Thank you and welcome. When people hear that we're doing a talk on psychoactive chemicals
in combat, the first response was usually, ooh, drugs, yay. However, the fact is that
we have caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine already being three major psychoactive substances
that are being used consistently throughout our society legally in order to help people
function or sometimes function less. In terms of psychoactive chemicals, the major classes
roughly are stimulants, depressants, antipsychotics, and hallucinogenics. And then there's sort
of a crossover, as you can see by this Venn diagram, of effects that you see that create
sort of the subclasses, if you will, that we'll be talking about to some degree. When
trying to find out what the classes are, it turns out that there aren't, there isn't
really a consistent classification used for them. So this is as close as, and kludgy,
as it gets.
Yeah, and worth noting, classifying by effects can make it easier for kind of the layman
to understand. But the big issue with that, too, is the variability in individual response
to different drugs. A good example would be like people with ADHD's response to Adderall,
where they find it more calming, making it easier to focus.
Likes per thumb, please!
As opposed to most people taking Adderall.
Adderall, where it just amps them up and jacks them up. The other kind of more technically
precise method would be by actual chemical structure. The issue with that being unless
you're, you know, really into and reading about structure-activity relationships and
stuff, most people can get lost with that pretty easily.
When we decided to talk about this topic, we had to limit the scope as a result. We
ended up defining it as we're looking to look at the experiments where psychoactive drugs,
psychoactive drugs were conducted by the military, either while at war or in preparation
for war. This also, as the research continued, it ended up involving the self-experiments
by military personnel, and looking at, to some extent, the long-term outcomes of these
military human experiments.
The first way that the military would like to use psychoactive drugs, of course, is weaponizing.
It's kind of one of the purposes of the military is to have weapons on hand to be used. One
of the first...
examples we'd like to talk about is the Moscow hostage crisis in 2002. There were 850 hostages
and 40 terrorists in a theater in Moscow. The Russian officials pumped in an incapacitating
gas and then went into a two-hour firefight, killing all of the terrorists. Unfortunately,
130 of the hostages also died, mostly due to the fact that the incapacitating gas hit
them in different ways. Also, because the hospitals were never informed of exactly what
that gas is.
That's why we're calling it the incapacitating gas, and not actually referencing what it
is. To this day, the authorities have never confirmed what it is.
There was some testing that was done on the clothing of people who were in the theater
at the time, some of the hostages. They did find traces of fentanyl analogs. For those
who aren't familiar, fentanyl is a synthetic opiate. Depending on the analog, a couple
hundred to a couple thousand times as potent as morphine. You're talking about a microgram
dose.
Quite a few of the deaths have been reported. There have been a number of deaths in the
past that have been attributed to the doctors not knowing how to treat the overdose. Because
they weren't given any information on what the drug was, they might have seen the symptoms
and assumed it's an opiate overdose, these are the symptoms of an opiate overdose. Unfortunately,
with fentanyl and with its derivatives, because it's so much more potent than your standard
opiate, a lot of the tools that would be used to treat an opiate overdose would not
be as effective.
With more information, there probably would have been a lot more lives saved in that
incident.
The next incident we would like to talk about is Project Coast, which took place basically
in the 80s through 90s. It was the South Africa's chemical and biological weapons
program. They were mostly dedicated to conventional testing, but they did have a small program
that was looking at weaponizing drugs like MDMA, Quaaludes, BZ. Then they also started
to look into developing non-lethal incapacitants for riot control. Unfortunately, the methodology
there was not as successful as they had hoped, and as a result, the project really just ended
up putting a chunk of those drugs out into the community. Then the head of the project,
in addition to that graft, was also giving South African agents the sedatives in order
to aid in the abductions and assassinations. Unfortunately, it was usually not as effective,
so they ended up either having to up the dosage to try and make it effective, or just
send it up manually, strangulating people instead.
Okay.
I just don't have anything to say right now.
Oh, they want us to trade. Got it. I was just going to project really loudly and let
him have the mic. Apparently we're going to trade back and forth. All right. The military
run, U.S. military run, Edward Arsenal is our third one, and that was 1948 to 1975. That
was a very fairly long-running one. It started out doing nerve testing, and then it started
to look into developing the non-lethal alternatives, testing PCP, LSD. There were 7,000 soldiers
and 1,000 civilians participating in this program. There was 250 different chemicals
tested. And it was, again, they did not have the necessary equipment. They did not have
great methodology. It was not getting anything resembling good results.
I'm totally lost. So, yeah, so worth noting here as well, down at the bottom there, is
that 30% of volunteer hours were spent testing incapacitating agents, which were mainly
things like LSD, THC analogs, and then BZ as well, because a large part of the program
was testing.
They were testing nerve gases and all that, but a significant amount, much larger than
a lot of other government programs you see, was actually spent testing psychoactive chemicals.
And for those who aren't familiar, BZ is a chemical. It's a, how do we pronounce that?
Antichologenic. It has sort of a deliriant effect. It's similar to scolopamine, atrophine,
or high doses of diphenhydramine, really unpleasant stuff. And then also, they investigated all
of these chemicals, just to give you an idea of, like, how much they cared about the people
exposed to these things. BZ was the one they pursued the most, getting to the point of
actually manufacturing, like, artillery rounds to disperse it. It was never used, but that
was the one that they actually saw the most promise in.
This is also one of the first cases where we clearly saw that the long-term effects
of experiments like this were not really treated well.
It was ignored for a while, and then they finally got around to acknowledging it years later,
and started to work with the veterans at that point to inform them about what was going on.
The lack of informed consent and the lack of follow-up are two ongoing problems throughout
most of these projects. This is especially true when we talk about the next one, MK Ultra.
You knew it would have to appear on this list. It's the U.S. Army Chemical Corps coordinated
with the CIA, which is how it fits in.
It's just infamous for its investigations into mind control, interrogation, truth serums,
while using the psychedelics and other drugs. However, it was racked with ethical violations
in the selection and treatment of test subjects, especially in terms of they were willing to
target refugees, prisoners of war. They took strangers and dosed them without their knowledge.
This was not a well-run, over-umbrella program. The experiments lacked purpose, and the
many of the records ended up being destroyed, no doubt, to the numerous ethical violations.
There were 80 institutions involved in the program, 44 of which were colleges and universities.
So this wasn't just a small little undercover op that happened briefly. It was an ongoing program
with 149 sub-projects, and yet the data is mostly not there because they destroyed it,
and the records, financial and otherwise, that we have that help kind of indicate what was going on.
Not good. Not good.
Any additional?
When we look at projects like this and the historical attempt to weaponize psychoactive drugs,
what we run into is that there just aren't that many situations where they're truly useful.
Trying to incapacitate a crowd could be useful, but there's no consistent reaction to the psychoactive agents.
And when you're trying to hit a crowd, you don't know how old they are, how much they weigh,
and because the delivery and the dispersal is difficult,
it's going to be uneven.
So you're going to hit an overdose to the little old lady and an underdose to the big hulking guy.
And the chances of that overdose are relatively high, as we saw with the Moscow incident.
The powerful agents, especially, are too easy to overdose or underdose.
And we see here a few weaponized drugs.
Really, we have no, there's no actual official evidence of psychoactives being used in a sort of open context.
There are some anecdotes, bits and pieces of it being used in the Middle East over the past 20 years,
maybe during Saddam Hussein's regime.
But in terms of active deployment by major militaries, we just don't see it.
They usually stick with, when they want to put people down and keep them alive,
irritants like tear gas and stuff.
And it's also worth noting that another contributing factor to why we don't see weaponized drugs,
is there are a lot of the psychoactive chemicals that would be good candidates for use are also very unstable.
And so when you want to be able to package something, ship it overseas,
have it be able to withstand heat, have it be able to withstand light,
there are not a lot of good candidates for that either.
But when it comes to talking about good candidates, stimulants.
One of the surprises to me was exactly how extensively the military experiments on the troops.
And since there is a military, apparently there has been experimenting on the troops,
we've picked up the story in World War II, in the golden age of amphetamines,
when meth just came onto the scene, and Japan and Germany adopted it
and quickly put it into use in both the civilian and military populations.
There was a billion doses produced and used in Japan.
During a short duration of months, we can confirm that 29 million doses,
1 million of the pills, and 35 million doses the following year were created.
But these are for short periods of that year.
If you extrapolate it out, they're getting closer to the billion mark themselves.
The stimulants were also being used on the other side.
Once Japan and Germany were using them,
Britain, the US, both the Axis and the Allies thought that that was a fantastic idea.
And there was 60 to 72 million doses
of amphetamines that we know of being distributed into the troops.
This is an actual war poster, and it just, we don't know what he's on,
but he's really feeling it.
With World War II ending, the reports that doctors had been putting together
and reporting back to the military that,
hey, this is not that great for people to take all the time,
they actually started to pay attention now that the fear of losing the war was ebbing.
And as a result, the militaries actually started to restrict their use.
And they started restricting it to, well, in case of combat,
and, oh, well, pilots will need it.
And, you know, there's some special missions where people need to stay awake.
And that became the restriction factor.
The, and that's just basically how it stayed.
The amphetamines of some nature in most militaries were the way to, you know,
stay awake and be able to go on the missions that were needed.
More recently, we've started to see the new stimulants like modafinil.
Modafinil's gone through trials with various militaries.
It's only been adopted officially by the U.S. Air Force in 2012.
It's really the only one we saw where they officially said that it was,
been added to the roster.
It doesn't mean that more experiments aren't going on,
or it hasn't been supplementing in areas that we don't know about.
The interesting one I thought was that, in addition to the,
the other legal way to help troops,
was the rise in prescriptions.
Ritalin and Adderall, the data from a certain time period,
showed that there was a thousand percent increase over five years
of service members being able to have a prescription for essentially stimulants.
And certainly some of them came in from the community needing that prescription,
and it was for that specific medical purpose.
But when it's a thousand percent jump in five years,
I feel like that is an area where we might want to research
and see if that's not perhaps a gray area
in which stimulants are being acquired.
The problem with all of the stimulants
is that at some point you also need the depressants
and the antipsychotics.
Having, having stimulants pumping through people's system
is not the healthiest thing,
and when you combine it in a combat situation,
you start running into psychological conditions.
There's PTSD, the depression,
just the general battle fatigue that is,
it may not fully develop
into PTSD, but as the Army has said,
every man has their breaking point.
As a result, from pretty early on,
barbiturates and alcohol were legally prescribed
during World War II as part of therapy.
So your therapist is going to get you drunk
and get you to talk about what happened,
because that's how therapy worked then.
It was talk therapy.
They thought that if everything was bottled up,
that was actually the big blocker to just moving past the incident.
As time progressed and different therapies developed
and different chemicals developed,
they ended up going more with Thorazine in Vietnam
to help with that piece,
which is probably good,
because Vietnam is widely considered
the pharmacological age of the military in some respects,
because there was a lot of drug use going on.
And in Vietnam specifically,
we actually see that they deployed
a large contingent of psychiatrists
as part of the medical staff going to Vietnam.
It's the first time, I think,
that at least the U.S. military
was really putting a lot of thought into the
sort of headspace that their soldiers were in,
that they were really trying a little bit harder
to manage the mental health of their soldiers.
Probably not very well,
but it's certainly something that they were really starting
to take notice of in this time period.
The last one is one that I don't ever hear talked about,
and that's the fact that the troops do self-experiments,
and there's the caffeine, the nicotine, the alcohol, of course.
That's standard in society,
and then it's certainly standard
and exasperated within the military to some extent.
There's also the illegal or gray use
of heroin, marijuana, opium,
and whatever else they could get their hands on
that would be effective.
And to me, we all know what's happening
to some extent the same way that everyone knows
that people are having coffee every day.
But they don't look at the interactions.
They're pumping them full of stimulants,
and then they're not actually checking to see,
well, what does that do when you're taking that much caffeine,
that much nicotine, that much alcohol in your sleep depth?
What does that do to you?
Those are not questions that I saw being asked,
so that was concerning to me.
When we look at current military and veteran experiments,
we know amphetamines and we know modafinil are being used.
We know that Night Eagle is a thing
that the Chinese say might be in existence.
We don't have any data on that, of course,
but it sounds really interesting
and a possible equal to or better than modafinil.
Whether it's propaganda or science fact,
we won't know for a while.
The rest, we don't have the clearance.
The modern military is not going to just say,
yes, you can just read up on everything
that we're doing right now.
So sadly, this is the very thin section.
The current VA programs that are interesting,
the Million Vet Program,
they're DNA sampling the veterans
and some of the active duty personnel
in an attempt to, I believe it was phrased
as improve health services.
Given the way that we've seen
some of the previous military experiments run,
I'm slightly hesitant to say
that that's the best idea I've ever heard.
The one I do like, though, is the MDMA PTSD trials
because in the 70s, they showed that one or two doses
of MDMA in therapy showed great promise
for resolving PTSD issues altogether,
which is amazing.
Through a variety of political and other reasons,
those trials didn't go anywhere until very recently.
This year, they were approved to have veterans trial it,
and I'm very much looking forward to those results.
And kind of correlating to current MDMA trials
and just the slow increase in research
in psychedelics and stuff,
you see more reports,
more reports of troops self-experimenting
with substances like MDMA, mushrooms, cannabis,
to try to treat PTSD and related issues as well.
And whether that's on the rise
or it's just the reporting's on the rise,
we don't really know.
But those kind of things definitely
are mirroring each other.
Absolutely.
And it's not just the PTSD,
but also the comorbidity of the alcoholism,
the depression.
These are all things that they're trying to treat together.
Basically, for our conclusions,
more research is needed just across the board
for a lot of things,
certainly with PTSD and drugs.
As we were alluding to,
do these stimulants contribute to PTSD?
That's a question that I don't see being asked,
and I want an answer.
I would love to see more people answering it.
Do the interactions of the drugs
that the military are dispensing
and that the troops are self-administering,
how do those work?
How is this contributing to any number of the ailments
that can happen involving combat scenarios?
And then just how effective is self-medication
in self-medication?
We hear about it,
and everyone widely acknowledges
that there is self-medication happening amongst troops,
usually with alcohol and other things,
but no one's looking to see how effective is it?
Is there a way to supplement it or do better with it?
And I think that that's also a fantastic question
that should be asked and researched.
In terms of our overall conclusions,
I think just greater responsibility.
The military has done an amazing job
at acknowledging a lot of the things
that they've done wrong,
and they try to rectify it.
They still have room for improvement.
We should never be in another situation
where the ends justifies the means,
and we shouldn't have to see the military
failing to provide long-term care follow-up
for experiments that they're doing.
One of the things that I'm not sure how we can resolve
is that there is informed consent.
Can't really happen in the military.
The military is in a position of power over the troops,
and the military is providing those troops
with a mindset that says,
I will do whatever you tell me,
no questions asked.
In addition, even if we want to move past that,
President Clinton signed Executive Order 13139,
which allows the waiving of informed consent
to service members under a very broad definition of it.
It has to be asked for, but it can be granted.
Also, I've had a number of,
I'll call it spontaneous admissions
by a number of veterans when I was talking with them
about this topic,
where they were telling me how, yeah,
they were told to present arm,
and they got a shot in the arm,
or, you know,
or they presented their hand and got pills,
and if they asked what it was,
they might be told maybe.
And to this day,
most of them don't actually know
what got put in their bodies.
The last one is just that information dissemination is,
it's critical to be able to do good research,
and the military has classified materials
that we don't know about,
so we don't know if some of our assumptions here are wrong,
because we don't have the data.
We also don't know how those experiments really happened,
because we don't have enough data
on what, if it was peer-reviewed,
what were the methodologies, et cetera.
It's a problem.
As the older experiments get declassified,
we get to learn some of those details
and start making some value calls,
but others, we may never know.
That translates over when the civilians
who work in that sector
have put up paywalls in the NIH databases,
or because of corporate secrecy and IP,
that they are not going to want to share details
that might be relevant to the research.
The ultimate takeaway, though,
is that if this is,
we're talking about the government,
and government information and data and experiments,
that that information should be available in some way.
Yep.
So, what questions do you have?
Was there anything found on military animals,
like military dogs or anything like that?
Not military dogs.
There were a number of animal tests that were done,
but usually people,
we were mostly focused on the human experiments.
Right.
There was a trial,
trial's not the right word,
there was an experiment that was conducted in China
involving myostatin inhibition in dogs,
and it was suggested by the researcher
and his conclusion that one of the possible applications
would be for military or police dogs.
Right.
So, but that's about the most that I think we saw.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah, I just know like,
like for example Benadryl in a dog
is like four times higher dose.
So I wonder like if you're gassing a population
and they've got dogs,
would the dogs go down, would they not?
But it'd be interesting to see if they were,
try to figure that out.
That's a good question.
Hi, thanks for the speech.
Are you familiar with DMSO,
the drug that allows the transdermal absorption of chemicals?
Has your research shown that,
that's been a heavy part of testing?
I kind of study this area and it's,
there's a lot of people claiming it's being used
in nonconsensual experiments or abuses.
I mean, it's certainly possible it could be used.
We didn't see it named anywhere.
Yeah, again back to the having reliable sources piece.
We've seen a lot of very interesting rumors
and terrifying out there,
but for things that we don't know,
things that could actually be backed up,
I didn't see anything in that realm.
Okay.
Yeah, it's hard to get the hard evidence
without a congressional investigation.
Do you know about any research on traumatic brain injury
and interactions with this?
When you're talking about military population,
there's so many traumatic brain injuries
and in terms of healing,
is anybody doing that?
There is some research out there.
It's interesting.
It's very recent.
I want to say the past 10 years especially.
I'm seeing that that specific phrase is being used more and more
when they're talking about PTSD and traumatic brain injury
and the depression.
But the TBI just definitely popped up several times.
But they didn't tease it out as a distinction,
which I found interesting.
It was usually here we're trying to treat things
and my focus was more on the PTSD
because of the stimulant interaction.
I too would be curious to see if there's a tie at all.
So I think that's a fantastic one.
Thank you.
So I was just wondering,
as you know,
I'm one of those spontaneous admissions.
They gave me some pills.
They were like, take these things, right?
So my question would be,
do you know of anybody who,
is there any sort of movement to bring this to light?
Because right now,
it's very much like a kind of mythology that exists.
I mean, military guys will trade the stories back and forth,
but when you tell a civilian,
they tend to be like, yeah, right.
You know what I mean?
And so is there any sort of movement
to bring this to light
and maybe correct it or rectify that problem?
Also, your talk was awesome.
As far as I'm aware,
there's no direct movement for it.
Certainly there's been at times
the government tries to make the correction.
I think that some of the vet programs
have sort of made motions in that direction.
I think in particular,
there's an onus on society to be the one to do this
because we're the ones that have created a military
that takes somebody and teaches them
that they aren't allowed to ask for help.
And then we put them in a situation where they need it.
So I agree that we need to have a push
to try and help those who can't ask for it.
Any other questions?
Thank you both very much.
Thank you.