Albion Dreaming

by Andy Roberts

  Porton scientist Harry Collumbine also attended the meeting, apparently in support of the idea that LSD could be used as a drug for interrogation purposes. The minutes record: “Dr. Collumbine was of the opinion that subjects to whom the drug had been administered without their knowledge were affected to the extent that their reactions were beyond their control when subjected to interrogation by a skilled interrogator experienced in the application of this drug.” Collumbine’s faith in LSD as a possible interrogation agent does not appear to have been followed up, presumably because of his concerns about the potential for mental disturbance in test subjects.13

  The meeting went on to discuss various theories of LSD application in warfare. These included dispensing the drug in an aerosol for use against targets such as battleships or aircraft, or against key civil defence personnel such as firefighters. It was even speculated that the effects of LSD on a small number of combatants might cause mass hysteria, the afflicted mimicking LSD symptoms though they hadn’t been directly exposed to the drug. The report cited a case from World War I when large numbers of troops fled the front line in the belief they had been gassed when they were in fact entirely unaffected. The counter culture would come to know this phenomenon as a “contact high”, in which people who had not taken LSD found themselves in an altered state of consciousness after spending time with those who had.

  The report recommended that further investigation of LSD and its analogues could prove fruitful and made several recommendations. The most significant was: “Its potential as a large scale Chemical Warfare agent required expert examination.” The report ended: “In view of the above conclusions, the panel strongly recommend that. ‘The necessary action should be taken to bring its views to the notice of the appropriate authorities.’” The implication was LSD tests with military personnel in simulated battlefield conditions were required, and there were several internal discussions at Porton in the late Fifties about the ethics of such trials.

  Porton scientist Roger Brimblecombe made the situation perfectly clear at a meeting of the Porton advisory committee when he said the only way to determine if a drug might be of use in battle was “... by tests on humans, but there were many objections to that”. Professor Rydon speculated whether permission would even be granted for human experimentation of this type and thought it pointless even applying unless it could be shown “... whether the effect of psychomimetic drugs was always temporary and entirely reversible, even in persons liable to develop psychoses without the administration of drugs”. Professor Gaddum thought that the effect of a few doses was not a barrier to human tests but “... if repeated doses were given, an irreversible effect might be produced”. 14 In his book Gassed, Rob Evans quotes an anonymous former Porton Down scientist as saying that since “... quite a lot was known about LSD, it was thought to be potentially safe to expose people to it”.15

  A compromise was reached and it was agreed that future tests on humans would be buffered by a series of tests to screen out those who might react badly to LSD so that “... only normal people would be used”. This seemed to satisfy the higher echelons of the MOD and tests on humans resumed in late 1961. At first, it was only Porton scientists who were administered the drug, intravenously and under the supervision of medical staff. The doses were low, 50 μg, enough to precipitate psychological effects but not enough for a full-blown hallucinatory journey. One of the scientists involved was Maxwell Hollyhock, who would later write up his experiences for the popular science journal New Scientist.16

  Further tests on volunteers took place in 1962, with the dosage remaining at 50 μg of LSD. Then, in November 1962, following the results of a working party chaired by Nobel Prize winner Sir Alexander Todd, the Chiefs of Staff decided that chemical weapons should form a part of Britain’s armoury. This reasoning was based on the revived belief that Russia held large stocks of poisonous gas and other chemical and biological agents. In addition, the nature of warfare was changing and the Chiefs argued that creating battlefield incapacitants fulfilled a variety of hitherto unrealised needs. For instance, chemical weapons could be employed as a delaying tactic, preventing the enemy from immediate nuclear retaliation. Alternatively, chemical warfare agents could be used to incapacitate civilians in occupied territory without causing harm. The Cabinet’s Defence Committee sanctioned more research into nerve gas and other incapacitating agents and a new era of MOD experiments with LSD began at Porton Down.

  Prior to 1964, all LSD tests on humans at Porton had been laboratory based. Because the drug was being considered as an aid to interrogation, there had been no need to test it either in groups of people or in the open air. Now the expectations for LSD, as a battlefield incapacitant, were different and new test criteria needed to be developed.

  In November 1964, as Britain’s nascent hippies were starting their own experiments with LSD, Porton Down began a series of three field trials with the drug. It was hoped these experiments would provide conclusive evidence of LSD’s potential as a battlefield incapacitant. The trials were code-named Moneybags, Recount and Small Change, the names being an MOD attempt at wit; LSD also stood for the Latin names for Britain’s pre-decimal currency (Libra, Solidus, and Denarius). 17

  Operation Moneybags took place at Porton Down between 27 November and 4 December 1964, with all the volunteers drawn from 41 Royal Marine Commando. The aim of this trial was to test the effect of LSD on the behaviour of troops in field conditions. Psychological tests had now been added to the physical examination and some volunteers were immediately rejected because they failed these new screening procedures. On the first day of the trial, the Marines were not given any LSD and simply carried out a field exercise to acclimatise themselves. On the second day, seventeen Marines took part, sixteen of whom were given 200 μg of LSD in water. One man, for whom 200 μg was thought to be too high, was given 75 μg. They were asked to repeat the exercise. As a film of the trial held at the Imperial War Museum shows, the effect of LSD on the men was dramatic.

  Several troops are shown moving through the countryside as the narrator points out that the effects of the LSD were apparent after twenty-five minutes. The broad grins on their faces and the unsteadiness of their gait indicates something is happening, and almost immediately one man has to abandon the exercise. He is shown briefly, sitting in a Land Rover talking to a nurse, his face a mask of concern. Within minutes, the radio operator becomes hopelessly tangled in the wires of his set and the rocket launcher team are unable to aim or focus on their target.

  The exercise soon descends into chaos. The troops quickly lose all sense of military discipline, for instance going against standard operational procedures by bunching together as they enter a wood occupied by the “enemy”. An attempt at map reading dissolves into confusion and men are seen wandering aimlessly, unsteady on their feet and giggling hysterically. Although some are still capable of sustained physical effort, the soldiers are clearly ineffective as a fighting force and would have been quickly annihilated or captured by an enemy. Some of the soldiers were clearly fighting the drug, trying to maintain their composure so they could continue with the exercise, but it was impossible. Seventy minutes into the exercise, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander admitted he could no longer control himself or his men, lying on the ground, racked with laughter.18

  Though the MOD files at the National Archives do not reveal the depth to which the Porton scientists were liaising with their American counterparts, there was certainly some on-going contact. In late 1965, Bill Ladell, then in charge of human experiments at Porton, invited James Ketchum to visit him there. Ketchum, a psychiatrist working at the Edgewood Arsenal, America’s Porton Down, wrote: “Bill thought I would find it useful to observe an LSD field test, which was designed to test the ability of highly trained LSD-dosed commandos to defend their position against un-drugged ‘attackers.’” Ketchum arrived too late to observe the trial but was shown the film of the exercise, commenting: “No doubt about
it – LSD could disrupt even the most elite troops.”19

  While in England, Ketchum met up with Dr. Maxwell Hollyhock, one of the organisers of the Porton LSD trials, and discussed his article in the New Scientist. The article, “Weapons against the Mind”, in the September 1965 issue, was a brief but cogent discussion of all aspects of chemical warfare. Although Hollyhock didn’t mention his involvement with the experiments at Porton Down he wrote about LSD at length. For Hollyhock, there was no chemical warfare agent to surpass LSD as an incapacitating agent. He placed the drug in a historical context, pointing out how successive eras have argued against, but eventually allowed, the use of certain kinds of weaponry from explosive bullets to mustard gas to aerial bombardments.20

  Hollyhock’s article was illustrated with drawings carried out while he was under the influence of LSD. Snakes, spiders and crocodiles stare from the page, child-like yet disturbing in their simplicity. Another drawing hints at the revelations LSD can bring: Einstein’s E=mc2 formula is glimpsed behind curtains. Hollyhock, who was incapacitated by stroke in 2007 and so unavailable for interview for this book, took his governmental duties and the Official Secrets Act very seriously. His daughter commented: “I am unable to help you since my father did not discuss his work with the family.”21

  Despite the success of Moneybags, there was an eighteen-month hiatus before the next LSD field trial. Some staff on Porton’s Committee on the Safety of Human Experiments (COSHE) did not share Hollyhock’s view that there were no long-term risks from using LSD and the tests were halted. The Applied Biology Committee recorded they were “unsure of the justification for restarting the LSD trials until, more is known of the persistence of mood effects.” Rather mysteriously, the report also notes the tests were stopped because there had been “disconcerting results in one particular case of multiple self-administration and concern over possible addiction”. There is nothing more about this supposed catalyst to the tests being halted, but it presumably refers to an individual who had access to LSD and had taken so much they had, in the parlance of the counter culture, “freaked out”. As the only people who had access to repeated doses of LSD at Porton were the scientists who conducted the tests, the inference is that it was one of their own men who had taken a liking to the drug!22

  These ethical issues were either ignored or circumvented because in 1966 the success of Operation Moneybags led staff at Porton Down to plan another trial, in which sixteen out of twenty-eight soldiers were given LSD. This exercise, Operation Recount, involved volunteers from the Royal Artillery’s 37th Heavy Air Defence Regiment. The men were not told what drug they would be given or what symptoms to expect and, in an attempt to make it difficult for the men to pre-empt what was going to happen, the exercise was spread over three days. Of the eighty volunteers, sixty-one were rejected, twenty-seven because their jobs were not suitable for the type of trial envisaged and thirty-four due to the psychological screening tests.

  Operation Recount was poorly organised. Initial plans to give the soldiers 200 μg of LSD, to make the test identical to Moneybags, were scrapped when it was found that the medical officers in attendance had no experience of dealing with high dosage levels. It was recommended to Porton Down’s director that the dose be reduced to 50 μg. But such a low dose would have rendered the trials worthless so a compromise was reached; each soldier would receive a dose of 100 μg of LSD. The men were given orange squash each morning, with the LSD being added on the second day.23

  When Recount took place in September 1966, the results were inconclusive. Those who took LSD displayed the usual erratic and chaotic behaviour but all tasks issued to the group were completed within the allocated timescale. The relatively weak does of LSD, coupled with army discipline and team spirit enabled the unit to continue to function even though over half the unit were drugged. Porton’s scientists concluded that Recount’s success was limited. If the scientists had understood anything about LSD and the importance of set and setting, they might have taken a different view. Being on LSD in a peace time exercise when you are confident you will not come to harm is completely different from being given LSD in a battle zone with the real possibility of death or serious injury and the sights and sounds of men being torn apart by ordnance.

  Some of the LSD used in the three Sixties field trials might have originated with the US military. The US Army supplied Porton with 10 grams of LSD in December 1965 and another 10 grams in June 1966. At the optimum dosage level of 200 μg, this represents 5000 powerful doses of LSD, double that amount if doses of 100 μg were used. As the MOD only tested the drug on a handful of troops after June 1966 and claim to have ceased LSD research on humans entirely by 1969, this raises the question of what happened to the stockpile of LSD Porton must have held at the end of the Sixties.

  The final field test of LSD at Porton was code named Operation Small Change. Because staff at Porton believed rumours about the trials had spread among the volunteers, this one was structured in a different way, running over seven days, making it difficult for the men to anticipate on which day they might be drugged.

  Twenty-eight soldiers took part in the trial, split into a headquarters unit and three other units, simulating anti-terrorist sweeps on the Porton Down ranges. Half the men received an oral dose of 160 μg of LSD, the other half a placebo. The results of Small Change are somewhat perplexing. Three men were withdrawn from the trial when they exhibited florid symptoms from the drug, and the LSD incapacitated other two men, but the remaining twenty-five carried out the exercise with “little overall reduction in the unit’s military efficiency”.24

  Porton’s analysis of Small Change concluded those soldiers who did not receive LSD had acted as a stabilising influence on those who had been drugged. Nonetheless, it is highly unusual for anyone to be able to function normally, in any circumstances, when under the influence of 160 μg of LSD. As with the previous tests, there was a fundamental flaw in the Porton scientists’ reasoning. LSD is a powerful amplifier of the senses and a “safe” field trial at Porton, while disorientating and bewildering, would have nothing like the effects on LSD-dosed troops in the chaotic horror of the battlefield. Having to contend with simple map reading exercises, guarding prisoners and pretending to capture a wood on a bright, quiet December day is a complete contrast to having to advance on an enemy in battle. This fact was not grasped by those in charge of the tests. If the organisers of the LSD field trials had taken the trouble to read the literature being created by the psychotherapists and the counter culture they would have had a much better understanding of the complexity of LSD and its potential for use in warfare. It is probably a good thing that the Porton scientists didn’t understand this or LSD could well have turned out to be a terrifying weapon.

  The varied and inconclusive results of the three field trials with LSD led the MOD to abandon LSD tests on service personnel altogether. Whatever its potential, the effects of LSD were not predictable and no two doses would guarantee a consistent result. From a tactical point of view, using LSD as a weapon would be analogous to using a gun that refused to be accurately aimed, worked intermittently, and fired different calibre shells in all directions. A meeting of COSHE on 14 February 1968 concluded that LSD “is of doubtful chemical value” and no further tests were conducted on humans.

  In March 1971, Porton began to trace the soldiers who had been involved in their Sixties LSD field trials. By July, sixty-six out of sixty-seven volunteers had been located and interviewed. Unfortunately the report on these follow-ups, if it was written, has never been located. The results of these follow-up interviews might have been useful in later years when the MOD were challenged in the courts about the long-term effects of LSD tests.

  Government files documenting the Sixties LSD trials at Porton gloss over the detrimental effects suffered by some volunteers. Other than noting a few men were withdrawn from tests, there is no reference to anyone suffering serious mental health issues. Yet the numbers of those rejected because they were psych
ologically unsuitable indicates there was considerable potential for severe mental disruption. The fact that the volunteers had no idea what drug they were taking, coupled with the often-high dosages, suggests that at least a few servicemen would require longer-term treatment or hospitalization. Harry Collumbine’s unpublished autobiography also indicates there were problems with LSD tests in the Fifties, which he alleges were stopped because of fears for the mental health of the volunteers. There is nothing in any government file to imply this was the case. However, one anecdote suggests that Netley Military Hospital in Southampton might have been used to treat those who didn’t recover quickly from the effects of LSD.

  Brigadier John McGhie was colonel-commander of Netley during the Fifties and Sixties. He would often take his nephew, Robert Owen, with him when he carried out his daily round of the wards. The young boy was shocked by the sights and sounds he witnessed, at first believing the sufferers to be mentally ill. His uncle told him these unfortunate soldiers were “... victims of chemical experiments such as LSD, from both grenade canisters and artillery shells, ‘to see what effect they had on the human mind in a battle situation.’”25

  No documentary evidence has yet emerged to support this anecdote. If true, it suggests that government agencies were testing LSD in a much wider series of trials than they have admitted. It also seems probable that servicemen were being used as human guinea pigs in LSD experiments at Netley. LSD psychotherapist Ronnie Sandison, though having no involvement with the MOD’s use of the drug, has stated, “I believe LSD was used at Netley, but I have no details of who was involved”.26

  Though the British public were largely unaware of the truth about LSD experiments at Porton Down until the early years of the new millennium, strong hints had appeared in the media that the drug was being used there. In May 1964, The Times’ defence correspondent reported that Porton was testing a wide range of substances including LSD “... the lysergic acid derivative having the property of removing the will to fight or even to offer defence against attack.”27 This reference, however, would have meant little to readers as LSD was virtually unheard of in the British media before 1966.