The Emperor Wears No Clothes
by Jack Herer
A Secret Program to Control Minds and Choices
Through a report released in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act, it was discovered (after 40 years of secrecy) that Anslinger was appointed in 1942 to a topsecret committee to create a “truth serum” for the Office of Strategic Service (OSS), which evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (Rolling Stone, August 1983) Anslinger and his spy group picked, as America’s first truth serum, “honey oil,” a much purer, almost tasteless form of hash oil, to be administered in food to spies, saboteurs, military prisoners and the like, to make them unwittingly “spill the truth.”
Fifteen months later, in 1943, marijuana extracts were discontinued by Anslinger’s group as America’s first truth serum because it was noted that they didn’t work all the time. The people being interrogated would often giggle or laugh hysterically at their captors, get paranoid, or have insatiable desires for food (the munchies?). Also, the report noted that American OSS agents and other interrogation groups started using the honey oil illegally themselves, and would not give it to the spies. In Anslinger’s OSS group’s final report on marijuana as a truth serum, there was no mention of violence caused by the drug! In fact, the opposite was indicated. The OSS and later the CIA continued the search and tried other drugs as a truth serum; psilocybin or amanita mascara mushrooms and LSD, to name a few.
For twenty years, the CIA secretly tested these concoctions on American agents. Unsuspecting subjects jumped from buildings, or thought they’d gone insane. Our government finally admitted doing all this to its own people in the 1970s, after 25 years of denials: drugging innocent, non-consenting, unaware citizens, soldiers and
government agents – all in the name of national security, of course.
These American “security” agencies constantly threatened and even occasionally imprisoned individuals, families and organizations that suggested the druggings ever occurred.
It was three decades before the Freedom of Information Act forced the CIA to admit its lies through exposure on TV by CBS’s “60 Minutes” and others. However, on April 16, 1985 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the CIA did not have to reveal the identities of either the individuals or institutions involved in this travesty.
The court said, in effect, that the CIA could decide what was or was not to be released under the Freedom of Information Act, and that the courts could not overrule the agency’s decision.
As an aside, repealing this Freedom of Information Act was one of the prime goals of the Reagan/Bush/Quayle Administration.
(L.A. Times, The Oregonian, etc. editorials 1984; The Oregonian, January 21, 1985; Lee, Martin & Shlain, Bruce, Acid Dreams, Grove Press, NY, 1985.