A Terrible Mistake?

Today in the French News, was the startling announcement that the French Government is demanding explanations from the United States for a mysterious outbreak of mass insanity in the South Eastern Village of Pont-Saint-Esprit that occurred almost 60 years ago. 500 hundred people were affected and there were 5 deaths. The implications could have long range effects on Franco-American relations.

The incident occurred in 1951 and started with the hospitals being flooded with people in various stages of outward insanity. Children tried to murder their parents, victims screamed that "red flowers were growing from their heads", that their heads ahad turned to molten lead, their stomachs were filled with snakes. Others were enthralled and claimed they saw heavenly visons, heard cosmic music and were filled with the holy spirit.

At the time, scientists came up with various explanations ranging from mercury tainted wheat to a recurrence of ergotism, or St. Anthony's Fire, alegendary afflicion that vanished with the Middle Ages and was caused by rye grains infected with the ergot fungus, which among other substances, produced lysergic acid which is the active ingredient of LSD.

Mercury tainted wheat sold illegally by an Italian firm in the this decade in Iraq was responsible for an outbreak of seeming insanity in an Iraqi village, but the symptoms also were lethal in many cases, from the mercury.

The Pont-Saint-Esprit mystery was speculated about for years. Indeed a tantalizing clue was given by Albert Hoffman, the Swiss scientist who worked for Sandoz Laboratories who developed LSD and documented its effects. He wrote in his work, LSD, My Problem Child, about the connection with Sandoz and the American CIA and how Sandoz was able to interest the Americans in the possible use of an aerosol delivered LSD for military use.

Recently after the allegations of American involvement began to resurface in 2009 and were never successfully quashed, the Author, H.P. Albarelli Jr. just released a book in the USA called A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments.

He documents through the revelations of Ex CIA personel that the outbreak in 1951 in Pont-St-Esprit was the direct result of a covert CIA experiment with an aerosol LSD which was carried out by the Special Operations Division of Fort Detrick, MD.

He documents that the scientists who produced the explanations were experts working for Sandoz which was supplying the US Army and the CIA with LSD for experimental use.

He goes on to say, that at one point and this has been documented in many places, the CIA entertained the idea of using  LSD in a control in an American city by placing it in the water system, but the results of the French experience were so horrific that they reconsidered it.

Indeed, in documents that Alberelli obtained from Ft. Dertrick, the Special Operations Force had considered, in a 1950 memo, using the aerosol in the New York City Subway System in a test to study its effects.

The unfolding of this story took a few years of research and the results are so damning that we are on the verge of diplomatic and political scandal because of Albarellis work.

There are many documented articles and interviews with survivors of the Pont-Saint-Esprit tragedy if you are interested and many articles available with the evolution of the story over the last 60 years.