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Army's Conquer by Cannabis Plan
04.08.07|SFGate

The U.S. Army, in a search for "nonlethal incapacitating agents," tested cannabis-based drugs on GI volunteers throughout the 1960s according to Dr. James Ketchum, the psychiatrist who led the classified research program at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.

Ketchum retired as a colonel in 1976 and lives in Santa Rosa. He has written a memoir, "Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten," in which he describes experiments conducted at Edgewood and defends the Army's ethical standards. In a talk to the Society of Cannabis Clinicians in Los Angeles last month, Ketchum recounted to 20 doctors the Army's experiments with cannabinoid drugs.

(The society was founded in 2000 by Dr. Tod Mikuriya, a Berkeley psychiatrist with a long-standing interest in cannabis therapeutics, to provide a forum in which doctors monitoring cannabis use by California patients could share information.)

Ketchum was a young captain finishing a residency at Walter Reed Army Hospital when he was assigned in 1961 to be the supervising psychiatrist at Edgewood Arsenal. The new president, John F. Kennedy, was enthusiastic about funding the search for nonlethal incapacitants (first authorized by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958).

The synthetic analog of THC tested by the Army in pursuit of this ideal, EA 2233, was developed by a chemist named Harry Pars employed by the Arthur D. Little company of Cambridge, Mass. It was a mixture of eight isomers of the THC molecule (different arrangements of the same atoms). EA 2233 was ingested at strengths ranging from 10 to 60 micrograms per kilogram of body weight. Although its effects lasted up to 30 hours, they were not potent enough for military purposes.

Ketchum excerpts an interview in his book between a scientist and a GI on EA 2233:

Q: How are you?

A: Pretty good, I guess.

Q: Pretty good?

A: Well, not so good maybe.

Q: You've got a big grin on your face.

A: Yeah. I don't know what I'm grinning about either. ...

Q: Suppose you had to get up and go to work now. How would you do?

A: I don't think I'd even care.

Q: Suppose the place was on fire?

A: I don't think it would be -- 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.

Q: Can you think of anything now which would seem hazardous or worry you? ...

A: No. No. Everything just seems funny in the Army. Seems like everything somebody says, it sounds a little bit funny.

When the isomers of EA 2233 were isolated and purified following 1964, they were tested by Edgewood doctor Fred Sidell (while Ketchum focused on more promising incapacitants, mainly an atropine derivative with opiate properties, known as BZ, and LSD). Two of the THC isomers caused dramatic drops in blood pressure, according to Ketchum, so the lab stopped testing all of them. But Ketchum still wonders if one of the potent isomers would work as an incapacitant.

"The finding that isomers 2 and 4 possessed uniquely powerful postural hypotensive effects that prevented standing without fainting led Sidell to discontinue testing out of an abundance of caution for the welfare of the subjects. It later occurred to me that this property, in an otherwise nonlethal compound, might be an ideal way to produce temporary inability to fight (or do much else) without toxicological danger to life."

Only a small fraction of Ketchum's work at Edgewood involved THC derivatives. Ketchum says he was motivated to write his memoir because the media has conflated the ethical, scientific drug studies conducted by the Army on knowing volunteers with the kinky, unsafe drug studies conducted by the CIA on unwitting civilians.

A chapter of Ketchum's book is devoted to informed consent. GIs considered Edgewood Arsenal what we used to call "good duty" and volunteered with alacrity for the two-month stint.

"We never needed to browbeat, threaten or hint at repercussions for someone's unwillingness to participate in a drug test," Ketchum writes. "Invariably, would-be volunteers inundated us with applications, year after year. An abundance of troops were obviously more than willing to jump through all the hoops required in order to make the list of accepted candidates. In fact, the ratio of the number of applicants to the number accepted increased progressively throughout the 1960s."

When Ketchum arrived at Edgewood in 1961, the detachment of test subjects consisted of 20 men. By 1963 it was 50. "Eventually a cohort of 60-80 arrived, requiring the prior review of as many as 300-500 applicants," he writes. Some 7,000 enlisted men took part in the program, most between 1961 and 1970.

"None, to my knowledge, returned home with a significant injury or illness attributable to chemical exposure," Ketchum says. "Nevertheless, years later, a few former volunteers did claim that the testing had caused them to suffer from some malady." Those claims came from subjects exposed to agents other than EA 2233, he says.

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BillieBudd

"A: No. No. Everything just seems funny in the Army. Seems like everything somebody says, it sounds a little bit funny."

Since the beginning of time, any soldier with a brain has thought that!

Buzzby

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Darque Pervert

Am I the only one who thinks that bomb or missile or whatever looks surprisingly like a joint?

fuzzyninja

No, you're not. I think it's supposed to look like that.

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Whenever you feel all meaning is gone - kick back your feet and light up a bong.