Psychoactive Agents Research Chemical Warfare Edgewood Maryland 1950s US Army

• By Cali Shaye
• Synthetic Marijuana
• 14 years ago
• 9

Beginning in the mid-1950s, the US Army conducted research involving thousands of human subjects on various chemical agents, including LSD, BZ and marijuana derivatives, to assess their utility for chemical warfare applications. Army doctors gave soldier volunteers synthetic marijuana, LSD, BZ and other psychoactive drugs during experiments aimed at developing chemical weapons that could incapacitate enemy soldiers. The program, which ran at the Army’s Edgewood, Md., arsenal from 1955 until about 1972, concluded that counterculture staples such as acid and pot were either too unpredictable or too mellow to be useful as weapons. One of the leading participants in that enterprise, Dr. James S. Ketchum, has published a memoir entitled “Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten.” (www.forgottensecrets.net ), a detailed autobiographical reconstruction of the Edgewood Arsenal program of evaluating possible incapacitating agents in human volunteers (enlisted men) during the 1960s. This clip is from the 1950s episode, the Unseen Weapon, from the The Big Picture documentary television program which ran on the American Broadcasting Company from 1953 to 1959. The program consisted of documentary films produced by the United States Army Signal Corps Army Pictorial Service