US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

[elfismiles]

Covered in French state media:

http://www.english.rfi.fr/americas/2010 ... e-suggests
Article published the Friday 12 March 2010 - Latest update : Friday 12 March 2010

CIA spiked baguettes with LSD, new evidence suggests

Holy shit! I always wondered what the deeper significance of THIS "Twin Peaks" scene was all about...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXRWQ2-TxA8

Yeah, and of course this should be bigger news but... it seems nothing political ever really grabs the public's attention (or is allowed to).

I'm sure we can all do our part to get this story wider traction:


http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=france+CIA+lsd

[Cordelia]

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's roots, FWIW


Bouvier Family Origins

Pont-Saint-Esprit is famous as the town of origin of Michel Bouvier, a cabinetmaker, who was the ancestor of John Vernou Bouvier III, father of Jacqueline Kennedy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont-Saint-Esprit

[Nordic]

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's roots, FWIW


Bouvier Family Origins

Pont-Saint-Esprit is famous as the town of origin of Michel Bouvier, a cabinetmaker, who was the ancestor of John Vernou Bouvier III, father of Jacqueline Kennedy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont-Saint-Esprit

Okay, that's just weird.

[DeltaDawn]

yeah, agreeing with Nordic.....that's just weird......gives something to think about? huh??

[Cordelia]

I might be repeating something that's already been included on this thread, but I just noticed, on the Wikipedia page, the reference to Frank Olson and his colleagues being in France during the outbreak at Pont St.Esprit:


"In a 2009 book, journalist Hank P. Albarelli Jr alleges (based on official US government documents) that the CIA tested the use of LSD as a war weapon on the population of Pont-Saint-Esprit as part of their MKULTRA program. Albarelli states that Sandoz was covertly producing LSD for the CIA at the time that Sandoz scientists pointed the finger at ergot or mercury.[3]

On Nov. 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a bland, seemingly innocuous 42-year-old government scientist, plunged to his death from room 1018A in New York's Statler Hotel, landing on a Seventh Avenue sidewalk just opposite Penn Station. Olson's ignominious end was written off as an unremarkable suicide of a depressed government bureaucrat who came to New York City seeking psychiatric treatment, so it attracted scant attention at the time. But 22 years later, the Rockefeller Commission report was released, detailing a litany of domestic abuses committed by the CIA. The ugly truth emerged: Olson's death was the result of his having been surreptitiously dosed with LSD days earlier by his colleagues. The shocking disclosure led to President Gerald Ford's apology to Olson's widow and his three children, who accepted a $750,000 civil payment for his wrongful death. But the belated 1975 mea culpa failed to close a tawdry chapter of our nation's past. Instead it generated more interest into a series of wildly implausible "mind control" experiments on an unsuspecting populace over three decades. Much of this plot unfolded here, in New York, according to H.P. Albarelli Jr., author of "A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments." "For me, in countless ways the Olson story is a New York City story," said Albarelli, a former lawyer in the Carter White House, who has written extensively about biological warfare and intelligence matters. "The CIA itself was created and initially composed of wealthy men who came from Wall Street and New York City law firms." Olson was a research scientist assigned to the CIA's Special Operations Division, at Ft. Detrick, Md., who was performing top secret research relating to LSD-25, a powerful new drug whose properties were barely understood. Could psychedelic drugs be used to get enemy combatants to lay down their arms, or work as a truth serum on reluctant prisoners? Albarelli spent more than a decade sifting through more than 100,000 pages of government documents and his most startling chestnut might be his claim that the intelligence community conducted aerosol tests of LSD inside the New York City subway system. "The experiment was pretty shocking — shocking that the CIA and the Army would release LSD like that, among innocent unwitting folks," Albarelli told The Post. A declassified FBI report from the Baltimore field office dated Aug. 25, 1950 provides some tantalizing support for the claim. "The BW [biological weapon] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September 1950, have been indefinitely postponed," states the memo, a copy of which the author provided to The Post. An Olson colleague, Dr. Henry Eigelsbach, confirmed to Albarelli that the LSD subway test did, in fact, occur in November 1950, albeit on a smaller scale than first planned. Little, however, is known about the test — what line, how many people and what happened. The purported experiment occurred nearly a year before a more infamous August 1951 incident in the small town of Pont St. Esprit, in the south of France, when the citizens were hit by a case of mass insanity. Over a two-day period, some 250 residents sought hospital care after hallucinating for no apparent reason. Thirty-two patients were hauled off to mental asylums. Four died. Mercury poisoning or ergot, a fungus of rye bread, was cited as the culprit. But ergot is also one of the central ingredient of LSD. And curiously enough, Olson and his government pals were in France when the craziness erupted."

[Laodicean]

the town of origin of Michel Bouvier, a cabinetmaker, who was the ancestor of John Vernou Bouvier III, father of Jacqueline Kennedy.

[Project Willow]

I'm going to point out a link here to some questioning that I thought was at least worth considering even though I believe that if Albarelli found the evidence that he reports, then these caveats are overridden. Interesting case however, and yes, as others have commented, it's interesting how the controlled US mainstream media has neglected the issue. (Rather perhaps it's interesting to those of you who live in THAT country, unlike some others who basically have always lived in a kind of gulag next-door. What an efficient model, eh? Only horribly oppress selected members of the populace, the rest you just slightly manipulate.)

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/03/11/nonsense_about_lsd.php

...or the non-chemists in the audience, diethylamide isn't a separate compound; it's the name of a chemical group. And LSD isn't some sort of three-component mixture, it's the diethylamide derivative of the parent compound, lysergic acid. (I'd like to hear this guy explain to me what the "S" stands for). Diethylamides have no particular hallucinogenic properties; they're too small and common a chemical group for anything like that. DEET, the insect repellent, is a common one, and there are plenty of others.

In short, neither the author of this new book, nor the people at the Telegraph, nor the supposed scientific "source" of this quote, know anything about chemistry. This is like saying that the secret of TNT is a compound called "Tri". Nonsense.

Update: see the comments section. Not everyone's buying my line of thought here. . .

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

I think Albarelli is misdirecting us regarding the reason for Frank Olson's death.
He'd have us believe that Olson's murder was over this LSD test in France.

While that incident seems to be a real one, especially with a decoy movie to cover it up, I think it is far more likely that Frank Olson's ethical qualms were over biological warfare in North Korea and China during the Korean War.

A couple of journos were pursuing this angle with former DCI Willliam Colby just before Colby was murdered in 1996.

[compared2what?]

I think Albarelli is misdirecting us regarding the reason for Frank Olson's death.
He'd have us believe that Olson's murder was over this LSD test in France.

While that incident seems to be a real one, especially with a decoy movie to cover it up, I think it is far more likely that Frank Olson's ethical qualms were over biological warfare in North Korea and China during the Korean War.

A couple of journos were pursuing this angle with former DCI Willliam Colby just before Colby was murdered in 1996.

Well....I'm not sure that "misdirection" is the right word. Or at least not yet. Because if Albarelli's reporting does end up prompting a full inquiry (ha, I know) confirming that he was disturbed by the incident in France in '51, it could make whatever evidence indicating that by 1953, the use of similarly vile tactics in North Korea was more than he could tolerate just that much more credible, should any such evidence surface.

I mean, in theory, it's totally possible that Albarelli went with what he had in order to shake the rest of the story loose, for all we know.

Except....I really do wish that the media wasn't basically just acting like there's no reason at all to ask any questions about what the hell was going on during the year-and-a-half or so that went by between what they're representing as the last straw (ie -- Point-St. Esprit) and the breaking of the camel's back, as represented by the events immediately leading up to his death (ie -- the retreat, the trip to New York, and all that other stuff that's been a matter of public record since the late '70s.)

Because it does kind of require some kind of explanation, doesn't it? Or....I don't know. Doesn't it? Maybe it's just me.

The other thing that I'm finding a little worrisome -- and this may totally be the media's failure, not Albarelli's -- is the non-explanation wrt to how they managed to carry off that whole aerosol-delivery thing.

I mean it's not like people preserved LSD for sale by putting it on blotter paper for no reason at all. It's not very stable, you have to keep it away from light and moisture. So the mass-LSD-dosage-of-a-village-via-air-(oh-and-also-food-or something)-delivery part of the story has also been striking me as possibly a more problematic thing than the unthinking stenography-style reportage might lead one to think. Plus, just on a common-sense basis, if it was a viable aerial weapon in 1951 in France, why is there no hint of it having ever been used in, say, Vietnam? Or Nicaragua? Or any of the other places you'd logically expect?

Although since my scientific doubts are just based on ancient recollections that are backed up by Wiki, I'll totally defer to anyone who actually knows what he or she is talking about if it turns out that I totally don't. Because I totally well might not. I should hasten to add.

[Penguin]

They did possibly use other stuff as aerosols in the 60s - at least this substance was weaponized and stored as bombs as late as the 1980s afaik:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate

http://www.thewednesdayreport.com/twr/bz.htm
(I dont know about this site, but couldnt find one great article I know Ive read at some time right now)

Most records of military experiments involving BZ are still classified and prolonged attempts to obtain them through the Freedom of Information Act have been unsuccessful (WWW2).A group called American Citizens for Honesty in Government, part of the Church of Scientology, tried to locate former soldiers who were exposed to BZ during Army experiments by placing full-page advertisements in newspapers during the summer of 1979. They found 30 former volunteers who claimed residual after effects including memory gaps, difficulty concentrating, and occasional flashback hallucinations (Marshall 1979).

The Army's involvement with BZ can be traced back to the Chemical Corps's increasing interest in the 1950's in exploring chemical warfare agents which were not lethal, but merely "incapacitating." According to a 1968 Army technical manual, an incapacitating agent is:
"any compound which can interfere with the performance of military duties. In actual usage, however, the term has come to refer primarily to those agents which- (1) Are highly potent and logistically feasible. (2) Produce their effects mainly by altering or disrupting the higher regulatory activity of the central nervous system. (3) Have duration of actions of hours or days, rather than momentary or fleeting action. (4) Do not seriously endanger life except at doses exceeding many fold the effective dose, and produce no permanent injury." (TM 8-285 1968)

With a therapeutic index of approximately 1000 (SIPRI 1973), BZ fit the profile as an ideal chemical incapacitant.

As for the origins of BZ, the late 1950's and early 1960's were characterized by cooperation between civilian drug researchers and Army laboratories. During this time pharmaceutical companies were submitting drugs which had undesirable side effects to the Army's Chemical Corp with regularity:"The most important trend to emerge from the search for new agents over recent years is another example of the ironic twist so common in this field: the aim is to borrow knowledge from the pharmacologists in the hope of converting medically useful drugs into weapons of war. The establishments concerned have expressed interest in compounds which produce heat stroke, fainting, high blood pressure, muscular tremors and nausea- the very side- effects which drug houses spend so long on trying to eliminate. During 1962 about 400 possible drugs a month were supplied to the US Army Chemical Center for further testing (Clarke 1968)."

The patent for the process of making BZ was approved in 1962 and filed under an individual affiliated with the New York based Food Machinery and Chemical Corporation, an innocuously titled company which received multi-million dollar contracts from the Pentagon for designing and manufacturing large quantities of VX nerve gases, as well for conducting studies on growing biological warfare viruses in fertile eggs (Hersh 1968).

While BZ is no longer a part of the US military chemical arsenal, as late as 1986 bombs filled with BZ were stored at the Pine Bluff Arsenal and were still awaiting destruction (Chemical 1986). Surprisingly, BZ is readily available today from many chemical supply companies and can be easily ordered over the Internet (WWW4). An article in a 1979 issue of Science commented on the remarkable ease with which an ordinary citizen could obtain BZ, in this case from the drug company Hoffmann-La Roche (Marshall 1979). Because of its extremely high affinity for the muscarinic cholinergic receptors (Kalant and Roshlau 1990), much more so than atropine or scopolamine, it is often radio-labeled (especially with tritium) and used as neuropharmacological tag in muscarinic receptor binding assays (Liu et al. 1983). A keyword search for quinuclidinyl benzilate on MEDLINE or other scientific journal databases will reveal BZ as the industry standard high affinity ligand for the post-ganglionic muscarinic acetylcholine neurotransmitter receptor research (Iga et al. 1998; Kjome et al. 1998; Ellison et al. 1999; Abi-Gerges et al. 1997; Singh et al. 1994; Lenz et al 1994).

US has also claimed (possibly only for propaganda purposes) that serbs would have used this substance in the Balkan war.

But you are absolutely correct about the delivery method (and the name of the substance! What was it really?) of LSD sounding questionable based on the current reporting.
Which doesn't surprise much - reporters probably are not too well informed in this area.

One could probably overcome many of the difficulties simply by using huge amounts to overcome the breakdown when in contact with air and other substances - and regarding the stated effects the residents must have received quite hefty doses of whatever it was they did get. And it is not all that frail a chemical - it can be stored at room temperature in blotter for at least years and still retain useful potency. Mixing in food is certainly doable - but the dosage would be pretty random in that event.

That also is only a problem if you care about the wellbeing of the targets. If you do not, its all just fine, better too much than too little!
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/dll/knockoutgas2.htm

American officials said yesterday that they suspected the Russian security police who raided a Moscow theater early Saturday might have used an aerosol version of a powerful, fast-acting opiate called Fentanyl to knock out Chechen extremists and prevent them from killing the 750 hostages they were holding.

The gas killed all but one of the 117 hostages in the Russian assault to retake the theater.

The senior administration officials said their suspicions were tentative, because Russian authorities had refused to provide American officials in Moscow with information about the drug used in the assault. Nor has the United States been able to test the gas or take samples from hostages exposed to it, they said.

Edit: As noted below, it does not sound like it was LSD due to the number of deaths attributed solely to ingesting the substance. LSD is not known to kill, even with huge doses. Also, LSDs effects start in under an hour for normal doses, and in 10-30 minutes for very large ones.
Something is wrong there.

[compared2what?]

You're right, could have been another substance, though unless the publicly known dates (interest starts in '51, interest in weaponization starts in '59) are way, way off, probably not BZ.

But more than that, I still do think that Hugh has a point, albeit one that he was approaching from a different perspective than I am. But that's just a technicality. I say, in further support of Hugh's point:

The Korean War started in 1950 and was still ongoing at the time of Olsen's death in '53. Whereas the Point Saint-Esprit thing was (as far as we know) a one-time event in '51. So. If he was on the verge of becoming a whistleblower right before he died in 1953, given the nature of his work, it kind of stands to reason that the cumulative weight of all the pressure that had bee building up since the 1951 incident probably wasn't the only aggravating factor, doesn't it? I'm not saying it wasn't a significant factor. On the contrary. I'd imagine that it was.

Nevertheless, I do doubt that during the one-and-a-half to two-year period in question, everything that Frank Olsen observed and participated in while developing chemical and/or biological weapons for covert indiscriminate use against large numbers of people was absolutely A-okay with him, with the exception of that one troubling incident from some months back at Point Saint-Esprit.

There's stuff yet to be told, imo.

[Penguin]

Yes regarding the other points, and I did not mean to suggest that the substance would have been BZ - that was only an example of later developed aerosol-delivery substance...The Olson angle sure is interesting.

Nevertheless, I do doubt that during the one-and-a-half to two-year period in question, everything that Frank Olsen observed and participated in while developing chemical and/or biological weapons for covert indiscriminate use against large numbers of people was absolutely A-okay with him, with the exception of that one troubling incident from some months back at Point Saint-Esprit.

There's stuff yet to be told, imo.

Yeah.

[Cordelia]

Posted twice somehow.

[Cordelia]

I'm going to point out a link here to some questioning that I thought was at least worth considering even though I believe that if Albarelli found the evidence that he reports, then these caveats are overridden.
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/03/11/nonsense_about_lsd.php

...or the non-chemists in the audience, diethylamide isn't a separate compound; it's the name of a chemical group. And LSD isn't some sort of three-component mixture, it's the diethylamide derivative of the parent compound, lysergic acid. (I'd like to hear this guy explain to me what the "S" stands for). Diethylamides have no particular hallucinogenic properties; they're too small and common a chemical group for anything like that. DEET, the insect repellent, is a common one, and there are plenty of others.

In short, neither the author of this new book, nor the people at the Telegraph, nor the supposed scientific "source" of this quote, know anything about chemistry. This is like saying that the secret of TNT is a compound called "Tri". Nonsense.

Update: see the comments section. Not everyone's buying my line of thought here. . .

Thanks for this. I wondered about Derek Lowe's hostile dismissal of the book as laughable and about his agenda, but since I know nothing about chemistry, who am I to argue? But, he does point to some of the comments as disagreeing with him and I found several of the responses very interesting, including:

"23. James Redford on March 12, 2010 6:26 AM writes...

The mass-poisoning whose symptoms began circa August 16, 1951 in Pont-Saint-Esprit, France most definitely wasn't caused by LSD, let alone anything that was sprayed through the air.

The poisoning was traced back to bread made by local baker Roch Briand. It didn't affect people in the area generally, but only those who had eaten the contaminated bread. So Hank P. Albarelli, Jr.'s claim that the poisoning was due to "a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army's top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland" can be definitely ruled out.

Further, the symptoms of poisoning were incompatible with those of LSD's effects. Symptoms began 6 to 48 hours after eating the contaminated bread. Whereas if it had been LSD, effects would have started to occur at about an hour for normal doses and sooner for massive doses (and sooner still for insufflation via aerosol spraying). Secondly, people haven't died from even massive overdoses of LSD, unlike a number of people who died of convulsions from the mass-poisoning in Pont-Saint-Esprit. There has never been a unambiguous recorded human death from LSD overdose. The therapeutic index for LSD is among the highest known for any pharmacologically active substance. Physiologically speaking, it's extremely safe.

For a description of the symptoms of the Pont-Saint-Esprit victims by the physicians who treated them, see Gabbai, Lisbonne and Pourquier, "Ergot Poisoning at Pont St. Esprit," British Medical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4732, pp. 650-651, available for free on the National Center for Biotechnology Information website.

Concerning U.S. Army scientist Dr. Frank Olson, an investigation in 1994 by a forensic team headed by Prof. James E. Starrs of George Washington University concluded that the overwhelming probability is that Dr. Frank Olson's death was not a suicide but a homicide. Dr. Olson's family have uncovered evidence that he was involved in lethal torture experiments and anthrax experiments under the C.I.A.'s Project ARTICHOKE, which later became Project MKULTRA. Oslon's family believe that he became disillusioned with the military and was planning on quiting, and that the U.S. government murdered him as they considered him a risk regarding potentially revealing details of his work. For more on that, see the below items.

Eric Olson, Ph.D., Stephan Kimbel Olson, Nils Olson, D.D.S., Lauren Olson and Kristin Olson, "Family Statement on the Murder of Frank Olson," Frank Olson Legacy Project, August 8, 2002.

Del Walters, "Army Scientist Killed by CIA?," WJLA-TV (ABC 7 News, Arlington, Virginia), August 8, 2002.

28. Steve Hager on March 12, 2010 12:00 PM writes...

The case for an LSD attack on the town is based on the fact that Frank Olson and other scientists from SOD at Fort Dietrick (who were working on chemical weapons) were in the area at the time of the incident. It is also based on documents that show the CIA had a great interest in covering up the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident after the story of Olson's death began unraveling during the Rockefeller hearings on CIA abuses in the 1970s. Have any of you read the book? Saying this is all based on one document from Sandoz is ridiculous. The fact that Sandoz sent Hoffman to the town immediately to cover up is another piece of evidence. You ask why did they want to dose a town? They were testing the potential of this drug to disable a town, only the experiment went awry, people died, people went insane, and then they had to cover it all up to avoid the lawsuits, which included murdering Frank Olson, the scientist who weaponized the LSD. Next you're going to tell us Olson commited suicide by jumping out of 13-floor hotel room in the middle of the night wearing only his underpants six days after taking 60 micrograms of LSD. Olson was murdered. And he was murdered because he told people about Pont-Saint-Esprit.

33. MTK on March 12, 2010 10:53 PM writes...

#27,

Of course France has a long history of ergotism. That's why the CIA chose that village. It's called a cover story. "



When I first read the RI thread, I wondered how a village in Southern France was chosen--does someone just spin a globe, ala 'Wag The Dog'? But if intelligent criminals are going to commit a crime, surely they look at all the angles, like a country known for its bread and with a history of ergotism.......

Also, about the movie, 'King of Hearts', since it was considered a 'classic' (and I had a crush on Alan Bates), I watched it some years ago but found it so strange and disappointing I didn't finish. In light of the possible intentional poisoning of Pont-Saint-Esprit, I think the theme is especially intriguing, but why would the film be released more than 15 years after the event?

[Project Willow]

I think Albarelli is misdirecting us regarding the reason for Frank Olson's death.
He'd have us believe that Olson's murder was over this LSD test in France.

While that incident seems to be a real one, especially with a decoy movie to cover it up, I think it is far more likely that Frank Olson's ethical qualms were over biological warfare in North Korea and China during the Korean War.

A couple of journos were pursuing this angle with former DCI Willliam Colby just before Colby was murdered in 1996.

from the Olson Legacy Project

He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program called “ARTICHOKE” in the early 1950’s, and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War.

I haven't gotten there yet but I've seen nothing to suggest Albarelli writes against that synopsis in his book. If I remember correctly it was Olson's witnessing of terminal Artichoke experiments in Europe that put him over the line.