AlterNet: Synthetic Pot as a Military Weapon? Meet the Man Who Ran the Secret Program

[marmar]

Synthetic Pot as a Military Weapon? Meet the Man Who Ran the Secret Program

By Martin A. Lee, AlterNet. Posted July 19, 2008.

Dr. James Ketchum tested a potent form of synthetic marijuana on soldiers to develop a secret weapon in the '60s. Now he's telling the tale.



It was billed as a panel discussion on "the global shift in human consciousness." A half-dozen speakers had assembled inside the Heebie Jeebie Healers tent at Burning Man, the annual post-hippie celebration in Black Rock, Nev., where 50,000 stalwarts braved intense dust storms and flash floods last August. Among the notables who spoke at the early evening forum was Dr. Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, the Bay Area-based psychochemical genius much beloved among the Burners, who synthesized Ecstasy and 200 other psychoactive drugs and tested each one on himself during his unique, offbeat career.

Sitting on the panel next to Shulgin was an unlikely expositor. Dr. James S. Ketchum, a retired U.S. Army colonel, told the audience, "When Sasha was trying to open minds with chemicals to achieve greater awareness, I was busy trying to subdue people."

Ketchum was referring to his work at Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, in the 1960s, when America's national security strategists were high on the prospect of developing a nonlethal incapacitating agent, a so-called humane weapon, that could knock people out without necessarily killing anyone. Top military officers hyped the notion of "war without death," conjuring visions of aircraft swooping over enemy territory releasing clouds of "madness gas" that would disorient the bad guys and dissolve their will to resist, while U.S. soldiers moved in and took over.

Ketchum was into weapons of mass elation, not weapons of mass destruction. He oversaw a secret research program that tested an array of mind-bending drugs on American GIs, including an exceptionally potent form of synthetic marijuana. (Most of these drugs had no medical names, just numbers supplied by the Army.) "Paradoxical as it may seem," Ketchum asserted, "one can use chemical weapons to spare lives, rather than extinguish them."

Some of the Burners were perplexed. Was this guy cool or creepy? ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/92049/

[druidity33]

1. interesting. K&R. nt

[Yuugal]

2. great read ty nt

[Trillo]

3. I found these paragraphs most interesting

In 1976, Ketchum retired from the Army and embarked upon a new career as a civilian psychiatrist in California. Commissioned by the California Department of Justice, he collaborated on a 1981 study comparing the effects of alcohol and smoked marijuana on driving performance. The results were somewhat surprising. "When combined with alcohol, cannabis produced little additional impairment," he concluded.

"While alcohol had an adverse impact on steering, THC affected a driver's ability to estimate time. But the combination of both drugs did not substantially increase the impairment produced by either one alone. ... In fact, there was an antagonistic effect. Marijuana seemed to offset some of the problems caused by alcohol, and vice versa."
...
Today, Ketchum steadfastly maintains that cannabis and LSD are safe drugs compared to many legal substances. This is what the Edgewood experiments and other studies have shown, he contends. Given his status as a retired army officer who had extensive, hands-on experience testing psychoactive compounds, he speaks with a certain authority that most medical and recreational drug users cannot claim.

With the amount of research apparantly conducted, it's hard to believe that BigPharma doesn't already have many derived substances of use.

[formercia]

4. Big-Pharma did much of the work on these mind-altering weapons.

I can tell you from personal experience that these substances have absolutely no recreational value.

Some of them are being used today to break the will of prisoners, the so-called 'enemy combatants.'

If you think someone can resist torture then you're mistaken. The combination of physical abuse and psychoactive agents will turn anyone into a vegetable in short order.

[Trillo]

5. You seem to believe the excerpted paragraphs are false.

Have any supporting evidence?

Edit: Regarding military uses, that's an interesting, and perhaps believable angle. Marijuana is illegal because the military uses derivatives of it. If true, so much for 'being free'.

[formercia]

6. Personally, I don't think LSD is safe.

If you had any experience with the drug, you would know that everyone reacts differently. Some people experience debilitating and permanent psychoses as a result. I don't think it would pass muster in any legitimate drug testing program.

Having been unknowingly given a heavy dose of some of these psychoactive agents as a prank, I can assure you it was no fun. It to years to overcome the flashbacks.

I would take anything he says with a grain of salt. Any member of the mental health profession that violated his oath as he did should have been banned from the medical profession for life.

I think cannabis is safer than alcohol or tobacco but you can bet that Big Pharma, Big Tobacco and Big Alcohol will be on the ground floor to control the business should it ever be legalized.

Why do people need drugs in the first place? Is your life so fucking miserable that you need a mind-altering substance to escape it?

[Trillo]

7. So you have no evidence.

Oxygen. Why do people need it? Is there life so miserable that they cannot live without it?

Yes, its rhetorical.

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Trillo]

9. Isn't that getting a bit off topic and into personal attack territory?

"I also believe that you are either a fool, charlatan or agent provocateur."

I've found that usually people casting personal aspersions are unknowingly writing about themselves in what is known as 'projection'.

I cannot find anything I've written that deserves such scorn. Oxygen is a drug according to Random House Webster's unabridged V3.0, definition 2(c)&(d):

drug1 (drug), n., v., drugged, drug·ging.
–n.
1. Pharm. a chemical substance used in the treatment, cure, prevention, or diagnosis of disease or used to otherwise enhance physical or mental well-being.
2. (in federal law)
a. any substance recognized in the official pharmacopoeia or formulary of the nation.
b. any substance intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease in humans or other animals.
c. any article, other than food, intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of humans or other animals.
d. any substance intended for use as a component of such a drug, but not a device or a part of a device.

I see that definition (b) also applies to oxygen, so I've edited to include it. Possibly (a) as well. You know, the more I look at the definitions, even definition #1 would seem to include oxygen.

[Uncle Joe]

10. I believe breathing pure oxygen for too long destroys or weakens the lungs.

I remember my grandmother being hooked up to it and the nurses told her that.

[formercia]

12. You're right, Oxygen can be toxic.

Having been in a decompression chamber filled with Oxygen and having the pressure increased to a couple of atmospheres, I can attest that it can be very toxic. It was done as a demonstration to illustrate the dangers of diving with pure oxygen.

[Cobalt-60]

11. Plastic Buds..ewwwww

They'd do better dropping the real thing.
The Cannabis Club can become part of the Military Industrial Complex?

[SteveM]

13. Only the Feds would spin millions to synthesize a weed (nt)