MSTed: LSD, CIA, MST -- OH MY! pt 4/5 NEW!!!
Lisa D. Jenkins
Part 4
MiSTied by Lisa Jenkins
DISCLAIMER:
_Mystery Science Theater 3000_, its characters and situations are copyright
1994 Best Brains, Inc. This publication is not meant to infringe on any
copyrights held by Best Brains, Comedy Central, its employees or the
originator of the material for this post. This article is free to distribute
as long as its contents and this notice remains intact.
[Continued from part 3:]
[Satellite of Love Theater]
[MIKE carries TOM in and CROW follows them in.]
TOM: Woo-hoo! That was fun!
MIKE: I'm so high, man.
CROW: Who knew Elmer's glue was that versatile?
>
> The CIA inherited this ambiguous legacy when it embraced LSD as a mind
> control drug.
MIKE: [dark voice] It was a dangerous love-affair. One that would only end
in -- MURDER!
> An ARTICHOKE document dated October 21, 1951, indicates
> that acid was tested initially as part of a pilot
TOM: --show for CBS. But "Space Rangers" beat them out.
> study of the effects
> of various chemicals "on the conscious suppression of experimental or
> non-threat secrets". In addition to lysergic acid this particular
> survey covered a wide range of substances, including morphine, ether,
> Benzedrine, ethyl alcohol, and mescaline. "There is no question," noted
> the author of this report, "that drugs are already on hand (and new ones
> are being produced)
CROW: --because we're so dependent on them, and they build up in our systems
and we need MORE!
> that can destroy integrity and make indiscreet the
> most dependable individual." The report concluded by recommending that
> LSD be critically tested "under threat conditions beyond the scope of
> civilian experimentation".
MIKE: I'll use this in the military. I swear I will, Dad, if you send me to
military school.
> POWs, federal prisoners, and Security
> officers were mentioned as possible candidates for these field
> experiments.
TOM: Why not? They've used just about everyone else.
>
> In another study designed to ascertain optimal dosage levels for
> interrogation sessions, a CIA psychiatrist administered LSD to "at least
> 12 human subjects _of not too high mentality_".
MIKE: Oh, nice. Now we're using people in our mentally handicapped hospitals
as guinea pigs.
TOM: Like it's not been done before, Mike.
MIKE: I don't want to listen to this.
> At the outset the
> subjects were "told only that a new drug was being tested and promised
> that nothing serious or dangerous would happen to them.... During the
> intoxication they realized something was happening, but were never told
> exactly what."
CROW: Although eventually they realized that their heads had mysteriously
swollen three times their size.
> A dosage range of 100 to 150 micrograms was finally
> selected, and the Agency proceeded to test the drug in mock
> interrogation trials.
CROW: Does this bug you? I've injected 150 micrograms into you!
>
> Initial reports seemed promising. In one instance LSD was given to an
> officer who had been instructed not to reveal "a significant military
> secret". When questioned, however, "he gave all the details of the
> secret...
TOM: He was never really that good of an officer, anyway.
> and after the effects of the LSD had worn off, the officer
> had no knowledge of revealing the information (complete amnesia)."
MIKE: Little did they know that he was really testing them instead of the
other way around.
> Favorable reports kept coming in,
CROW: "I love your drugs! Keep up the good work!"
> and when this phase of experimentation
> was completed, the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI)
> prepared a lengthy memorandum entitled "Potential New Agent for
> Unconventional Warfare".
TOM: They stole the material from Stoll's own article which was already
plagiarized.
> LSD was said to be useful "for eliciting true
> and accurate statements from subjects under its influence during
> interrogation".
CROW: --except when they were lying.
> Moreover, the data on hand suggested that LSD might
> help in reviving memories of past experiences.
TOM: Even though testing LSD showed its effects gave the user complete
amnesia, they wanted to use it to revive memories?
MIKE: Perhaps they were trying to do regression with LSD and revive past life
memories.
>
> It almost seemed to good to be true -- a drug that unearthed secrets
> buried deep in the unconscious mind but also caused amnesia during the
> effective period.
CROW: If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
> The implications were downright astounding. Soon the
> entire CIA hierarchy was head over heels
TOM: --in love with drugs all over again!
> as news of what appeared to be
> a major breakthrough sent shock waves rippling through headquarters.
MIKE: At first it was attributed to the news, but then they realized that it
was only an earthquake.
> (C.P.Snow once said, "The euphoria of secrecy goes to the head.")
CROW: --and makes you want to tell everybody else the secret which makes it
not quite as secret any more, you know?
> For
> years they had searched, and now they were on the verge of finding the
> Holy Grail of the cloak-and-dagger trade.
CROW: So the Grail Harrison Ford drank out of in that Indy Jones movie was
really filled with LSD diluted in water?
TOM: LSD heals everything.
> As one CIA officer recalled,
> "We had thought at first this was the secret that was going to unlock
> the universe."
MIKE: Hey, I knew a lot of people who thought LSD GAVE them the answers to the
Universe.
>
> But the sense of elation did not last long.
TOM: They came crashing at the end of their LSD-induced high.
> As the secret research
> progressed, the CIA ran into problems. Eventually they came to
> recognize that LSD was not really a truth serum in the classical sense.
CROW: Instead, it was more of a funk-rock type of drug.
> Accurate information could not always be obtained from people under the
> influence of LSD because it induced a "marked anxiety and loss of
> reality contact".
TOM: "Mr. Smith, what was it liked to be drugged?"
MIKE: "Uh, I dunno. Uh, cool, I guess."
TOM: "Could you be more SPECIFIC, Mr. Smith?"
MIKE: "Uh, no."
> Those who received unwitting doses experienced an
> intense distortion of time, place, and body image, frequently
> culminating in full-blown paranoid reactions.
TOM: OH MY GOD! MY FEET ARE SWOLLEN!
MIKE: Tom, you don't have feet.
> The bizarre
> hallucinations caused by the drug often proved more of a hindrance than
> an aid to the interrogation process. There was always the risk, for
> example, that an enemy spy who started to trip out would realize he'd
> been drugged.
MIKE: "Hey, man! I see trails! You drugged me, man! Hey, cool."
> This could make him overly suspicious and taciturn to the
> point of clammy up entirely.
CROW: Nope, nope. Ain't gonna talk. Can't make me. Nope.
MIKE: Shut up, Crow.
>
> There were other pitfalls that made the situation even more precarious
> from an interrogation standpoint. While anxiety was the predominant
> characteristic displayed during LSD sessions, some people experienced
> delusions of grandeur and omnipotence.
TOM: I am Q!
> An entire operation might
> backfire if someone had an ecstatic or transcendental experience and
> became convinced that he could defy his interrogators indefinitely.
MIKE: Are you gonna tell us?
CROW: No!
MIKE: Are you sure you won't tell us?
CROW: No! I mean, yes!
> And
> then there was the question of amnesia, which was not as cut-and-dried
> as first supposed.
MIKE: Now, did I have amnesia when I first started out? I can't remember....
> Everyone agreed that a person would probably have a
> difficult time recalling exactly what happened while he was high on LSD,
> but that didn't mean his mind would be completely blank.
CROW: Duh...my mind's a complete blank. No, wait! I remember Patrick Swayze
walking in and saying--
ALL: "It's my way or the highway."
MIKE: That's pretty close to empty, though.
> While the drug
> might distort memory to some degree, it did not destroy it.
TOM: So, you thought you could give me LSD and I'd forget the twenty bucks you
owe me, huh? Well, think again, mister!
>
> When CIA scientists tested a drug for speech-inducing purposes and found
> that it didn't work, they usually put it aside and tried something else.
CROW: It doesn't work. I give up.
> But such was not the case with LSD.
TOM: The drug was just too darned fun!
> Although early reports proved
> overoptimistic, the Agency was not about the discard such a powerful and
> unusual substance simply because it did not live up to its original
> expectations.
MIKE: They suspected that their subjects were building a kind of immunity to
the drugs, meaning they would have to give them more in order to create
any kind of effect.
> They had to shift gears.
TOM: [makes a car shifting gears noise] Hey, if you can't find 'em, grind
'em! Heh heh.
> A reassessment of the strategic
> implications of LSD was necessary. If, strictly speaking, LSD was not a
> reliable truth drug, then how else could it be used?
CROW: You could stop speaking so strict and have really, really cool trips.
TOM: Only the stupid die young.
>
> CIA researchers were intrigued by this new chemical, but they didn't
> quite know what to make of it.
MIKE: So -- do we eat it, snort it or rub it all over our bodies?
> LSD was significantly different from
> anything else they knew about. "The most fascinating thing about it," a
> CIA psychologist recalled, "was that such minute quantities had such a
> terrible effect."
TOM: LSD is a terrible thing to waste.
> Mere micrograms could create "serious mental
> confusion... and render the mind temporarily susceptible to
> suggestion".
CROW: Cluck like a chicken.
TOM: [clucks like chicken]
CROW: Wow! It works!
> Moreover, the drug was colorless, odorless, and tasteless,
MIKE: Kind of bland, really.
> and therefore easily concealed in food and beverage. But it was hard to
> predict the response to LSD. On certain occasions acid seemed to cause
> an uninhibited disclosure of information, but oftentimes the
> overwhelming anxiety experienced by the subject obstructed the
> interrogation process. And there were unexplainable mood swings -- from
> total panic to boundless blissout.
CROW: [calmly] I'm at peace with myself. I am one. [paranoid] Get outta my
sight, you ugly a--!
MIKE: [grabs CROW's beak] Censorship. Gotta love it.
> How could one drug produce such
> extreme behavior and contradictory reactions? It didn't make sense.
TOM: She's my sister! *Ptsh!* She's my daughter! *Ptsh!*
MIKE: This post is so long, Tom's already done that joke.
TOM: Oops.
>
> As research continued, the situation became even more perplexing. At
> one point a group of Security officers did an about-face and suggested
> that acid might best be employed as an anti-interrogation substance:
CROW: Oh, great. Now they're going in the opposite direction! We're going
backwards through the book again!
>
> "Since information obtained from a person in a psychotic state
> would be unrealistic, bizarre, and extremely difficult to assess,
MIKE: "--we might be able to make the information into a really bizarre, cool
movie that will gross millions!"
TOM: Gross millions of people out, you mean.
> the _self-administration_ of LSD-25, which is effective in minute
> doses,
CROW: Because hourly doses are too far apart.
TOM: MINUUUTE doses, MINUUUTE!
> might in special circumstances offer an operative temporary
> protection against interrogation [emphasis added]."
MIKE: In special circumstances, I might add emphasis.
>
> This proposal was somewhat akin to a suicide pill scenario. Secret
> agents would be equipped with micro-pellets of LSD to take on dangerous
> assignments.
CROW: Now the CIA is telling their operatives to overdose on LSD? When will
the madness end!
> If they fell into enemy hands and were about to be
> interrogated, they could pop a tab of acid as a preventive measure and
> babble gibberish.
MIKE: Why pop a pill? Just tell them the plot to "Mighty Jack."
> Obviously this idea was impractical, but it showed
> just how confused the CIA's top scientists were about LSD.
MIKE: I'd say they were confused about a lot more than just LSD.
> First they
> thought it was a true serum, then a lie serum, and for a while they
> didn't know what to think.
TOM: Wait a minute. You're implying that the CIA THINKS!
CROW: Now THERE'S the contradiction.
>
> To make matters worse,
CROW: --the chapter continued.
> there was a great deal of concern within the
> Agency that the Soviets and the Red Chinese might also have designs on
> LSD as an espionage weapon.
CROW: I think if we dress it up in black, put a little bright red trim on the
side--
MIKE: Oh, no, it has to be green. They'll see the red trim a-comin'.
> A survey conducted by the Officer of
> Scientific Intelligence noted that ergot was a commercial product in
> numerous Eastern Bloc countries.
CROW: You can make a fungus?
MIKE: Sure, why not? I can "make" moldy bread.
> The enigmatic fungus also flourished
> in the Soviet Union, but Russian ergot had not yet appeared in foreign
> markets.
TOM: Just the Black Market.
> Could this mean the Soviets were hoarding their supplies?
TOM: No, it just meant everyone was allocated a certain amount of ergot every
week. The Soviet Union was very strict on supply control to their
citizens.
> Since information on the chemical structure of LSD was available in
> scientific journals as early as 1947, the Russians might have been
> stockpiling raw ergot in order to convert it into a mind control weapon.
MIKE: Oh, that's it. The Russians were gathering all the moldy rye bread
loafs and sticking them in a huge warehouse.
>
> "Although no Soviet data are available on LSD-25," the OSI study
> concluded, "it must be assumed that the scientists of the USSR are
> thoroughly cognizant of the strategic importance of this powerful
> new drug and are capable of producing it at any time."
MIKE: Oh, obviously. Especially because we're so paranoid about everything
the Soviets do and don't do. Come on, America! Maybe they've got
better things to think about!
TOM: Or perhaps better yet, they were smart enough to know the Americans were
stupid gits.
>
> Were the Russian really into acid? "I'm sure they were,"
CROW: Hey, man. EVERYONE wants to get high!
> asserted John
> Gittlinger, one of the CIA's leading psychologists during the Cold War,
> "but if you ask me to prove it, I've never seen any direct proof of it."
MIKE: That proves it right there. No direct proof proves the Russians did it.
> While hard evidence of a Soviet LSD connection was lacking,
TOM: Very.
> the CIA
> wasn't about to take any chances. What would happen, for example, if an
> American spy was caught and dosed by the Commies?
TOM: They would probably invite him in for tea and ask him to join them later
that night to the Kremlin for a dinner party.
> The CIA realized that
> an adversary intelligence service could employ LSD "to produce anxiety
> or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable to distinguish
> drug-induced psychosis from actual insanity".
MIKE: And I think we've sufficiently proven here that Americans were
pretty...unsophisticated subjects.
> The only way to be sure
> that an operative would not freak out under such circumstances would be
> to give him a taste of LSD (a mind control vaccine?) before he was sent
> on a sensitive overseas mission.
CROW: I'm POSITIVE we've heard this before.
MIKE: It was in the preview before the chapter started.
CROW: I'm having flashbacks even WITHOUT the aid of LSD!
> Such a person would know that the
> effects of the drug were transitory and would therefore be in a better
> position to handle the experience. CIA documents actually refer to
> agents who were familiar with LSD as "enlightened operatives".
CROW: I KNOW I made a comment about this once. I'm CERTAIN I did....
MIKE: Come on, guys, the Mads' are just trying to confuse you into thinking
they've drugged you!
CROW: It might just be working, Mike....
MIKE: Okay. Let's take a break.
[Door sequence]
[Satellite of Love]
[MIKE has opened up CROW to look at his wiring inside. MIKE poke at CROW's
innards with some instruments.]
CROW: He he! That tickles, Mike! Stop it!
MIKE: [holds out a hand to receive an instrument] Pliers.
TOM: Would love to serve you, Mike, but I haven't got working arms.
MIKE: Oh, right. [gets the pliers]
CROW: [waves arm wildly in the air] Oh, Mike! He, he! I can't stand it!
You're tickling me!
MIKE: Would you keep still? I'm trying to fix your deja vu sequencer.
TOM: You know, Mike, Crow was right. We HAD heard that passage before.
MIKE: I know. But humor me.
TOM: Okay. What do you get when you cross the CIA with LSD?
MIKE: I don't know. What?
TOM: A lot of acronyms!
[MIKE and TOM mock laugh.]
[Commercial sign lights flash.]
MIKE: Oh, that's too much. We'll be right back.
[To be continued....]
--
Lisa Jenkins "The euphoria of secrecy goes to the head."
jen...@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu --C.P.Snow