Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten

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Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten
by James Ketchum

I just bought myself a copy of this book (it can be found by following the link to the original article), it looks to be a fascinating read.


Hallucinogenic Weapons: The Other Chemical Warfare - RU Sirius Interview with James Ketchum
January 10th, 2007

There were many acid tests happening in the 1950s and 1960s. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters dosed sometimes-unsuspecting proto-hippies. The CIA was dosing unsuspecting mainstreamers. Leary dosed fully cognizant artists, therapists and students. But meanwhile, over at Edgewood Arsenal Proving Grounds in Maryland, psychiatrist James S. Ketchum was testing LSD, BZ and other psychedelic and deliriant compounds on fully informed volunteers for the U.S. military.

Dr. James S. Ketchum was hired by Edgewood, first as a research psychiatrist in 1961. He became Chief of the Psychopharmacology Branch in 1963, and then became Acting Chief of Clinical Research in 1966. After a brief hiatus at Stanford University, he returned as Edgewoods’ Chief of Clinical Research in 1968, staying there until 1971. Dr. Ketchum and his team were looking, primarily, for non-lethal incapacitating agents, and he was central to many of the experiments with these compounds that took place during that time.

Now, Dr. Ketchum has released his fascinating self-published memoir, Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten, primarily detailing his times at Edgewood. The book boasts charts, graphs and experimental reports — a veritable goldmine of information for those who are interested in psychedelics, deliriants, or chemical warfare. It’s also a funny, observant, and reflective personal memoir, casting a light not only on Ketchum and his work, but on a decade that saw 60s counterculture and the military share an oddly intersecting obsession with mind-altering drugs.

Dr. Ketchum himself has remained intrigued by these chemicals, as reflected in his ongoing friendship with Dr. Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin, who wrote a foreword for this book.

I recently interviewed him for The RU Sirius Show. Steve Robles joined me.

RU SIRIUS: Tell us about the research you did at Edgewood Arsenal with various substances as weapons. What was the political environment?

JAMES KETCHUM: It was during the Cold War and there was great concern about what the Soviet Union might be plotting. It was known that they were investing a lot of money in chemical warfare research — about ten times as much as we were. And at the same time, there was an interest in the U.S. in developing weapons that might be called more “humane” as opposed to “conventional” weapons. In 1955, Congress was entertained by Major General Creasy, who described what LSD could do. At the time, that was the latest drug of interest. And as he described it to Congress, they became very enthusiastic, and voted in favor of doing research into LSD as a possible incapacitating agent that would be life-sparing. Congress passed a resolution with only one vote against it, which is perhaps indicative of the philosophy of the times.

So money was allocated to build a project at Edgewood Arsenal, the army chemical center. And over the next few years the budgeting increased, supported by John F. Kennedy, among others. I was given the opportunity to go there after my residency in psychiatry in 1961, and I thought it would be interesting. I ended up spending about ten years there. When I arrived, the program was just in its nascency. There had been some work done by others there with LSD, but they had never had a psychiatrist. And they’d run into a few problems that made them think they ought to have one. So I was given pretty much a free hand over the next few years to develop a program that would be safe and also provide the information that was being sought, not only about LSD but about drugs like BZ, and others.

RU: So you actually ended up having a long strange trip of your own. You had some very interesting experiences with it.

JK: I enjoyed it very much. Unfortunately at the time, classification of that research was so great that very little of the information we found was leaked out to the public or allowed to be spread among the public. And as is the custom in the army — or was the custom — classified papers usually remained classified for 12 years before they’d be downgraded and made available. By that time, most people had gone separate ways. The program itself had been pretty much terminated. No one really wrote the history of that decade. I thought, later, that was a serious omission. And that’s what led me to write this book.

STEVE ROBLES: Did you find any evidence that the Soviets might have taken this tack in their own chemical warfare research?

JK: There was information indicating that, around 1960, the Soviet Union was importing vast quantities of fermented rye from the satellite countries. This was interpreted as being indicative of their interest in producing LSD, since there’s not much use for fermented rye except that it contains ergot, which is a form of contamination [ed: ergot is used to prepare lysergic acid, the raw material for LSD]. That made us think maybe they were having a big LSD development program of their own.

SR: So there was a different kind of space race going on at the same time.

JK: That’s right. Inner space.

RU: The meat of this book, and the fun part, is descriptions of people undergoing the experiments. I wonder if any moments in particular pop into your head showing the way that human beings behave under the influence.

The Volunteers

JK: I watched a number of people — actually, more than a hundred — going through the experience of having BZ, which is a long-acting atropine type compound. It produces delirium if given in a sufficient dose. Half-a-milligram is sufficient in the case of BZ, as compared with about 10 milligrams of atropine. To describe the tripping in detail would take some time. In the book, I’ve documented an entire BZ trip over a hundred-hour period, including everything that was said and done.

RU: You had a man watching an entire football game on his fingernail or something?

JK: It was a tiny baseball game on the padded floor. The hallucinations were “real” hallucinations. I’d like to make a distinction between BZ hallucinations and LSD so-called hallucinations, which are really not hallucinations — they’re more illusions. People generally know that they’re not real, but produced by the drug. Whereas with BZ, the individual becomes delirious, and in that state is unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, and may see, for instance, strips of bacon along the edge of the floor.

RU: Belladonna would probably be the most common deliriant among drug experimenters.

JK: Right. Loco weed. Belladonna, in the form of Asmador, for example, was used for asthma and contains atropine. People were getting high on this in the 60s. My brother described one young man trying to crawl across a street in New York City and grabbing onto the pants leg of a police officer. People don’t know what they’re doing when they’re under the influence. They mistake people for objects and objects for people. They’ll salute the water fountain or bump into a nurse and say, “Excuse me, sir,” and the like.

RU: Were you guys doing a lot of chuckling while this was going on? You’re trying to maintain a certain degree of decorum, but…

JK: Yes. I would tell the technicians that it wasn’t nice to laugh at these things, even though the subject probably wouldn’t remember it later. It was sometimes hard to suppress it. Like when one individual asked another, in the same padded room, if he could have a cigarette. And then, when the other individual held out an empty hand that looked like it was holding a pack, he said, “Oh, I don’t want to take your last one.” So it was fully “out there” on a fantastic scale.

RU: I had a friend who took belladonna at a rock concert. And about halfway into it, he thought he was back in his own room and that the music on the radio really sucked, and he was going to turn it off. That basically involved twisting this girl’s kneecap until he got kicked out. Fortunately, it was just the kneecap.

JK: One young man tried to straighten out my arm, as if it were a pipe of some sort! He tugged on it, and pulled it, and didn’t seem at all aware that I might be discomforted by that.

RU: So this book, which is about a very serious subject, is actually quite an amusing read.

JK: Yeah, I tried to keep it from being too heavy, and included a number of anecdotes about people who weren’t delirious that were equally funny.

RU: Some of the inter-office activity was amusing too. Describe what happens when soldiers try to deal with mock-up battle conditions under the influence of BZ.

JK: Well of course, commanders wanted to know what would happen if this stuff were ever used in the field. So at first we set up an indoor type of situation, a sort of simulated command post with four soldiers in it. One of them was given a full dose of BZ while the others were given either small doses or none at all, in order to have some possibility of maintaining order. So this one individual would continually go to the door and try to get out. He’d turn around and say, “I’ll see you later,” but it was locked, and he finally concluded that he was trapped. When the cameras, which were behind these sliding plywood doors, were opened, he came over to one and looked into it as if it were the eye of a Martian. And then he tried to climb out through the medicine cabinet. Then he went over to the water bag and yelled, “Hey, this broad just committed suicide.” It took quite a bit of help from his teammates to keep him from hurting himself. But fortunately, nothing serious happened.

RU: You write that nobody was really injured or permanently damaged by these experiments, and you make a distinction between the work that you did at the arsenal and work done by the Central Intelligence Agency.

JK: I tried to dissect out the work done by the army from the work done by the CIA. The CIA, of course, was the first to undertake studies of LSD. They did it without any real scientific structure; and they took liberties that they shouldn’t have taken, giving it covertly to American citizens and the like. This was the MK-ULTRA program. Unfortunately, Edgewood Arsenal acquired a reputation for being somehow involved in the MK-ULTRA program — being somehow underwritten by the CIA. And this was not true. There were a couple of individuals who had a secret connection to the CIA, but the program itself was transparent, at least within the military, and there was none of the hijinx that the CIA carried out in San Francisco and other places. [ed: they gave LSD to customers in a house used for prostitution and watched them through a two-way mirror.]

RU: You recently gave testimony about the CIA program. Tell us a little bit about that.

JK: I testified on behalf of Wayne Ritchie, a deputy U.S. Marshall who had been an ideal officer — four years in the Marines, a year at Alcatraz as a guard. He was regarded as perfectly stable — normal. After a Christmas party, where people from the CIA office next door were present, he came back to his office and began to believe that everyone was against him. And then he went out on the street and walked home for the first time without his car, and was convinced that his girlfriend was against him; and the bartender was against him. So he decided to hold up a bar and get enough money for his girlfriend to fly to New York, and then he’d be arrested and they would kick him out of the Marines and everyone would be happy. So this is what he did, and this is what happened. And when he came to and realized what he’d done, he felt terrible. He wanted to commit suicide. He asked for a bullet to save the state some money, and he submitted a letter of resignation.

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PART II


From that point on, he was regarded as a pariah and he spent the rest of his life believing he had committed a serious crime for which he’d never be forgiven. Then Sidney Gottleib — who was the head of the MK-ULTRA program — died. And in his obituary, it mentioned that he was supervising the administration of LSD to unwitting American citizens. [ed: The CIA also dosed unsuspecting attendants at office parties, as documented in Acid Dreams and elsewhere.] And so the light went on in his head at that point, and Wayne realized, or believed, that that’s probably what happened to him. So a case was eventually brought to court, and I was asked to testify on behalf of Wayne. I spent two-and-a-half days on the witness stand, mostly answering questions from CIA lawyers. Ultimately the outcome was not favorable, unfortunately. The judge didn’t feel convinced, and neither did the Appeals court. The judge said, in effect, “If you can explain this man’s criminal behavior with LSD, then I suppose you could blame anyone’s criminal behavior on LSD.” And this really wasn’t very logical and didn’t fit the facts, but that’s how it ended up. It was a rather unhappy ending to an unhappy story.

The Ward

RU: A number of your volunteers in the LSD experiments expressed feelings of having had a profound experience. More frequently than not, they expressed a sort of regret in coming down and having the experience end.

JK: Yes. We were primarily interested in measuring performance on a systematic basis. But, of course, clinically it was pretty hard to ignore the differences in the responses to LSD that we observed. Some individuals would become very frolicsome and laugh a great deal. Some would become depressed and withdrawn; some became paranoid. Seeing the spectrum of responses in otherwise normal young men was quite interesting. One individual in particular, I believe, actually had a therapeutic experience. He was in a group of four, and we held a televised discussion after the test, and he admitted finally under pressure from his buddies that he had had some unacceptable erotic thoughts about the nurses that he was reluctant to reveal. And they told him that was all right, there’s nothing wrong with that. And when he went back to his unit, I heard indirectly that his personality was different. He became more sociable and outgoing. I have to give LSD some of the credit in that case.

RU: Also a frequent response from some of the volunteers was to find the tests just silly and absurd and to just laugh at the things they were asked to do.

JK: Yeah, under LSD, they perceived the absurdity of being asked to solve as many arithmetic problems as they could in three minutes. Sometimes they refused to do it all together. But in other cases they did their best, but couldn’t do as well as they did before the drug. I took it once and I had precisely the same difficulty solving arithmetic problems, but I didn’t have any of the wonderful visions and fantasies. I guess because I was thinking of the psychopharmacology of the LSD going through my raphe nucleus and so forth.

RU: You took 80 micrograms. It’s a little bit shy of a trip.

JK: Yeah. But it was chemically pure, U.S. Army-grade, 99.9 percent…

RU: Got any of that stuff left?

JK: Well, there was 40 pounds left in my office one day in a big black barrel…

RU: Oh yes! Do tell the story of the canister.

JK: I was chief of the department at that point. When I came into work one day, I noticed that there was a big, black, sort of oil barrel-type drum in the corner of the room. And no one said anything, or told me anything about it. So after a couple of days, my curiosity overcame me. After everyone had gone home, I opened it up and pulled out a jar. And I looked and saw that it was about 3.41623 kilograms of LSD. And so were the rest of the jars.

RU: Drop that baby on Iran and see what happens.

JK: But after another couple of days, the barrel was gone! I never heard anything; I never got a receipt for it. The LSD there was probably worth about a billion dollars on the street. And it just stayed there for a few days and went away.

SR: Speaking of getting onto the street, I’ve never heard of BZ, I guess it didn’t penetrate the black market?

RU: That’s really not the sort of thing people tend to want to take.

JK: Well, as I say, it’s similar to atropine or belladonna, which some people have taken for trips, and it’s been used through the ages for ceremonial purposes, for various purposes.

RU: I remember Durk Pearson saying it was interesting.

JK: It lasts about 72 hours in a dose that is just sufficient to incapacitate someone. It can last longer if you take more, but we kept the doses as low as we could. Delirium is not something that anyone particularly wants to go through. It’s more of a shipment than a trip, I would say.

RU: You don’t remember much. It’s probably more fun to watch other people take it.

JK: Right. Not too much intelligent insight emerges under its effects.

RU: Let’s get back to the purpose of this research. What you were hoping for?

JK: I felt I was working on a noble cause because the purpose of this research was to find something that would be an alternative to bombs and bullets. It could also be helpful in reducing civilian casualties, which have increased ever since the Civil War from almost zero percent to the eighty percent now or maybe higher — 90 percent perhaps in Iraq, because you can’t really avoid “collateral damage” if the enemy is going to hide among the civilians. Perhaps it’s a good time to rethink our use of incapacitating agents as a humane alternative.

The Russians did very well with this. When the Chechnyan terrorists took over an auditorium filled with attendees at a Moscow concert and held them captive for three days, the Russians brought in an incapacitating agent. It happened to be a morphine derivative of high potency, and they pumped it in through the ceiling and the floor, waited for a while, and then rushed in. And those terrorists did not detonate the bombs they had strapped to their bodies; they did not fire their weapons; they were all down on the floor unconscious, as was most of the audience. They were able to save about 80% of the audience.

RU: Do you feel that maybe they could’ve used a better incapacitating agent that would’ve allowed them to save everybody or nearly everybody?

JK: No, I don’t think there was anything better they could’ve used. This was a quick-acting drug, which is what it had to be. If they’d used BZ or some drug like that, the effects would have come on too gradually. The terrorists would have had time to figure out what was going on. So this was a knockout effect, and it worked very well. And I credit the Russians for doing this, although they seem to be embarrassed about giving out the details, because in the United States and the rest of the world in general, chemical warfare in any form is a no-no.

RU: It’s illegal internationally, isn’t it?

JK: A number of treaties were drawn up, the last of which was the chemical warfare convention. And it’s now illegal to use any drug that can either cause death or seriously disturbed behavior. And I think it’s unfortunate that we went in and agreed to this treaty because we’re now in a different kind of war from anything we’ve been in previously.

SR: I wonder what effect of LSD would have in either dislodging — or maybe even reinforcing – the beliefs of real serious believers, like fanatical Islamists, for example.

JK: Well, LSD was discarded pretty early on as an incapacitating agent when it was realized that it produced highly unpredictable effects and that people could still retain the ability to fire a rifle or push a button on a bomb-release mechanism. So I’m pretty sure LSD would not be used. It would have to be something in the opiate category, like what was used in Moscow; or perhaps one of the rapid-acting belladonna-like drugs. Incidentally, although BZ was adopted briefly and even packed into munitions, as far as I know, it was never used, despite rumors to the contrary. And later on we found rapid-acting compounds in the same category — short-acting, rapid-acting compounds that would’ve worked much better. But by this time, the whole notion of militarizing incapacitating agents had lost its window of opportunity. That’s one reason that all this research was kind of left in file cabinets.

RU: We’ve talked about psychedelics, and we’ve talked about deliriants. But what about disassociatives like ketamine and PCP? Do those hold any potential in your opinion, and do you know if they were looked into at all?

JK: A little work was done with PCP before my arrival. They had a complication. One individual became psychotic and required hospitalization. And this kind of scared them. In fact, that’s one reason I was asked to go there. So PCP would probably be an unacceptable drug.

SR: That’s not an uncommon reaction to PCP, right? Violence…

JK: It definitely can produce aggressive and resistant behavior that’s very hard to overcome.

RU: The 1970s was a time of great revelation of government crimes, and Edgewood Arsenal and your work got roped into the general attitude in the media towards the establishment, towards the military and so forth. Talk a little bit about how you feel the media misinterpreted your work.

JK: It grew out of the Congressional hearings, the most famous of which was the Kennedy hearings. The CIA was investigated. Congress attempted to find out just what they did with LSD in the early 50s. The CIA had destroyed all their records and the people who were still around claimed they couldn’t remember anything. But as a result of that, the army was asked to look at its work with similar agents. The Inspector General held a very comprehensive review, the National Academy of Sciences was asked to do a review of the work with BZ, and although they produced follow-ups finding no harm, somehow in the public mind, the CIA work and the U.S. Army work became interwoven. I believe that’s an unfortunate thing.

Another mistake was that the media characterized BZ as a super-hallucinogen, which really is not a good way to describe it. It’s a deliriant, basically — pure and simple.

RU: You’ve indicated the effects of some of today’s potential chemical weapons have been exaggerated in the media. You’ve spoken about the potency of VX, for example

JK: That’s right. This is in relation to nerve agents. I wasn’t an expert on that — that work was going on next door. But people have been told that a couple of drops of VX on the floor of Macy’s would wipe out the entire customer population. And things of that nature have been represented in programs like 24. (It’s a great series but…). People have a morbid fear of anything chemical, which has been encouraged by the media. Many inaccuracies have been brought out. As a matter of fact, ironically, nerve agents are a good antidote for drugs like BZ, and vice versa. Atropine’s used to treat nerve agent poisoning, and nerve agents can be used to treat atropine or BZ poisoning. We found this out in the lab. Of course anyone who heard that they were going to be treated with a nerve agent for their atropine or BZ poisoning would probably be very unhappy and nervous. But it works very well!

RU: So tell people how they can get a hold of this book. It’s an independent publication, with a unique design. It’s almost like a coffee table book.

SR: I thought you were going to say, “Tell people how they can get a hold of that black barrel!”

RU: Yeah. Where did you hide that black barrel?

JK: Here.

LINK - http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/01/10/hallucinogenic-weapons-the-other-chemical-warfare/

[BlueMystic]

Looks interesting. Thanks for the heads up.

[Riconoen {UGC}]

If we used some form of LSD or mushroom spray against the enemy I thinkt he war would be over tommorrow. :D

[Nagognog2]

I'd buy this (expensive) tome for the information on BZ alone*. Thanks for posting this! I've been hunting something like this for a long, long time.

* In fact - I just did!

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I suspect that there was a fairly short print run for this book, and that it will gain value significantly over time - one reason I bought it.

[Nagognog2]

I got an email back thanking me and asking for a review. I'll do it. I want this info out in public - before the Feds start it up again. Using pot-prisoners and other terrorists for experimental subjects.

I think I'll strike up a corrospondence with the author.

[radiometer]

You can listen to the audio of the interview here:

http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/local_links.php?action=ratelink&linkid=3076&catid=42&lpage=2

[rodent]

Nice find!

I love reading about the BZ experiments... the potency and duration of effects... it's all fascinating and scary at the same time. At least, according to this read, the army didn't pull the crap that the CIA did though you have to wonder just how "informed" the volunteers really were.

I didn't realize Ketchum had any type of relationship with Sasha... interesting.

[Nagognog2]

Note: My copy just arrived - Prioity Mail - in perfect shape. Mailed by the author himself, as well as signed and addressed to me in the front of the book. Nice touch! It's a self-published work with a foreward written by A. Shulgin.

This one is going to be a rare book!

[Alicia]

^^ swia says enjoy the read Nag ;) !!
She herself has some curiosity with delirants. BZ has always been an interest since she has seen "Jacob's Ladder" she knows its a film, but it mentioned BZ was used on troops during that time at the end of it. She herself has no interest in trying delirants.

But loves to read about other peoples experiences, she likes reading about people experiencing belladonna too, the ones that survived that is of there experiences. Swia did wonder if u could use 'set and setting' on PCP she assumed it only made normal run of the mil aggressive people aggressive. Rather then people who have control, but then it was stopped because of those reactions.

[Nagognog2]

I've always had a curiosity regards BZ (quinuclidinyl benzilate). Due, in no small part, to it's secrecy.

PCP is not similar to BZ. BZ, which was developed following research done with the JB series by the CIA, is an anti-cholinergic delieriant. Same class as the alkaloids found in Datura sp. While PCP can truly bend your mind, these drugs create an entirely separate reality. You really are being chased by a minotaur. No doubt about it!

[Demonslayer]

If we used some form of LSD or mushroom spray against the enemy I think the war would be over tomorrow. :D
We should spray ourselves at the same time and peace would come by itself.
SWIM has at least never had an aggressive thought or wanted to harm a single living creature while under the influence of LSD, shrooms or cannabis. They are for the healing of the nations. They are not weapons, but medicines. That is why it never was possible to implement as a tool for control over others.

[~lostgurl~]

http://www.drugs-forum.com/index.php/forum/links/downloads/forum/links/downloads/imageuploads/601111856183554175.jpg
A new entry has been added to Drugs Archive

Description:

The RU Sirius Show - Interview with James Ketchum
Show 88: Psychotropic Chemical Warfare

James Ketchum, the psychiatrist who was at the center of U.S. military research into BZ, LSD, and other deliriants and hallucinogens as potential incapacating chemical warfare agents, joins The RU Sirius Show to talk about his self-published memoir: “Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten.”

To check it out, rate it or add comments, visit
The RU Sirius Show - Interview with James Ketchum (http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/local_links.php?linkid=3076)
The comments you make there will appear in the posts below.

[enquirewithin]

The Counterculture Colonel Posted by CN Staff (editor@bohemian.com) on July 10,
http://cannabisnews.com/news/24/thread24068.shtml

2008 at 19:39:43 PT
By Martin A. Lee
Source: North Bay Bohemian (http://www.bohemian.com/)

http://cannabisnews.com/images/cannabisicon.gif (http://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml) USA -- During the 1960s, the U.S. Army tested a potent form of synthetic marijuana on soldiers to develop a secret weapon. Meet the Santa Rosa resident who ran the program.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, off-beat 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, which 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?
Shulgin, a critic of chemical mind-meddling by the military, was wary when he first met Ketchum at a 1993 event honoring the 50th anniversary of the discovery of LSD. But Ketchum is not your typical military bulldozer type. An intelligent, gracious man with a disarming sense of humor, in his own way Ketchum has always been a free spirit. He and his wife, Judy, who currently reside in Santa Rosa, became close friends with Sasha and his formidable partner, Ann. They stayed in frequent contact and occasionally socialized together. When the Shulgins invited them to Burning Man, the Ketchums joined the caravan of RVs driving to the desert.
"I'm kind of a Sasha worshipper," Ketchum, who reads neuropharmacology textbooks during his leisure hours, confessed. Tall and lanky, the colonel, now 76, is one of the few people who can actually understand what Shulgin, six years his senior, is talking about when he lectures on the molecular subtleties of psychedelic drugs, waving his arms furiously like a mad scientist. Sasha took Ketchum under his wing and welcomed him into the fold.
Shulgin wrote the foreword to Ketchum's self-published memoir, Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten (www.forgottensecrets.net (http://www.forgottensecrets.net)), which lifts the veil on the Army's little-known drug experiments and illuminates a hidden chapter of marijuana history. A graduate of Cornell Medical College, Ketchum describes how he was assigned as a staff psychiatrist to Edgewood Arsenal, located 25 miles northeast of Baltimore, in 1961.
"There was no doubt in my mind that working in this strange atmosphere was just the sort of thing that would satisfy my appetite for novelty," Ketchum wrote. Soon he became chief of clinical research at the Army's hub for chemical warfare studies. Although the Geneva Convention had banned the use of chemical weapons, Washington never agreed to this provision, and the U.S. government poured money into the search for a nonlethal incapacitant.
Red Oil
The U.S. Army Chemical Corp's marijuana research began several years before Ketchum joined the team at Edgewood. In 1952, the Shell Development Corporation was contracted by the Army to examine "synthetic cannabis derivatives" for their incapacitating properties. Additional studies into possible military uses of marijuana began two years later at the University of Michigan medical school, where a group of scientists led by Dr. Edward F. Domino, professor of pharmacology, tested a drug called "EA 1476" ,otherwise known as "Red Oil",on dogs and monkeys at the behest of the U.S. Army. Made through a process of chemical extraction and distillation, Red Oil (akin to hash oil) packed a mightier punch than the natural plant.
Army scientists found that this concentrated cannabis derivative produced effects unlike anything they had previously seen. "The dog gets a peculiar reaction. He crawls under the table, stays away from the dark, leaps out at imaginary objects and, as far as one can interpret, may be having hallucinations," one report stated. "It would appear even to the untrained observer that this dog is not normal. He suddenly jumps out, even without any stimulus, and barks, and then crawls back under the table."
With a larger dose of Red Oil, the reaction was even more pronounced. "These animals lie on their side; you could step on their feet without any response; it is an amazing effect and a reversible phenomenon. It has greatly increased our interest in this compound from the standpoint of future chemical possibilities."
In the late 1950s, the Army started testing Red Oil on U.S. soldiers at Edgewood. Some GIs smirked for hours while they were under the influence of EA 1476. When asked to perform routine numbers and spatial reasoning tests, the stoned volunteers couldn't stop laughing.
But Red Oil was not an ideal chemical-warfare candidate. For starters, it was a "crude" preparation that contained many components of cannabis besides psychoactive THC. Army scientists surmised that pure THC would weigh much less than Red Oil and would therefore be better suited as a chemical weapon. They were intrigued by the possibility of amplifying the active ingredient of marijuana, tweaking the mother molecule, as it were, to enhance its psychogenic effects. So the Chemical Corps set its sights on developing a synthetic variant of THC that could clobber people without killing them.
Enter Harry Pars, a scientist working with Arthur D. Little Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass., one of several pharmaceutical companies that conducted chemical-warfare research for the Army. (Two Army contracts for marijuana-related research were awarded to this firm, covering a 10-year period beginning in 1963.) A frequent visitor to Edgewood, Pars synthesized a new cannabinoid compound, dubbed "EA 2233," which was significantly stronger than Red Oil.
At the outset of this project, Pars had sought the advice of Dr. Alexander Shulgin, then a brilliant young chemist employed by Dow Chemical. Shulgin was a veritable fount of information regarding how to reshape psychoactive molecules to create novel mind-altering drugs. Eager to share his arcane expertise, Shulgin gave Pars the idea to tinker with nitrogen analogs of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Pars never told Sasha that he was an Army contract employee. A declassified version of Pars' research was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (August 1966), in which he thanked Shulgin for "drawing our attention to the synthesis of these nitrogen analogs."
The U.S. Army Chemical Corps began clinical testing of EA 2233 on GI volunteers in 1961, the year Ketchum arrived at Edgewood Arsenal. When ingested at dosage levels ranging from 10 to 60 micrograms per kilogram of body weight, EA 2233 lasted up to 30 hours, far longer than the typical marijuana buzz.
'I Just Feel Like Laughing'
In an interview videotaped seven hours after he had been given EA 2233, one soldier described feeling numb in his arms and unable to raise them, precluding any possibility that he could defend himself if attacked. "Everything seems comical," he told his interlocutor.
Q: How are you?
A: Pretty good, I guess. . . .
Q: You've got a big grin on your face.
A: Yeah. I don't know what I'm grinning about either.
Q: Do things seem funny or is that just something you can't help?
A: I don't"I don't know. I just'I just feel like laughing. . . .
Q: Does the time seem to pass slower or faster or any different than usual?
A: No different than usual. Just'just that I mostly lose track of it. I don't know if it's early or late.
Q: Do you find yourself doing any daydreaming?
A: Yeah. I'm daydreaming all kinds of things. . . .
Q: Suppose you have to get up and go to work now. How would you do?
A: I don't think I'd even care.
Q: Well, suppose the place were on fire?
A: It would seem funny.
Q: It would seem funny? Do you think you'd have the sense to get up and run out or do you think you'd just enjoy it?
A: I don't know. Fire doesn't seem to present any danger to me right now. . . . Everything just seems funny in the Army. Seems like everything somebody says, it sounds a little bit funny. . . .
Q: Is it like when you're in a good mood and you can laugh at anything?
A: Right. . . . It's like being out with a bunch of people and everybody's laughing. They're just..
Q: Having a ball?
A: Yeah. And everything just seems funny.
Q: Would you do this again? Take this test again?
A: Yeah. Yeah. It wouldn't bother me at all.
EA 2233 was actually a mixture of eight stereoisomers of THC. (An isomer is a rearrangement of atoms within a given molecule; a stereoisomer entails different spatial configurations of these atoms.) Eventually, Edgewood scientists would separate the eight stereoisomers and investigate the relative potency of each of them individually in an effort to separate the wheat from the psychoactive chaff and reduce the amount of material needed to get the desired effect for chemical warfare.
Only two of the stereoisomers proved to be of interest (the others didn't have much of a knockdown effect). When administered intravenously, low doses of these two synthetic cousins of tetrahydrocannabinol triggered a dramatic drop in blood pressure to the point where test subjects could barely move. Standing up without assistance was impossible. This was construed by cautious Army doctors as a warning sign,a sudden plunge in blood pressure could be dangerous, and human experiments with single THC stereoisomers were suspended.
Looking back on these studies, Ketchum wonders whether his colleagues made the right decision. "This hypotensive property, in an otherwise nonlethal compound, might be an ideal way to produce a temporary inability to fight, or do much else, without toxicological danger to life," Ketchum says now. Given the high safety margin of THC, no one has ever died from an overdose, and the likelihood that the stereoisomers would display a similar safety profile, Ketchum believes the Army may have spurned a couple of worthy prospects that were capable of filling the knock-'em-out-but-don't-kill-'em niche in America's chemical-warfare arsenal.
As for the two exemplary stereoisomers weaned from EA 2233, Ketchum speculates, "They probably would have been safe in terms of life-sparing activity. . . . But a person who received them would have to lie down. If he tried to stand up and get his weapon, he would feel faint and lightheaded and he'd keel over. Essentially he would be immobilized for any military purpose until the effects wore off."
The colonel's assessment: "A safe drug that knocks people down�what more could you ask for?"
[B] Volunteers for America
With THC isomers on the back burner, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps focused on several other compounds, including LSD, PCP, methylphenidate (Ritalin) and a delirium-inducing ass-kicker known as "BZ" (a belladonna-like substance similar to atropine), all of which were thought to have significant potential as nonlethal incapacitants.
By the time the clinical testing program had run its course, 6,700 volunteers experienced some bizarre states of consciousness at Edgewood. Under the influence of powerful mind-altering drugs, some soldiers rode imaginary horses, ate invisible chickens and took showers in full uniform while smoking phantom cigars. One garrulous GI complained that an order of toast smelled "like a French whore." Some of their antics were so over-the-top that Ketchum had to admonish the nurses and other medical personnel not to laugh at the volunteers, even though it was unlikely that the soldiers would remember such incidents once the drugs wore off.
Ketchum insists that the staff at Edgewood went to great lengths to ensure the safety of the volunteers. (There was one untoward incident involving a civilian volunteer who flipped out on PCP and required hospitalization, but this happened before Ketchum came on board.) During the 1960s, every soldier exposed to incapacitating agents was carefully screened and prepped beforehand, according to Ketchum, and well treated throughout the experiment. They stayed in special rooms with padded walls, while medical professionals monitored their situation 24/7. Antidotes were available if things got out of hand.
"The volunteers performed a patriotic service," Ketchum says. "None, to my knowledge, returned home with a significant injury or illness attributable to chemical exposure," though he admits that "a few former volunteers later claimed that the testing had caused them to suffer from some malady." Such claims, however, are difficult to assess given that so many intervening variables may have contributed to a particular problem.
A follow-up study conducted by the Army Inspector General's office and a review panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences found little evidence of serious harm resulting from the Edgewood experiments. But a 1975 Army IG report noted that improper inducements may have been used to recruit volunteers and getting their "informed consent" was somewhat dubious given that scientists had a limited understanding of the short- and long-term impact of some of the compounds tested on the soldiers.
Ketchum draws a sharp distinction between clinical research with human subjects under controlled conditions at Edgewood Arsenal and the CIA's reckless experiments on random, unwitting Americans who were given LSD surreptitiously by spooks and prostitutes. "Jim is very certain of his own integrity," says Ken Goffman (aka R.U. Sirius). "There is little doubt in his mind that he was doing the right thing. He felt he was working for a noble cause that would reduce civilian and military casualties." Former editor of the psychedelic tech magazine Mondo 2000, Goffman helped Ketchum edit and polish his book manuscript, which vigorously defends the Edgewood research program.
Strange bedfellows, the colonel and the counterculture scribe. Or so it would appear. But these days, Ketchum and Goffman see eye to eye on many issues. Both feel that the alleged dangers of marijuana and LSD have been way overblown. No doubt, LSD could wreak havoc on the toughest, best-trained troops, derailing their thought processes and disorganizing their behavior.
When used wisely, however, LSD can be uplifting. Ketchum notes that some soldiers had insightful and rewarding experiences on acid, lending credence to reports from civilian psychiatrists that LSD was a useful therapeutic tool. "I had an interest in psychedelic drugs long before my interest in chemical warfare," Ketchum says. "I was intrigued by the positive aspects of LSD, as well as the incapacitating aspects."
Mystery Stash
One morning, Ketchum arrived at his office in Edgewood and found "a large, black steel barrel, resembling an oil drum, parked in the corner of the room," he recounts in his book. Overcome by curiosity, he opened the barrel and examined its contents. There were a dozen tightly sealed glass canisters that looked like cookie jars; the labels on the canisters indicated that each contained about three pounds of "EA 1729," the Army's code number for LSD. By the end of the week, the 40 pounds of government acid�enough to intoxicate several hundred million people�vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. Ketchum still doesn't know who put the LSD in his office or what became of it.
But this much is certain: some officers at Edgewood were dipping into the Army's stash for their own personal use. "They took LSD more often than was necessary to appreciate its clinical effects," Ketchum admits. "They must have liked it."
The colonel was personally a bit skittish about trying LSD. Eventually, he worked up the courage to experiment on himself. Under the watchful eye of a knowledgeable Edgewood physician, he swallowed a small dose and proceeded to take the same numerical aptitude tests that the regular volunteers were put through to measure their impairment. Constrained by the white-smock laboratory setting, his lone LSD experience was somewhat anticlimactic. "Colors were more vivid and music was more compelling," Ketchum recalls, "but there were no breakthroughs in consciousness, no Timothy Leary stuff."
Ketchum also sampled cannabis shortly after he began working for the Chemical Corps. His younger brother turned him on to marijuana, but the first time Ketchum smoked a joint nothing happened. "Later, I read about reverse tolerance. Some people don't get high on marijuana until they use it a few times," Ketchum explains.
It wasn't until he went on a paid, two-year leave of absence from Edgewood that he started smoking pot socially. Ketchum had convinced the Surgeon General of the Army that it would be in everyone's best interest if he studied neuroscience at Stanford University. How better to keep abreast of the latest advances in the field? In 1966, he joined a team of postdoctoral researchers mentored by Karl Pribram, a world-renowned expert on the brain and behavior.
Ketchum related well with his academic colleagues. "I got together with a few of my friends at Stanford and we had some cheap marijuana, which I smoked, and I got a real effect for the first time," he says. "I liked it. It was very sensuous. But I didn't use it very often. I didn't have any of my own."
Ketchum's West Coast hiatus coincided with the emergence of the hippie movement in San Francisco. "I was fascinated with this spectacular development," he gleams. "Luckily, I caught it at its peak."
Occasionally, Ketchum took his home movie camera to Haight-Ashbury, the epicenter of hippiedom, and filmed the procession of exotically dressed flower children strutting through the neighborhood high on marijuana and LSD. "I was always interested in drugs, primarily because I've always been interested in how the mind works," he says. "So when this wave of psychedelic users descended upon San Francisco, I thought maybe I'd learn more by going there."
Ketchum attended the legendary Be-In in Golden Gate Park in January 1967, sitting cross-legged on the lawn with 20,000 pot-smoking enthusiasts, soaking up the rays and listening to rock music, poetry and antiwar speeches. A few months later, the colonel began working as a volunteer doctor at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, where he treated troubled youth with substance-abuse problems.
Life After Edgewood
Ketchum returned to Edgewood in 1968, but the mood back at headquarters was not the same as before. Growing opposition to the Vietnam War and public disapproval of the use of napalm and toxic defoliants cast a lengthening shadow over classified research into chemical weapons. When journalists briefly got wind of the Army's ambitious psychochemical warfare program, they scoffed at the notion of making the enemy lay down their arms by turning them on.
The colonel saw the writing on the wall. Army brass consented when he asked to be transferred to another base in the early 1970s. By this time, the Chemical Corps had concluded that marijuana-related compounds would not be effective in a battlefield situation, but the testing of other incapacitating agents under field conditions would proceed. And drug companies continued to supply a steady stream of pharmaceutical samples for evaluation by the military.
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."
Ketchum feels that drug prohibition is bad public policy. "It's the refusal to look at the evidence that keeps pot illegal. They misrepresented marijuana as an evil weed. . . . I've always had a libertarian attitude toward drugs. I believe people should be able to do anything as long as it's not harmful to somebody else."
In the years ahead, Ketchum would reach out to medical marijuana trailblazers, prominent psychedelic advocates and drug-policy rebels working inside and outside the system to end prohibition. He joined the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and became a member of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
Founded by Rick Doblin, MAPS has spearheaded the revival of scientific investigations into the therapeutic potential of LSD, ecstasy, psilocybin and ibogaine, while also challenging bureaucratic roadblocks that prevent independent cannabis research in the United States. Col. Ketchum attended fundraising events and wrote letters to potential donors, praising the work of MAPS.
During the 1960s, Ketchum supervised thousands of drug experiments, yet he barely scratched the surface of the awesome potential of cannabis and LSD. "Jim is not apologetic for what he did before," Doblin says, "and I don't think he sees it as incongruous with supporting research into the therapeutic aspect of psychedelics. These tools have tremendous power, but he only looked at a narrow slice of it while he was at Edgewood."
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.
Medical Marijuana
After Californians broke ranks from America's drug-war orthodoxy in 1996 and legalized medical marijuana in the Golden State, Ketchum got a recommendation from his family doctor to use cannabis for insomnia. "I have personally found it helpful, especially for sleep," he says. "I've had problems with sleep for a long time."
It was at a picnic hosted by the Shulgins that Jim and Judy Ketchum first met Tod Mikuriya, the controversial Berkeley-based physician who has been described as "the father of the medical marijuana movement." One of the prime movers of Proposition 215, the successful med-pot ballot measure, Dr. Mikuriya quickly took a liking to the Ketchums and taught them how to use a vaporizer for inhaling cannabis fumes without tar and smoke.
Like Ketchum, Mikuriya was a maverick psychiatrist who once worked for the U.S. government. In 1967, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) recruited Mikuriya to direct its marijuana-research program. One day, after leaving his position at NIMH, he got a phone call from Dr. Van Sim, a cohort of Ketchum's at Edgewood Arsenal. A major figure in the Chemical Corps' secret drug-testing efforts, Sim told Mikuriya of Army studies which indicated that cannabis has valuable therapeutic properties. Sim asserted that marijuana "is probably the most potent anti-epileptic known to medicine." Unfortunately, much of this data remains classified.
Army scientists also inadvertently rediscovered the powerful antispasmodic effect of cannabis, a medicinal boon subsequently confirmed by many multiple sclerosis and AIDS patients who smoked marijuana and ate ganja-laced cuisine to ease nerve spasms and painful bouts of peripheral neuropathy. "We weren't looking for benefits," Ketchum concedes. "When I was at Edgewood, I wasn't aware of the medicinal history of cannabis."
With Mikuriya tendering introductions, Ketchum befriended some of the leading lights of the '60s counterculture, including Tim Scully, the prodigious underground chemist who manufactured millions of hits of black market LSD (remember Orange Sunshine?) while the colonel was administering hallucinogenic drugs to soldiers at Edgewood. "Jim and his wife visited me at my home in Mendocino County," Scully says. "I enjoyed their company. We found that we shared idealistic beliefs about the potential for good in psychoactive drugs, as well as sharing some wry understanding of the pitfalls, too."
As for their divergent paths in the past, Scully remarks, "I don't really see his work as having been in conflict with mine. I believe Jim sincerely hoped to save lives by helping in the development of nonlethal weapons as an alternative to conventional weapons."
An incurable iconoclast, the colonel has made common cause with counterculture veterans and anti-prohibition activists. His endorsement of the therapeutic use of marijuana and LSD confers additional credibility on views long championed by his newfound allies. Validation, in this case, goes both ways. Embraced as one of the elders, a peculiar elder to be sure, Ketchum somehow fits right in.
"I don't have a problem with being difficult to categorize," he says.
Sonoma County writer Martin A. Lee is the author of 'Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of the LSD,The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond.' He is writing a social history of marijuana.