Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten
Review from the Erowid Library
© 2006/2007
J.S. Ketchum
J.S. Ketchum
Documenting a Lost Decade of Clinical Research
The average effective dose is 7-8 ug/kg (roughly 500 ug per average male adult). The onset is slow, lasting roughly 3 hours. By the fourth hour, subjects generally enter a stuporous slumber. Around hour 12, subjects become ambulatory but profoundly disoriented for another day or two, during which time subjects typically experience extreme confusion, hallucinations, and delirium closely resembling datura intoxication.
Ketchum and the other Edgewood researchers investigated the effects of BZ on reaction time, various delivery methods, possible antidotes, and so forth. In one operation called Project Dork, aerosolized BZ was delivered to eight volunteers at Dugway Proving Grounds during combat simulation. The operation was a success; most of the troops experienced the predicted course of symptoms with the predicted impact on their performance, and all recovered fully within 72 hours.
We follow Ketchum through his experiences with the military and the media, his two-year post-doc at Stanford, and into private practice as he provides off-the-cuff commentary on familiar faces and interesting places. I was particularly intrigued to hear personal anecdotes of important early researchers such as Sidney Cohen and George Aghajanian.
Ketchum argues throughout the book that the dangers and improprieties of the Edgewood experiments are exaggerated by over-zealous investigative reporters, many of whom inappropriately associate the Edgewood Arsenal experiments with the notorious CIA operation MKULTRA. In that operation, hundreds or thousands of civilians were surreptitiously dosed with psychoactive drugs without their knowledge or consent. Ketchum maintains that his work was scrupulous and that he and his colleagues were careful to obtain consent from subjects. He argues:
Unwitting guinea pigs? Naïve young men taken in by Army propaganda? Mentally marginal soldiers who could not make good decisions? Ignorant individuals who didn’t know what they were getting into because of tight security? In my view, none of the above! (p. 30) … Nevertheless, years after extensive testing with drugs such as BZ and LSD had ceased, investigative reporters continued to apply the pejorative “guinea pig” cliché to Edgewood volunteers. (p. 31)
The book meticulously documents the considerable lengths to which Ketchum and his team went to obtain voluntary consent, but difficult questions remain. Beginning in 1965, Edgewood Arsenal began recruiting prisoners from the Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. While the prisoner subjects were a small percentage of the volunteer population (less than 1%), it is unclear that prisoners are in a position to make a free, balanced decision, when income opportunities are tightly constrained.
Allan Lawson, a former Holmesburg inmate and experiment volunteer, testified before a Senate subcommittee investigating the use of prison inmates in 1973. He stated that prisoners were “trading [their] bodies for money,” making “any claim of voluntary participation … in human experimentation a cruel hoax.” Following those Senate hearings, the use of prisoner volunteers in experiments became much less common.
Ketchum offers broad defenses of Edgewood research. For example:
Many think that the so-called Army volunteers we tested more than forty years ago were not really volunteers … In short, they assert that Army testing in the 1960s was unethical, incompetent, and carried out in violation of basic human rights. These erroneous beliefs could have been dispelled by authentic information long ago, but very little ever appeared in the public media. (p. 2)
However, we later read:
In the late 1950s Dr. Van Sim and his colleagues sometimes gave LSD covertly to Edgewood volunteers. Such studies could be, and eventually were, criticized as lacking in rigorous design, and particularly for their lack of sufficient regard for possible adverse psychological consequences, as well as trampling on the civil rights of the unknowing recipients. (p. 118) > more
Ketchum and the other Edgewood researchers investigated the effects of BZ on reaction time, various delivery methods, possible antidotes, and so forth. In one operation called Project Dork, aerosolized BZ was delivered to eight volunteers at Dugway Proving Grounds during combat simulation. The operation was a success; most of the troops experienced the predicted course of symptoms with the predicted impact on their performance, and all recovered fully within 72 hours.
We follow Ketchum through his experiences with the military and the media, his two-year post-doc at Stanford, and into private practice as he provides off-the-cuff commentary on familiar faces and interesting places. I was particularly intrigued to hear personal anecdotes of important early researchers such as Sidney Cohen and George Aghajanian.
Ketchum argues throughout the book that the dangers and improprieties of the Edgewood experiments are exaggerated by over-zealous investigative reporters, many of whom inappropriately associate the Edgewood Arsenal experiments with the notorious CIA operation MKULTRA. In that operation, hundreds or thousands of civilians were surreptitiously dosed with psychoactive drugs without their knowledge or consent. Ketchum maintains that his work was scrupulous and that he and his colleagues were careful to obtain consent from subjects. He argues:
Unwitting guinea pigs? Naïve young men taken in by Army propaganda? Mentally marginal soldiers who could not make good decisions? Ignorant individuals who didn’t know what they were getting into because of tight security? In my view, none of the above! (p. 30) … Nevertheless, years after extensive testing with drugs such as BZ and LSD had ceased, investigative reporters continued to apply the pejorative “guinea pig” cliché to Edgewood volunteers. (p. 31)
The book meticulously documents the considerable lengths to which Ketchum and his team went to obtain voluntary consent, but difficult questions remain. Beginning in 1965, Edgewood Arsenal began recruiting prisoners from the Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. While the prisoner subjects were a small percentage of the volunteer population (less than 1%), it is unclear that prisoners are in a position to make a free, balanced decision, when income opportunities are tightly constrained.
Allan Lawson, a former Holmesburg inmate and experiment volunteer, testified before a Senate subcommittee investigating the use of prison inmates in 1973. He stated that prisoners were “trading [their] bodies for money,” making “any claim of voluntary participation … in human experimentation a cruel hoax.” Following those Senate hearings, the use of prisoner volunteers in experiments became much less common.
Ketchum offers broad defenses of Edgewood research. For example:
Many think that the so-called Army volunteers we tested more than forty years ago were not really volunteers … In short, they assert that Army testing in the 1960s was unethical, incompetent, and carried out in violation of basic human rights. These erroneous beliefs could have been dispelled by authentic information long ago, but very little ever appeared in the public media. (p. 2)
However, we later read:
In the late 1950s Dr. Van Sim and his colleagues sometimes gave LSD covertly to Edgewood volunteers. Such studies could be, and eventually were, criticized as lacking in rigorous design, and particularly for their lack of sufficient regard for possible adverse psychological consequences, as well as trampling on the civil rights of the unknowing recipients. (p. 118) > more