Table Of ContentCHEMICALWARFARE
SECRETS ALMOST
FORGOTTEN
APersonal Story of
Medical Testing of Army Volunteers
with Incapacitating Chemical Agents
During the Cold War
(1955-1975)
by
James S. Ketchum, MD
With a foreword by
Alexander Shulgin, PhD
Copyright © 2006 by James S. Ketchum
All rights reserved.
Published by ChemBooks Inc.
2304 Fairbanks Drive
Santa Rosa, California 95403
ISBN # 978-1-4243-0080-8
Registration Number TXu -1 - 333 – 097
Effective Date of Registration 11 Dec 2006
Cover design by Jim O’Neil
Dedicated to
My loving wife Judy Ann (Schaller) Ketchum
who helped and encouraged me
to undertake and complete
this book
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword – Alexander Shulgin, PhD
Prologue: Hot Night in Halifa
1 Cold War – Chemical Call to Arms 1
2 Incapacitating The Enemy Strange Fruit and Stray Smoke 9
3 Hello, Edgewood Arsenal 17
4 The Volunteers: Human Guinea Pigs – Not! 29
5 An Interesting Drug to Start With 35
6 BZ: Tiny Baseball Games and DC-3’s on a Padded Floor 43
7 LSD: The Other Acid Test 53
8 Working Out the Kinks 69
9 Busy as a Bee on a Dose of BZ 81
10 More Breeds than at a Dog Show 97
11 Taming the Fractious Belladonnoids 109
12 Altered States In Fish Tanks and Field Tests 117
13 Name Your Poison: Safety First and Always 127
14 Project Dork: Soldiering on BZ in the Utah Desert 141
15 Rummaging Through the Closet 153
16 Post-Doc with Pribram 171
17 Edgewood Again: Hoping for Déjà Vu 181
18 Good and Bad Vibrations Within and Without 193
19 Rearranging the Deck Chairs 201
20 Final Days at Edgewood 207
21 CIA Connections: Now You See Them, Now You Don’t 217
22 On Into the 70s and 80s 227
23 To the End of the Century and Beyond 235
24 Belated Alarms: What Have We Done? 243
25 Chemical Warfare Then and Now: A Reality Check 257
Appendix 269
FOREWORD
My first two interactions with the world of US Government
chemical warfare were in the 1950s or maybe the 1960s when I was
still a senior research chemist at the Dow Chemical Company in the
San Francisco Bay Area. They were totally opposite in the images of
secrecy and research process that they presented. I kept no notes, so
all is from ancient memory.
The first meeting was with two or three chemists in dark suits
and ties who were introduced to me and a half dozen other research
chemists as being government researchers in the area of potentially
interesting synthetic organic chemicals. We were not told from which
laboratory they came and the only clues to their areas of interest were
two synthetic reaction sequences which had been drawn on the
conference room blackboard. The man with the chalk told us that
these two pictures had been worked out successfully, and their
question was: could any of us propose a last step which might link
them together. The bottom compounds in the two schemes were
followed by arrows which pointed to an empty area at the bottom of
the blackboard. I asked them why not draw in the structure of the
desired product and they said that they were not at liberty to do so.
"Oh, nonsense," I said and got up and went to the blackboard
and drew the structure of the target. I drew the isomeric homologue
of tetrahydrocannabinol with the terpene double bond down in the
terpene 3,4-position and a 1,2-dimethylheptyl chain at the aromatic 3-
position. "This is the obvious product you want," I added as I
returned to my seat, "So why don't we discuss how this coupling
could be achieved."
There was an unmistakable discomfort shared by the
gentlemen from Washington. After a bit of discussion I volunteered
the statement, "Of course, with three chiral centers, there will be eight
distinct optical isomers possible, all of different pharmacology, and
some may not resemble marijuana at all in action." The meeting
broke up shortly thereafter. A lot of things just couldn't be talked
about.
The second meeting occurred at an informal conference with
some thirty people present, located at a retreat north of Los Angeles.
This was organized by my good friend (and secret trumpet player)
Daniel H. Efron, MD, PhD (1913-1972). This get-together was
sponsored by the Washington operation he ran, the Pharmacology
program at the National Institute of Mental Health. He told me to sit
over there, pointing to an interesting looking man who was a total
stranger. We introduced ourselves. I said my name was Sasha
Shulgin, and he said his name was Van Sim. "Oh," I asked him,
"What is your first name?" "Van is my first name -- I am Van M.
Sim."
We quickly discovered that we were both fascinated by
psychedelics (they were called psychotomimetic drugs at that time)
and that we were both personally experimenting with them. My art
was the synthesis of new ones to compare the difference in activity
due to structural changes (this at my laboratory at Dow and in my
basement lab at home) and his curiosity was met by varying not the
compound so much as the setting and the immediate environment
around him (this at his laboratory at Edgewood Arsenal). Oh! A
government scientist with whom there was nothing in the world that
couldn't be talked about.
Thus, this foreword is intended to prepare the reader for a
story that has never before been told, the telling of the history, the
origins and the development of the physical structure and the variety
of people who worked at both the Edgewood Arsenal and its
precursor, the Army Chemical Center. This it indeed does, with a
flood of photographs and names and candid viewings of the people
who worked there during the 11 or so years that Jim Ketchum was a
major research person in the medical section. There is a mass of
small detail, ranging from unexpected visits and unusual interviews to
the conversations taking place during some of the drug experiments
with volunteer subjects. This is an intimate portrayal of the structure
of the research group, and the slow but inevitable changes in attitudes
and research goals that occurred over time.
But to me, this book is much more than an introduction to the
Edgewood Arsenal. It is an autobiography of the author himself, from
a young man with a developing medical career to an older, articulate
analyst of today's world of chemical weapons in general, but
particularly the instruments of psychochemical warfare.
It is a pleasure to be able to contribute to this story.
Alexander T. Shulgin, PhD
