much more in this book that is impossible to cover within this review. Regardless, this 360 page history lesson of the 1960's is essential reading to any understanding of Americana. Thankfully, the secrets in this book, thanks to Jim Kechum, will never be forgotten!
July 30, 2024
Ketchum writes:
Sometime during my second year as Department Chief, another very curious episode occurred. One Monday morning, I entered my office to find a large black steel barrel, resembling an oil drum, parked in the corner of the room. I assumed that there must have been a reason for somebody to put it there and probably not one that I needed to know, so I ignored it for a day or two.
On the second or third day, however, my curiosity overcame my discretion. Having neither asked for nor received any comment or explanation about the black drum, I decided to become Inspector Clouseau. After everyone had gone home, I carefully opened the hasp that held the retaining ring in place around the cover, and peered inside. Neatly labeled, tightly sealed glass canisters, looking like cookie jars, filled the entire drum. I cautiously took one out and examined it. According to the label, it contained approximately three pounds of pure EA 1729 (LSD)!
The next canister had a similar label, indicating about the same amount of EA 1729, expressed to a tenth of a milligram. The remaining canisters, perhaps a dozen or more, looked just like the first two, presumably with similar contents. For a moment, I considered indulging the temptation to remove a very small amount, and save it for some “future experiment.” However, I quickly dismissed this idea as being a good way to get in trouble, and not worth the risk. In addition, I knew it was wrong – another rather important consideration. So I replaced the top, re-fastened the hasp and thereafter dismissed the drum and its contents from my mind.
It was Friday, as I recall, when I came to work and found that the drum had vanished. Thirty or forty pounds of chemically pure LSD had spent a week in my office and had now disappeared with no comment from anyone, no receipt form and no other paper work! Enough LSD to intoxicate several hundred million people (by my estimate) had come and gone. I never received any explanation and never asked for one. I calculated, however, that if sold on the street in individual doses, the contents would have been worth close to a billion dollars!
/////
NPR
welcome to FRESH AIR. Give us a sense of the range of drugs that were tested on soldiers.
RAFFI KHATCHADOURIAN: So prior to World War II, what was of interest were the drugs of the era, and in that case largely mustard gas, which is a blistering agent, it causes burns on the skin. And so what they did was they actually constructed a gas chamber. Basically President Roosevelt appointed a guy named Alfred Richards to spearhead this research, and he went to the secretaries of the Army and the Navy, and he said look, this mustard gas is something, we don't understand how it affects the human skin, and we can only really test it on human beings.
And the secretaries of the Army and Navy were like well, you know, this causes us some discomfort, only if no harm can come, if you can assure us that no harm can come to human beings will we OK it. And he says yes, and they initiate these tests. And it's quite striking. They built this gas chamber in a building. Above it is the officer's club, in the same building. They used materials from a Navy ship. You can imagine a big steel door and a porthole, and they constructed this thing.
It was nine feet by nine feet. And they had soldiers go in there, and mustard gas was released into the gas chamber, and often they would come out with burns, or some of the tests were designed to create burns because that's what they were trying to measure. And, you know, some people were injured.
GROSS: So you write in your article after World War II, when the victors of the war became aware of what the Germans had in their arsenal and the chemicals that they were working on, both the Soviets and the Americans wanted some of that. What did the Americans take from the German chemical warfare program?
KHATCHADOURIAN: These weapons were - these chemicals were astoundingly potent, and both sides in the Cold War rushed to attain them and study them. They were called nerve agents because they basically function by allowing a certain neurotransmitter to overflow throughout the body. And the Americans mainly concentrated on sarin, which was extremely lethal, about 25 times deadlier than cyanide, and they began to try and figure out how to both create a weapon out of this chemical, as well as how to develop antidotes for it. And there again, human volunteers were used in that effort.
GROSS: To me one of the most shocking parts of your story is the extent to which soldiers, American soldiers, were used to test these nerve gases and to test hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and mescaline. What were the soldiers told when they were asked to volunteer for these tests?
KHATCHADOURIAN: Well, they were told, from the many soldiers - or many veterans, I should say, that I was able to contact - the initial recruitment process, which would have occurred off of Edgewood Arsenal, where this testing occurred, at the various sort of Army facilities throughout the country, recruiters would come out there, and they would have a small movie that they would show, and they would give a presentation.
And unfortunately I don't have my hands on one of those movies, and I don't know exactly what was said, but I do know what many of the veterans came away with, an ambiguous sense of what they were asking to volunteer for. It would be presented as medical research, sometimes even chemical warfare research or equipment testing, or human behavioral research.
And so even a number of the volunteers who ended up at Edgewood and did not necessarily have a bad time there recall not being certain exactly about what it was they were going to be participating in once they arrived.
GROSS: And in fact, a lot of those soldiers still don't know, and there's a class action suit that several of those soldiers are bringing, against - against the military?
KHATCHADOURIAN: That's right. Beginning in 2009, several of these veterans, and they call themselves test vets, got together, and they put together a packet of material that they sent to a law firm in San Francisco, Morrison Foerster, and they said, you know, this was our experience, this is what we went through, and we are living with the grave uncertainty that these tests affected us in ways that might have been profound, and we don't really know fully what the outcome of that is on our health.
And that initiated this long lawsuit that's going on to this day.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Raffi Khatchadourian, and in the current edition of the New Yorker, he has a piece called "Operation Delirium" that's about the chemical and hallucinogenic testing that the U.S. military did using soldiers as the subjects. And this was an attempt to find chemicals that could be used in warfare.
I want to talk about some of the experiments that were actually done on soldiers. Like one, you give an example that soldiers were in a wind tunnel and basically had to inhale clouds of gas. What was in the gas?
KHATCHADOURIAN: Well, I think what you're referring to is a chemical that was known as BZ. And BZ causes a powerful dreamlike experience. It causes - it sends the subject into a state of delirium. It's not an experience that is akin to LSD, where you might have insights or where disparate things might somehow be integrated in your own mind in a kind of way that will cause some kind of religious experience or anything like that.
It is - it causes the person to jolt from one reality to the next, and the illusions are extremely vivid. A person is in the moment and not even aware that a drug experience is occurring. Animals might appear, disappear. They might see miniature people. They might think that they're smoking a cigarette, eating a ham sandwich when they have a shoe in their hand.
It's a very powerful experience, and that particular drug, BZ, can last up to three days. Different variants of it can last up to two weeks. So you mentioned the wind tunnel. Soldiers would be asked to stand in a wind tunnel because obviously if you're going to use a gas of this kind, you have to know that it will work in a kind of realistic situation.
And a canister of BZ would be opened up, or a grenade constructed for this purpose would be released. And they would be inhaling the chemical, and they would be tested on their reactions.
GROSS: And what kind of reactions did they have?
KHATCHADOURIAN: Well, it ranged. They would move from experience to experience. So, they could look out the window and see a childhood friend. They could believe that they were riding a horse across the plain. They could look into the bottom of a pitcher and see an entire baseball game played out.
Typically as the drug began to wear off, what you would see is a blending of real and unreal, and at that point paranoia, anxiety and - could be very terrifying, and some of the BZ subjects at that point could become very aggressive.
GROSS: I imagine it was especially terrifying because the Army didn't tell them what to expect. So they might have thought they were truly losing their minds.
KHATCHADOURIAN: They did know that they were part of a test, but yeah, for many of these people it was a very difficult situation. What's interesting is that with the BZ-type delirium and to some extent with delirium in general, there is an amnesia that occurs after the experience. It's almost like waking up from a dream. You remember a fragment here and there, but you don't remember the totality of what happened over the course of the three days.
And some of the men actually came out of that experience somewhat euphoric for a few days. And so they didn't always come out of it, let's say, terrified, but some did. They remembered some fragments of their experience, or they recognized that three days had gone by, and they had no memory of what had happened, and that in itself was anxiety-producing.
GROSS: So with these BZ tests, they had to inhale the gas cloud in a wind tunnel. Did they stay in the wind tunnel? Where were they put after they inhaled the gas?
KHATCHADOURIAN: So after Jim Ketchum arrived, he basically took over the study of BZ and came to lead the psychopharmacology branch. The process changed a little bit. He very aggressively worked to construct padded rooms, where soldiers could be kept so they wouldn't injure themselves.
He arrived in 1961, where those rooms, if they existed, didn't really exist in quite the same way. And what had happened was that a soldier on BZ had kind of fallen back onto a heating pipe, and he burned himself. And Jim said look, we've got to come up with a safer way to do this. And so they constructed these padded cells.
And so whether a soldier was given BZ by injection or by inhalation, he was then taken to the padded cell, where he was kept for the duration of the experience and monitored.
GROSS: So that could be like for three days. I think you could become delirious just being in a padded cell for three days.
(LAUGHTER)
KHATCHADOURIAN: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's an odd place to be, but again many of these soldiers were living in their own heads, so to speak. And so they would look at the floor of the padded cell, and they would see a set of staircases descending down, or they would see other things in there. So I don't know. I haven't taken BZ, so I don't know what the experience was like.
GROSS: So this gas, BZ, that creates delirium, how did the people conducting the experiments evaluate the use of this for combat?
KHATCHADOURIAN: So the initial set of experiments was to measure, in a very narrow sense, incapacitation. BZ was one of many drugs. LSD was also used, mescaline, other drugs. They were never interested in how these drugs affected insight or their sort of broader psychological experience. What they wanted to know is how could a soldier exposed to this type of chemical function.
And they did this by asking them to do math problems, to do other tests of that kind, memorize cards or whatever, but they just wanted to see OK here we can establish a baseline. You can do this set of math problems in this amount of time before the drug, you can do it this set of times afterwards. Or they would have soldiers sometimes draw a picture of a man over the course of the experience, like at every hour or every two hours.
I've seen some of these pictures, and, you know, over time the image degrades to the point where it's just scribble, and then it kind of returns to the image of a man again. So they were trying to find objective measures of performance, and those were some of the ways.
/////
page 44
Systematic testing of BZ began in July 1960. By March 1963, we were ready to submit a summary of 22 different BZ studies, each designed to explore a particular aspect of its pharmacology. More than 300 enlisted men had helped to develop the details of BZ’s remarkable profile.
It took almost three years, and an estimated 100,000 hours of professional effort by physicians, nurses, technicians and volunteers to learn all the things we wanted to know about BZ. There were many questions to answer. What dose must one give to produce incapacitation? For that matter, how should we define incapacitation? How fast did effects develop at various doses, and how long did they take to clear? Was BZ equally effective whether taken by mouth, by vein, by muscle, through the air or on the skin? What was the lowest dose that could cause mild but significant effects – the “minimal effective dose?”
Those were just a few of the questions. There were many more. What would happen if we gave twice the incapacitating dose? Did everyone react the same to a given dose, or were some either extremely sensitive or extremely resistant? To what extent did various doses affect heart rate, blood pressure, respirations, body temperature and pupil size? What were the effects on vision, hearing, strength and neurological functions? If you give the same dose of BZ twice to the same individual (after a suitable interval) would the results be the same? What if you give it several days in a row – would the effects be additive?
One extremely important consideration was whether BZ effects could be reversed. If we did find an antidote, how safe would it be? Would it be practical for a medical technician to use it in the field? Could a soldier treat himself if necessary? Would he then be able assemble a rifle, put on a gas mask, navigate obstacles, read a map, and communicate coherently by radio or telephone?
Finally, what would happen if we gave BZ to a group of soldiers? Could they continue to cooperate with each other or would they each go into their own private world and be useless – even detrimental – to the performance of unaffected men around them? Would some of them become obstreperous, or even dangerous, while incapacitated? There seemed no end to the questions one might ask.
Other considerations were particularly important to military commanders. For example, how high a dose could the average person survive if no treatment were available? How much would weather conditions – particularly heat – affect the likelihood of a fatal outcome? Just how much BZ would a chemical officer in the field need to disseminate to achieve desired effects throughout a given area, and how much variation in dosage would each type of munition produce?
page 47
“...Frequently, time “stands still” for the incapacitated subject, from sometime on the first day until nearly complete recovery, two or three days later. When he “comes to,” he may think it is still the day on which he received the drug, sometimes in the face of external evidence to the contrary. For example, one man commented on the third day of the test: “You know, if I didn’t know it was Friday, I’d swear it was Sunday” (which it was). When asked to explain, he commented that the Post was nearly deserted, “like it would be on Sunday.” ...”
“...With regard to persons in his vicinity, recognition may be accurate for individuals whom he has met prior to testing, such as the doctor or nurse; other people may erroneously be greeted as old friends from his outfit, or even relatives. At times, he may react to large objects possessing a vertical shape as if they were people. One subject tried to provoke a fight with a simulated gun mount; another said “Excuse me, Sir” to the water fountain when he accidentally brushed against it. In more extreme states of confusion, he may even initiate conversations with hallucinated individuals. He conducts these one-sided conversations in such a natural, unstudied manner that acting is out of the question....”
“...Occasionally, he will take vigorous action to deal with imagined emergencies. Subjects may call frantically for medical assistance to treat an illusionary woman who has supposedly just been run over by a car, or shout up at the air-conditioning vent for someone to “throw down a shotgun and some shells” so he can protect himself from the mob he imagines coming toward his room. One subject scrambled halfway over a seven-foot-high partition, fleeing from “a guy with a gun” and the nurse caught him by the heels just before he vanished head first down the other side...”
“...Organized, complex panoramic hallucinations are most common between 24-48 hours after exposure to doses at or above the incapacitating dose. These may be benign or even entertaining – one subject described with great enthusiasm a Lilliputian baseball game being played on the floor in front of him. Later, particularly during the night, the visions may be gigantic and terrifying.
“Still later, in place of elephants and giant snakes, he sees rats, squirrels or spiders and gradually these diminish to become bugs or ants, which he labors to brush from his clothing and bedding. Finally, they disappear or are correctly perceived as pieces of lint, dust, loose threads, raised markings on the floor, nail heads, paint drippings or whatever would have been clearly recognized as inanimate a few hours before...”
“...Another curious disturbance of memory function is perseveration – the tendency to repeat the same response inappropriately. This may take a unique form: the subject initially cannot answer a question and seems unable even to remember what the question was, but when the examiner asks a new question, he replies by correctly answering the first! Simultaneously, he seems not to have heard the second question, nor to realize he has responded inappropriately...”
“...After recovery, amnesia is greatest for the period of greatest incapacitation, with fair recall of the onset stage. Amnesia for early phases of recovery is not total at the time of emergence from delirium, but
Sometime during my second year as Department Chief, another very curious episode occurred. One Monday morning, I entered my office to find a large black steel barrel, resembling an oil drum, parked in the corner of the room. I assumed that there must have been a reason for somebody to put it there and probably not one that I needed to know, so I ignored it for a day or two.
On the second or third day, however, my curiosity overcame my discretion. Having neither asked for nor received any comment or explanation about the black drum, I decided to become Inspector Clouseau. After everyone had gone home, I carefully opened the hasp that held the retaining ring in place around the cover, and peered inside. Neatly labeled, tightly sealed glass canisters, looking like cookie jars, filled the entire drum. I cautiously took one out and examined it. According to the label, it contained approximately three pounds of pure EA 1729 (LSD)!
The next canister had a similar label, indicating about the same amount of EA 1729, expressed to a tenth of a milligram. The remaining canisters, perhaps a dozen or more, looked just like the first two, presumably with similar contents. For a moment, I considered indulging the temptation to remove a very small amount, and save it for some “future experiment.” However, I quickly dismissed this idea as being a good way to get in trouble, and not worth the risk. In addition, I knew it was wrong – another rather important consideration. So I replaced the top, re-fastened the hasp and thereafter dismissed the drum and its contents from my mind.
It was Friday, as I recall, when I came to work and found that the drum had vanished. Thirty or forty pounds of chemically pure LSD had spent a week in my office and had now disappeared with no comment from anyone, no receipt form and no other paper work! Enough LSD to intoxicate several hundred million people (by my estimate) had come and gone. I never received any explanation and never asked for one. I calculated, however, that if sold on the street in individual doses, the contents would have been worth close to a billion dollars!
/////
NPR
welcome to FRESH AIR. Give us a sense of the range of drugs that were tested on soldiers.
RAFFI KHATCHADOURIAN: So prior to World War II, what was of interest were the drugs of the era, and in that case largely mustard gas, which is a blistering agent, it causes burns on the skin. And so what they did was they actually constructed a gas chamber. Basically President Roosevelt appointed a guy named Alfred Richards to spearhead this research, and he went to the secretaries of the Army and the Navy, and he said look, this mustard gas is something, we don't understand how it affects the human skin, and we can only really test it on human beings.
And the secretaries of the Army and Navy were like well, you know, this causes us some discomfort, only if no harm can come, if you can assure us that no harm can come to human beings will we OK it. And he says yes, and they initiate these tests. And it's quite striking. They built this gas chamber in a building. Above it is the officer's club, in the same building. They used materials from a Navy ship. You can imagine a big steel door and a porthole, and they constructed this thing.
It was nine feet by nine feet. And they had soldiers go in there, and mustard gas was released into the gas chamber, and often they would come out with burns, or some of the tests were designed to create burns because that's what they were trying to measure. And, you know, some people were injured.
GROSS: So you write in your article after World War II, when the victors of the war became aware of what the Germans had in their arsenal and the chemicals that they were working on, both the Soviets and the Americans wanted some of that. What did the Americans take from the German chemical warfare program?
KHATCHADOURIAN: These weapons were - these chemicals were astoundingly potent, and both sides in the Cold War rushed to attain them and study them. They were called nerve agents because they basically function by allowing a certain neurotransmitter to overflow throughout the body. And the Americans mainly concentrated on sarin, which was extremely lethal, about 25 times deadlier than cyanide, and they began to try and figure out how to both create a weapon out of this chemical, as well as how to develop antidotes for it. And there again, human volunteers were used in that effort.
GROSS: To me one of the most shocking parts of your story is the extent to which soldiers, American soldiers, were used to test these nerve gases and to test hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and mescaline. What were the soldiers told when they were asked to volunteer for these tests?
KHATCHADOURIAN: Well, they were told, from the many soldiers - or many veterans, I should say, that I was able to contact - the initial recruitment process, which would have occurred off of Edgewood Arsenal, where this testing occurred, at the various sort of Army facilities throughout the country, recruiters would come out there, and they would have a small movie that they would show, and they would give a presentation.
And unfortunately I don't have my hands on one of those movies, and I don't know exactly what was said, but I do know what many of the veterans came away with, an ambiguous sense of what they were asking to volunteer for. It would be presented as medical research, sometimes even chemical warfare research or equipment testing, or human behavioral research.
And so even a number of the volunteers who ended up at Edgewood and did not necessarily have a bad time there recall not being certain exactly about what it was they were going to be participating in once they arrived.
GROSS: And in fact, a lot of those soldiers still don't know, and there's a class action suit that several of those soldiers are bringing, against - against the military?
KHATCHADOURIAN: That's right. Beginning in 2009, several of these veterans, and they call themselves test vets, got together, and they put together a packet of material that they sent to a law firm in San Francisco, Morrison Foerster, and they said, you know, this was our experience, this is what we went through, and we are living with the grave uncertainty that these tests affected us in ways that might have been profound, and we don't really know fully what the outcome of that is on our health.
And that initiated this long lawsuit that's going on to this day.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Raffi Khatchadourian, and in the current edition of the New Yorker, he has a piece called "Operation Delirium" that's about the chemical and hallucinogenic testing that the U.S. military did using soldiers as the subjects. And this was an attempt to find chemicals that could be used in warfare.
I want to talk about some of the experiments that were actually done on soldiers. Like one, you give an example that soldiers were in a wind tunnel and basically had to inhale clouds of gas. What was in the gas?
KHATCHADOURIAN: Well, I think what you're referring to is a chemical that was known as BZ. And BZ causes a powerful dreamlike experience. It causes - it sends the subject into a state of delirium. It's not an experience that is akin to LSD, where you might have insights or where disparate things might somehow be integrated in your own mind in a kind of way that will cause some kind of religious experience or anything like that.
It is - it causes the person to jolt from one reality to the next, and the illusions are extremely vivid. A person is in the moment and not even aware that a drug experience is occurring. Animals might appear, disappear. They might see miniature people. They might think that they're smoking a cigarette, eating a ham sandwich when they have a shoe in their hand.
It's a very powerful experience, and that particular drug, BZ, can last up to three days. Different variants of it can last up to two weeks. So you mentioned the wind tunnel. Soldiers would be asked to stand in a wind tunnel because obviously if you're going to use a gas of this kind, you have to know that it will work in a kind of realistic situation.
And a canister of BZ would be opened up, or a grenade constructed for this purpose would be released. And they would be inhaling the chemical, and they would be tested on their reactions.
GROSS: And what kind of reactions did they have?
KHATCHADOURIAN: Well, it ranged. They would move from experience to experience. So, they could look out the window and see a childhood friend. They could believe that they were riding a horse across the plain. They could look into the bottom of a pitcher and see an entire baseball game played out.
Typically as the drug began to wear off, what you would see is a blending of real and unreal, and at that point paranoia, anxiety and - could be very terrifying, and some of the BZ subjects at that point could become very aggressive.
GROSS: I imagine it was especially terrifying because the Army didn't tell them what to expect. So they might have thought they were truly losing their minds.
KHATCHADOURIAN: They did know that they were part of a test, but yeah, for many of these people it was a very difficult situation. What's interesting is that with the BZ-type delirium and to some extent with delirium in general, there is an amnesia that occurs after the experience. It's almost like waking up from a dream. You remember a fragment here and there, but you don't remember the totality of what happened over the course of the three days.
And some of the men actually came out of that experience somewhat euphoric for a few days. And so they didn't always come out of it, let's say, terrified, but some did. They remembered some fragments of their experience, or they recognized that three days had gone by, and they had no memory of what had happened, and that in itself was anxiety-producing.
GROSS: So with these BZ tests, they had to inhale the gas cloud in a wind tunnel. Did they stay in the wind tunnel? Where were they put after they inhaled the gas?
KHATCHADOURIAN: So after Jim Ketchum arrived, he basically took over the study of BZ and came to lead the psychopharmacology branch. The process changed a little bit. He very aggressively worked to construct padded rooms, where soldiers could be kept so they wouldn't injure themselves.
He arrived in 1961, where those rooms, if they existed, didn't really exist in quite the same way. And what had happened was that a soldier on BZ had kind of fallen back onto a heating pipe, and he burned himself. And Jim said look, we've got to come up with a safer way to do this. And so they constructed these padded cells.
And so whether a soldier was given BZ by injection or by inhalation, he was then taken to the padded cell, where he was kept for the duration of the experience and monitored.
GROSS: So that could be like for three days. I think you could become delirious just being in a padded cell for three days.
(LAUGHTER)
KHATCHADOURIAN: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's an odd place to be, but again many of these soldiers were living in their own heads, so to speak. And so they would look at the floor of the padded cell, and they would see a set of staircases descending down, or they would see other things in there. So I don't know. I haven't taken BZ, so I don't know what the experience was like.
GROSS: So this gas, BZ, that creates delirium, how did the people conducting the experiments evaluate the use of this for combat?
KHATCHADOURIAN: So the initial set of experiments was to measure, in a very narrow sense, incapacitation. BZ was one of many drugs. LSD was also used, mescaline, other drugs. They were never interested in how these drugs affected insight or their sort of broader psychological experience. What they wanted to know is how could a soldier exposed to this type of chemical function.
And they did this by asking them to do math problems, to do other tests of that kind, memorize cards or whatever, but they just wanted to see OK here we can establish a baseline. You can do this set of math problems in this amount of time before the drug, you can do it this set of times afterwards. Or they would have soldiers sometimes draw a picture of a man over the course of the experience, like at every hour or every two hours.
I've seen some of these pictures, and, you know, over time the image degrades to the point where it's just scribble, and then it kind of returns to the image of a man again. So they were trying to find objective measures of performance, and those were some of the ways.
/////
page 44
Systematic testing of BZ began in July 1960. By March 1963, we were ready to submit a summary of 22 different BZ studies, each designed to explore a particular aspect of its pharmacology. More than 300 enlisted men had helped to develop the details of BZ’s remarkable profile.
It took almost three years, and an estimated 100,000 hours of professional effort by physicians, nurses, technicians and volunteers to learn all the things we wanted to know about BZ. There were many questions to answer. What dose must one give to produce incapacitation? For that matter, how should we define incapacitation? How fast did effects develop at various doses, and how long did they take to clear? Was BZ equally effective whether taken by mouth, by vein, by muscle, through the air or on the skin? What was the lowest dose that could cause mild but significant effects – the “minimal effective dose?”
Those were just a few of the questions. There were many more. What would happen if we gave twice the incapacitating dose? Did everyone react the same to a given dose, or were some either extremely sensitive or extremely resistant? To what extent did various doses affect heart rate, blood pressure, respirations, body temperature and pupil size? What were the effects on vision, hearing, strength and neurological functions? If you give the same dose of BZ twice to the same individual (after a suitable interval) would the results be the same? What if you give it several days in a row – would the effects be additive?
One extremely important consideration was whether BZ effects could be reversed. If we did find an antidote, how safe would it be? Would it be practical for a medical technician to use it in the field? Could a soldier treat himself if necessary? Would he then be able assemble a rifle, put on a gas mask, navigate obstacles, read a map, and communicate coherently by radio or telephone?
Finally, what would happen if we gave BZ to a group of soldiers? Could they continue to cooperate with each other or would they each go into their own private world and be useless – even detrimental – to the performance of unaffected men around them? Would some of them become obstreperous, or even dangerous, while incapacitated? There seemed no end to the questions one might ask.
Other considerations were particularly important to military commanders. For example, how high a dose could the average person survive if no treatment were available? How much would weather conditions – particularly heat – affect the likelihood of a fatal outcome? Just how much BZ would a chemical officer in the field need to disseminate to achieve desired effects throughout a given area, and how much variation in dosage would each type of munition produce?
page 47
“...Frequently, time “stands still” for the incapacitated subject, from sometime on the first day until nearly complete recovery, two or three days later. When he “comes to,” he may think it is still the day on which he received the drug, sometimes in the face of external evidence to the contrary. For example, one man commented on the third day of the test: “You know, if I didn’t know it was Friday, I’d swear it was Sunday” (which it was). When asked to explain, he commented that the Post was nearly deserted, “like it would be on Sunday.” ...”
“...With regard to persons in his vicinity, recognition may be accurate for individuals whom he has met prior to testing, such as the doctor or nurse; other people may erroneously be greeted as old friends from his outfit, or even relatives. At times, he may react to large objects possessing a vertical shape as if they were people. One subject tried to provoke a fight with a simulated gun mount; another said “Excuse me, Sir” to the water fountain when he accidentally brushed against it. In more extreme states of confusion, he may even initiate conversations with hallucinated individuals. He conducts these one-sided conversations in such a natural, unstudied manner that acting is out of the question....”
“...Occasionally, he will take vigorous action to deal with imagined emergencies. Subjects may call frantically for medical assistance to treat an illusionary woman who has supposedly just been run over by a car, or shout up at the air-conditioning vent for someone to “throw down a shotgun and some shells” so he can protect himself from the mob he imagines coming toward his room. One subject scrambled halfway over a seven-foot-high partition, fleeing from “a guy with a gun” and the nurse caught him by the heels just before he vanished head first down the other side...”
“...Organized, complex panoramic hallucinations are most common between 24-48 hours after exposure to doses at or above the incapacitating dose. These may be benign or even entertaining – one subject described with great enthusiasm a Lilliputian baseball game being played on the floor in front of him. Later, particularly during the night, the visions may be gigantic and terrifying.
“Still later, in place of elephants and giant snakes, he sees rats, squirrels or spiders and gradually these diminish to become bugs or ants, which he labors to brush from his clothing and bedding. Finally, they disappear or are correctly perceived as pieces of lint, dust, loose threads, raised markings on the floor, nail heads, paint drippings or whatever would have been clearly recognized as inanimate a few hours before...”
“...Another curious disturbance of memory function is perseveration – the tendency to repeat the same response inappropriately. This may take a unique form: the subject initially cannot answer a question and seems unable even to remember what the question was, but when the examiner asks a new question, he replies by correctly answering the first! Simultaneously, he seems not to have heard the second question, nor to realize he has responded inappropriately...”
“...After recovery, amnesia is greatest for the period of greatest incapacitation, with fair recall of the onset stage. Amnesia for early phases of recovery is not total at the time of emergence from delirium, but
July 5, 2024
Rambling and full of personal recollections, this book does succeed at not overstating the value of chemical weapons as well as the many biological and technological factors. This is undoubtedly because the author has true first hand quantitative expertise, and so the rambling is forgiven. It was hard to track down a copy of this book, but it has excellent research value.
December 19, 2018
Chapters, describing the experiments and the effects of chemical agents on volunteers are very interesting to read, but the rest of the book is quite boring.
December 19, 2012
So I picked this book up after reading the very long review of this broader issue of chemical testing in the military written up by the New Yorker earlier this month.
It was mostly new to me but I thought it was something worth knowing about, since it happened just a short drive from DC and took place in the not so distant past.
Essentially, the story is written by one of the researchers, who spent the better part of 20 years working at this military testing ground where US military personel were invited to come and serve as test subjects for a range of medications and chemicals, including most notably LSD and marjuana.
The concept was intended to see how drugs could be used by the armed forces so the volunteers were all active duty military.
The book is pretty straight forward and there is not much attempt made to add any narrative or context. The researcher, James Ketchum, just retells his own story and experience being recruited to work there and what he did while he was there. He is, not surprisingly, a strong defender of the place - which is gone - and the work that went on there.
I learned many new things. Did you know that President Kennedy was a strong believer in this form of warfare and instructed the Pentagon to move ahead with it under the code name: Blue Sky?
Also that soldiers were not guinea pigs and in fact sought out the opportunity to get tested on because it seemed like easy work?
Anyway there are a ton of photos and graphics in the book that are also compelling and I would say it is worth your time to read this if you come across it.
It was mostly new to me but I thought it was something worth knowing about, since it happened just a short drive from DC and took place in the not so distant past.
Essentially, the story is written by one of the researchers, who spent the better part of 20 years working at this military testing ground where US military personel were invited to come and serve as test subjects for a range of medications and chemicals, including most notably LSD and marjuana.
The concept was intended to see how drugs could be used by the armed forces so the volunteers were all active duty military.
The book is pretty straight forward and there is not much attempt made to add any narrative or context. The researcher, James Ketchum, just retells his own story and experience being recruited to work there and what he did while he was there. He is, not surprisingly, a strong defender of the place - which is gone - and the work that went on there.
I learned many new things. Did you know that President Kennedy was a strong believer in this form of warfare and instructed the Pentagon to move ahead with it under the code name: Blue Sky?
Also that soldiers were not guinea pigs and in fact sought out the opportunity to get tested on because it seemed like easy work?
Anyway there are a ton of photos and graphics in the book that are also compelling and I would say it is worth your time to read this if you come across it.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews