French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment

[rubensni]

Reading the rest of the thread I tend to agree with Catalpa. The blame at the time was put on ergot, a naturally-occuring mould that grows on damp cereals. Seemingly it makes for things very like acid trips but very, very extreme and more or less invariably very, very bad. After which, very often, you die. Which is what happened in the French incident.

That doesn't sound like acid to me, unless it had at least been messed around with pretty severely. Sounds more like angel dust (PCP) or something.

I think you're on to something all right. This is from the France 24 website today:

Steven Kaplan, a US historian specialising in French food history and the author of the 2008 book “Le pain maudit” told FRANCE 24: “I have numerous objections to this paltry evidence against the CIA. First of all, it's clinically incoherent: LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople.”

Furthermore, Kaplan deems the whole notion “harebrained”. “It is absurd, this idea of transmitting a very toxic drug by putting it in bread," he said. "As for pulverising it [for ingestion through the air], that technology was not even possible at that time. Most compellingly, why would they choose the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half-destroyed by the US Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War. It makes no sense.”
France24 - Did the CIA poison a French town with LSD?

Jean-Pierre Colombet, the deputy mayor of the town yesterday interviewed for France Soir (my poor translation, I did pass French so if anyone can do a better one I'd be grateful):

"A year before, in the summer of 1951 our local newspaper ran an article about the bad quality of flour used in the Gard region. The LSD research theory is interesting, but I do not believe it. The village was really dirty, people suffered...in this case they became ill."
Pont-Saint-Esprit a-t-il servi d'expérience à la CIA ? | Actualités au quotidien France-Soir

Sounds like someone's trying to sell a book.

[Almanac]

I think you're on to something all right. This is from the France 24 website today:

Jean-Pierre Colombet, the deputy mayor of the town yesterday interviewed for France Soir (my poor translation, I did pass French so if anyone can do a better one I'd be grateful):

Sounds like someone's trying to sell a book.

Of course, there's no possibility that the CIA would have tried to cover their tracks by making it look like a case of ergot poisoning. The food historian- whose qualifications for commenting escape me- simply dismisses the evidence linking the scientists who came up with the explanation to the very lab which was covertly supplying the CIA with LSD. Not to mention the transcripts recording the conversations referring to diethlyamide. And what evidence does he have that pulverising LSD was not possible? Poison gas was successfully used back as far as WWI.

[Mitsui2]

@ Almanac -

I agree with your smiley, Almanac, but as odie points out

Originally posted by odie1kanobe
Elements of doubt in this as they had enough of their own country to experiment on and they did do that.

Still, the effects of ergot are not the same as those of LSD. I've been refreshing my memory of the Pont-Saint-Esprit case online, and it certainly sounds like classic ergotism. In the book I mentioned in a post above (Fuller's The Day of St Anthony's Fire) the author describes how a subsequent enquiry followed the trail of the wheat used in the bread which seems certain to have been the source of the outbreak (of whatever it may have been) and established that said wheat had undergone classic conditions for ergot manifestation... conditions very unusual for the mid-20th century.

All I can say is that if it was acid, then it was very messed-up acid. Which is of course not beyond the bounds of possibility - especially if the CIA was involved. But why they'd have bothered going to France to conduct such an experiment is a knottier problem.

[rubensni]

Of course, there's no possibility that the CIA would have tried to cover their tracks by making it look like a case of ergot poisoning. The food historian- whose qualifications for commenting escape me- simply dismisses the evidence linking the scientists who came up with the explanation to the very lab which was covertly supplying the CIA with LSD. Not to mention the transcripts recording the conversations referring to diethlyamide. And what evidence does he have that pulverising LSD was not possible? Poison gas was successfully used back as far as WWI.

Occam's razor Almanac. No one here is saying the CIA didn't do experiments with LSD on civilians, but this case doesn't sound like one.

Here's my biggest problem with the CIA LSD theory behind the Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning: The year the incident happened in was 1951

The CIA only seriously got their own brainwashing programme going in the mid-50s.
In the early days of the programme they experimented on volunteers, then guinea pigs (Frank Olson who died in 1953 being a good example). They started using the drug on the unwitting public later, only recruiting Ewen Cameron in 1958.

Also, the British started their work with LSD in 1953.

Therefore it's not likely, as Mitsui points out, that in 1951 the US government was poisoning whole towns in the South of France a number years before they'd even got their own programmes seriously up and running at home.

[ryson]

Occam's razor Almanac. No one here is saying the CIA didn't do experiments with LSD on civilians, but this case doesn't sound like one.

Here's my biggest problem with the CIA LSD theory behind the Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning: The year the incident happened in was 1951

The CIA only seriously got their own brainwashing programme going in the mid-50s.
In the early days of the programme they experimented on volunteers, then guinea pigs (Frank Olson who died in 1953 being a good example). They started using the drug on the unwitting public later, only recruiting Ewen Cameron in 1958.

Also, the British started their work with LSD in 1953.

Therefore it's not likely, as Mitsui points out, that in 1951 the US government was poisoning whole towns in the South of France a number years before they'd even got their own programmes seriously up and running at home.

LSD was in existence at least since around the beginning of the WWII and was thought of as a possible psycho-chemical weapon from almost the get-go.

[Mitsui2]

LSD was in existence at least since around the beginning of the WWII and was thought of as a possible psycho-chemical weapon from almost the get-go.

Discovered in the 30s. but its mind-bending properties weren't realised till Hoffman's notorious accidental exposure in something like 1943. Certainly the CIA used it (and much else) on both willing and unwilling participants during their mind-control experiments as part of the acknowledged MK-ULTRA programme from the 50s on.

Maybe the French incident in '51 was the CIA - I can't imagine that anything 'silly' like moral scruples or international law would have stopped them - but on the whole it seems extremely unlikely. As rubensni says, it's a case of Occam's razor. The French events are fully explicable in terms of the ergot story as established by the enquiry at the time, while the CIA experiments - if they were even started at that time - would still have been at a very early stage, and they'd've had plenty of scope for meddling back home without venturing abroad.

[Jimmyswift]

I take it this mold is the very same as the one linked to the salem witch trials?

[ryson]

Discovered in the 30s. but its mind-bending properties weren't realised till Hoffman's notorious accidental exposure in something like 1943. Certainly the CIA used it (and much else) on both willing and unwilling participants during their mind-control experiments as part of the acknowledged MK-ULTRA programme from the 50s on.

Maybe it's just me but didn't 1943 come before 1951?

Maybe the French incident in '51 was the CIA - I can't imagine that anything 'silly' like moral scruples or international law would have stopped them - but on the whole it seems extremely unlikely. As rubensni says, it's a case of Occam's razor. The French events are fully explicable in terms of the ergot story as established by the enquiry at the time, while the CIA experiments - if they were even started at that time - would still have been at a very early stage, and they'd've had plenty of scope for meddling back home without venturing abroad.

It was scientists dispatched to the scene from the Sandoz Chemical company in nearby Basle, Switzerland who manufactered LSD at the time who stated that mold was the cause, but many other experts disagreed with them - not exactly a disinterested party by most standards now is it?