Over at 10 Zen Monkeys there’s an interview with Dr. James Ketchum, one of the chief scientists involved with Edgewood Arsenal’s investigation of incapacitating agents such as LSD and BZ. Dr. Ketchum has self-published his memoir of this research during the 1960s, Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten. The book’s web site is one of the worst I have seen in a long time, so I certainly hope the book is put together better than the site. [Update: As a result of my complaining, the site was redesigned and is now safe to visit!]
He has some interesting stories about tests with BZ, which is I think the more interesting of the incapacitants because it causes true hallucinations—the person can’t tell the difference between the hallucination and reality. For example, he tells one story of a guy who watched a tiny baseball game being played on the floor. In another test:
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.
Ketchum also gives credit to the Russians for their use of a fentanyl drug as an incapacitant in the Moscow Theater siege, which probably kept the terrorists from blowing everyone up.
The U.S. eventually gave up on these types of agents because the affected people reacted unpredictably, and the effect could last in some cases for days on end. 
In some cases with LSD, subjects’ personalities were altered (although not always for worse.) Ketchum does note that the U.S. had a few BZ weapons stockpiled, but these were never used. In any case, we sure got lots of kooky stories out of the research. Last year I saw some old movies of research with BZ, and I gotta say, that shizzle was funny. Here’s a clip of some U.S. troops marching on LSD.
Filed under: incapacitants, military, nonlethal weapons, weird
BZ? That wouldn’t be belladonna zomething, would it? I heard spooky, spooky stories about that stuff.
I’m sure you know this, but for the benefit of those playing at home…they used to sell a cigarette for asthma sufferers (!) called Asmadore. The thing in them that made your bronchia dilate was belladonna (belladonna=”beautiful lady” — women would use it in eye drops to make their pupils dilate). Anyhoo! If you unrolled an Asmadore and dissolved it in a glass of water, you were guaranteed three days of a horrible high complete with vivid hallucinations indistinguishable from reality.
One guy I know walked for hours in a straight line through a beautiful forest without leaving his basement. Another saw the indians on his blanket come to life and was found in the front yard crawling on his belly with a shotgun going after them.
Both recovered fully and with vivid and intact memory of the experience, but neither could ever twease reality from hallucination. I’m happy to say, neither of those guys is me.
Crazy stuff! Maybe not the best idea to have guns & ammo around someone taking these drugs. If you’re interested in technical details, see BZ, atropine, the active ingredient in belladonna, and scopolamine, a source of which is jimsonweed, which my grandma told me the farm kids used to smoke and get high on. They’re all related anticholinergics.
Ah, I’ve heard of people smoking jimsonweedm too. I also heard it could be fatal, which Wikipedia confirms. The effective dose and the toxic dose are very close. Sounds like a horrible high. Loved this bit:
Which brings us full circle to chemical warfare.
Funny – at least they didn’t get accused of being possessed or something. Datura was also the plant Carlos Castaneda claimed to have taken in Mexico that enabled him to fly. As I recall (it’s been many years since I read this) he made a tea out of it on one occasion. He described his legs getting rubbery, then stretching longer and longer as he walked, until he was bounding along and then flying. There was a later occasion when he made a paste out of it, rubbed it on himself, and turned into a crow (and of course, flew). Whew.
hey! I’ve been here before! An old thread about the anesthetic gas — a superheroin — the Russians used in the theater hostage crisis in Moscow.
Anyway, for a post to commemorate the passing of the discoverer of LSD, I’m filching your Mickey Mouse Sorcerer’s Apprentice LSD dose image. Thanks!