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"TRUTH" DRUGS IN INTERROGATION
The search for effective aids to interrogation is probably
as old as man's need to obtain information from an uncooperative
source and as persistent as his impatience to shortcut any tortuous
path. In the annals of police investigation, physical coercion
has at times been substituted for painstaking and time-consuming
inquiry in the belief that direct methods produce quick results.
Sir James Stephens, writing in 1883, rationalizes a grisly example
of "third degree" practices by the police of India:
"It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade rubbing
red pepper in a poor devil's eyes than to go about in the sun
hunting up evidence."
More recently, police officials in some countries have turned
to drugs for assistance in extracting confessions from accused
persons, drugs which are presumed
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to relax the individual's defenses to the point that he unknowingly
reveals truths he has been trying to conceal. This investigative
technique, however humanitarian as an alternative to physical
torture, still raises serious questions of individual rights
and liberties. In this country, where drugs have gained only
marginal acceptance in police work, their use has provoked cries
of "psychological third degree" and has precipitated
medico-legal controversies that after a quarter of a century
still occasionally flare into the open.
The use of so-called "truth" drugs in police work is
similar to the accepted psychiatric practice of narco-analysis;
the difference in the two procedures lies in their different
objectives. The police investigator is concerned with empirical
truth that may be used against the suspect, and therefore almost
solely with probative truth: the usefulness of the suspect's
revelations depends ultimately on their acceptance in evidence
by a court of law. The psychiatrist, on the other hand, using
the same "truth" drugs in diagnosis and treatment of
the mentally ill, is primarily concerned with psychological
truth or psychological reality rather than empirical fact. A
patient's aberrations are reality for him at the time they occur,
and an accurate account of these fantasies and delusions, rather
than reliable recollection of past events, can be the key to
recovery.
The notion of drugs capable of illuminating hidden recesses of
the mind, helping to heal the mentally ill and preventing or
reversing the miscarriage of justice, has provided an exceedingly
durable theme for the press and popular literature. While acknowledging
that "truth serum" is a misnomer twice over -- the
drugs are not sera and they do not necessarily bring forth probative
truth -- journalistic accounts continue to exploit the appeal
of the term. The formula is to play up a few spectacular "truth"
drug successes and to imply that the drugs are more maligned
than need be and more widely employed in criminal investigation
than can officially be admitted.
Any technique that promises an increment of success in extracting
information from an uncompliant source is ipso facto of
interest in intelligence operations. If the ethical considerations
which in Western countries inhibit the use of narco-interrogation
in police work are felt also in intelligence, the Western services
must at least be prepared against its possible employment by
the adversary. An understanding of "truth" drugs, their
characteristic actions, and their potentialities, positive and
negative, for eliciting useful information is fundamental to
an adequate defense against them.
This discussion, meant to help toward such an understanding,
draws primarily upon openly published materials. It has the limitations
of projecting from criminal investigative practices and from
the permissive atmosphere of drug psychotherapy.
SCOPOLAMINE AS "TRUTH SERUM"
Early in this century physicians began to employ scopolamine,
along with morphine and chloroform, to induce a state of "twilight
sleep" during childbirth. A constituent of henbane, scopolamine
was known to produce sedation and drowsiness, confusion and disorientation,
incoordination, and amnesia for events experienced during intoxication.
Yet physicians noted that women in twilight sleep answered questions
accurately and often volunteered exceedingly candid remarks.
In 1922 it occurred to Robert House, a Dallas, Texas obstetrician,
that a similar technique might be employed in the interrogation
of suspected criminals, and he arranged to interview under scopolamine
two prisoners in the Dallas county jail whose guilt seemed clearly
confirmed. Under the drug, both men denied the charges on which
they were held; and both, upon trial, were found not guilty.
Enthusiastic at this success, House concluded that a patient
under the influence of scopolamine "cannot create a lie...
and there is no power to think or reason." [14] His experiment
and this conclusion attracted wide attention, and the idea of
a "truth" drug was thus launched upon the public consciousness.
The phrase "truth serum" is believed to have appeared
first in a news report of House's experiment in the Los Angeles
Record, sometime in 1922. House resisted the term for a while
but eventually came to employ it regularly himself. He published
some eleven articles on scopolamine in the years 1921-1929, with
a noticeable increase in polemical zeal as time when on. What
had begun as something of a scientific statement turned finally
into a dedicated crusade by the "father of truth serum"
on behalf of his offspring, wherein he was "grossly indulgent
of its wayward behavior and stubbornly proud of its minor achievements."
[11]
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Only a handful of cases in which scopolamine was used for police
interrogation came to public notice, though there is evidence
suggesting that some police forces may have used it extensively.
[2,16] One police writer claims that the threat of scopolamine
interrogation has been effective in extracting confessions from
criminal suspects, who are told they will first be rendered unconscious
by chloral hydrate placed covertly in their coffee or drinking
water. [16]
Because of a number of undesirable side effects, scopolamine
was shortly disqualified as a "truth" drug. Among the
most disabling of the side effects are hallucinations, disturbed
perception, somnolence, and physiological phenomena such as headache,
rapid heart, and blurred vision, which distract the subject from
the central purpose of the interview. Furthermore, the physical
action is long, far outlasting the psychological effects. Scopolamine
continues, in some cases, to make anesthesia and surgery safer
by drying the mouth and throat and reducing secretions that might
obstruct the air passages. But the fantastically, almost painfully,
dry "desert" mouth brought on by the drug is hardly
conducive to free talking, even in a tractable subject.
THE BARBITURATES
The first suggestion that drugs might facilitate communication
with emotionally disturbed patients came quite by accident in
1916. Arthur S. Lovenhart and his associates at the University
of Wisconsin, experimenting with respiratory stimulants, were
surprised when, after an injection of sodium cyanide, a catatonic
patient who had long been mute and rigid suddenly relaxed, opened
his eyes, and even answered a few questions. By the early 1930's
a number of psychiatrists were experimenting with drugs as an
adjunct to established methods of therapy.
At about this time police officials, still attracted by the possibility
that drugs might help in the interrogation of suspects and witnesses,
turned to a class of depressant drugs known as the barbiturates.
By 1935 Clarence W. Muehlberger, head of the Michigan Crime Detection
Laboratory at East Lansing, was using barbiturates on reluctant
suspects, though police work continued to be hampered by the
courts' rejection of drug-induced confessions except in a few
carefully circumscribed instances.
The barbiturates, first synthesized in 1903, are among the oldest
of modern drugs and the most versatile of all depressants. In
this half-century some 2,500 have been prepared, and about two
dozen of these have won an important place in medicine. An estimated
three to four billion doses of barbiturates are prescribed by
physicians in the United States each year, and they have come
to be known by a variety of commercial names and colorful slang
expressions: "goofballs," Luminal, Nembutal, "red
devils," "yellow jackets," "pink ladies,"
etc. Three of them which are used in narcoanalysis and have seen
service as "truth" drugs are sodium amytal (anobarbital),
pentothal sodium (thiopental), and to a lesser extent seconal
(seconbarbital).
As one pharmacologist explains it, a subject coming under the
influence of a barbiturate injected intravenously goes through
all the stages of progressive drunkenness, but the time scale
is on the order of minutes instead of hours. Outwardly the sedation
effect is dramatic, especially if the subject is a psychiatric
patient in tension. His features slacken, his body relaxes. Some
people are momentarily excited; a few become silly and giggly.
This usually passes, and most subjects fall asleep, emerging
later in disoriented semi-wakefulness.
The descent into narcosis and beyond with progressively larger
doses can be divided as follows:
I. Sedative stage.
II. Unconsciousness,
with exaggerated reflexes (hyperactive stage).
III. Unconsciousness,
without reflex even to painful stimuli.
IV. Death.
Whether all these stages can be distinguished in any given subject
depends largely on the dose and the rapidity with which the drug
is induced. In anesthesia, stages I and II may last only two
or three seconds.
The first or sedative stage can be further divided:
Plane 1. No evident
effect, or slightly sedative effect.
Plane 2. Cloudiness,
calmness, amnesia. (Upon recovery, the subject will not remember
what happened at this or "lower" planes or stages.)
Plane 3. Slurred
speech, old thought patterns disrupted, inability to integrate
or learn new patterns. Poor coordination. Subject becomes unaware
of painful stimuli.
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Plane 3 is the psychiatric "work" stage. It may last
only a few minutes, but it can be extended by further slow injection
of drug. The usual practice is to back into the sedative stage
on the way to full consciousness.
CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES
The general abhorrence in Western countries for the use of chemical
agents "to make people do things against their will"
has precluded serious systematic study (at least as published
openly) of the potentialities of drugs for interrogation. Louis
A. Gottschalk, surveying their use in information-seeking interviews,
[13] cites 136 references; but only two touch upon the extraction
of intelligence information, and one of these concludes merely
that Russian techniques in interrogation and indoctrination are
derived from age-old police methods and do not depend
on the use of drugs. On the validity of confessions obtained
with drugs, Gottschalk found only three published experimental
studies that he deemed worth reporting.
One of these reported experiments by D.P. Morris in which intravenous
sodium amytal was helpful in detecting malingerers. [12] The
subjects, soldiers, were at first sullen, negativistic, and non-productive
under amytal, but as the interview proceeded they revealed the
fact of and causes for their malingering. Usually the interviews
turned up a neurotic or psychotic basis for the deception.
The other two confession studies, being more relevant to the
highly specialized, untouched area of drugs in intelligence interrogation,
deserve more detailed review.
Gerson and Victoroff [12] conducted amytal interviews with 17
neuropsychiatric patients, soldiers who had charges against them,
at Tilton General Hospital, Fort Dix. First they were interviewed
without amytal by a psychiatrist, who, neither ignoring nor stressing
their situation as prisoners or suspects under scrutiny, urged
each of them to discuss his social and family background, his
army career, and his version of the charges pending against him.
The patients were told only a few minutes in advance that narcoanalysis
would be performed. The doctor was considerate, but positive
and forthright. He indicated that they had no choice but to submit
to the procedure. Their attitudes varied from unquestioning to
downright refusal.
Each patient was brought to complete narcosis and permitted to
sleep. As he became semiconscious and could be stimulated to
speak, he was held in this stage with additional amytal while
the questioning proceeded. He was questioned first about innocuous
matters from his background that he had discussed before receiving
the drug. Whenever possible, he was manipulated into bringing
up himself the charges pending against him before being questioned
about them. If he did this in a too fully conscious state, it
proved more effective to ask him to "talk about that later"
and to interpose a topic that would diminish suspicion, delaying
the interrogation on his criminal activity until he was back
in the proper stage of narcosis.
The procedure differed from therapeutic narcoanalysis in several
ways: the setting, the type of patients, and the kind of "truth"
sought. Also, the subjects were kept in twilight consciousness
longer than usual. This state proved richest in yield of admissions
prejudicial to the subject. In it his speech was thick, mumbling,
and disconnected, but his discretion was markedly reduced. This
valuable interrogation period, lasting only five to ten minutes
at a time, could be reinduced by injecting more amytal and putting
the patient back to sleep.
The interrogation technique varied from case to case according
to the background information about the patient, the seriousness
of the charges, the patient's attitude under narcosis, and his
rapport with the doctor. Sometimes it was useful to pretend,
as the patient grew more fully conscious, that he had already
confessed during the amnestic period of the interrogation, and
to urge him, while his memory and sense of self-protection were
still limited, to continue to elaborate the details of what he
had "already described." When it was obvious that a
subject was withholding the truth, his denials were quickly passed
over and ignored, and the key questions would be rewarded in
a new approach.
Several patients revealed fantasies, fears, and delusions approaching
delirium, much of which could readily be distinguished from reality.
But sometimes there was no way for the examiner to distinguish
truth from fantasy except by reference to other sources. One
subject claimed to have a child that did not exist,
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another threatened to kill on sight a stepfather who had been
dead a year, and yet another confessed to participating in a
robbery when in fact he had only purchased goods from the participants.
Testimony concerning dates and specific places was untrustworthy
and often contradictory because of the patient's loss of time-sense.
His veracity in citing names and events proved questionable.
Because of his confusion about actual events and what he thought
or feared had happened, the patient at times managed to conceal
the truth unintentionally.
As the subject revived, he would become aware that he was being
questioned about his secrets and, depending upon his personality,
his fear of discovery, or the degree of his disillusionment with
the doctor, grow negativistic, hostile, or physically aggressive.
Occasionally patients had to be forcibly restrained during this
period to prevent injury to themselves or others as the doctor
continued to interrogate. Some patients, moved by fierce and
diffuse anger, the assumption that they had already been tricked
into confessing, and a still limited sense of discretion, defiantly
acknowledged their guilt and challenged the observer to "do
something about it." As the excitement passed, some fell
back on their original stories and others verified the confessed
material. During the follow-up interview nine of the 17 admitted
the validity of their confessions; eight repudiated their confessions
and reaffirmed their earlier accounts.
With respect to the reliability of the results of such interrogation,
Gerson and Victoroff conclude that persistent, careful questioning
can reduce ambiguities in drug interrogation, but cannot eliminate
them altogether.
At least one experiment has shown that subjects are capable of
maintaining a lie while under the influence of a barbiturate.
Redlich and his associates at Yale [25] administered sodium amytal
to nine volunteers, students and professionals, who had previously,
for purposes of the experiment, revealed shameful and guilt-producing
episodes of their past and then invented false self-protective
stories to cover them. In nearly every case the cover story retained
some elements of the guilt inherent in the true story.
Under the influence of the drug, the subjects were crossexamined
on their cover stories by a second investigator. The results,
though not definitive, showed that normal individuals who had
good defenses and no overt pathological traits could stick to
their invented stories and refuse confession. Neurotic individuals
with strong unconscious self-punitive tendencies, on the other
hand, both confessed more easily and were inclined to substitute
fantasy for the truth, confessing to offenses never actually
committed.
In recent years drug therapy has made some use of stimulants,
most notably amphetamine (Benzedrine) and its relative methamphetamine
(Methadrine). These drugs, used either alone or following intravenous
barbiturates, produce an outpouring of ideas, emotions, and memories
which has been of help in diagnosing mental disorders. The potential
of stimulants in interrogation has received little attention,
unless in unpublished work. In one study of their psychiatric
use Brussel et al. [7] maintain that methedrine gives the liar
no time to think or to organize his deceptions. Once the drug
takes hold, they say, an insurmountable urge to pour out speech
traps the malingerer. Gottschalk, on the other hand, says that
this claim is extravagant, asserting without elaboration that
the study lacked proper controls. [13] It is evident that the
combined use of barbiturates and stimulants, perhaps along with
ataraxics (tranquilizers), should be further explored.
OBSERVATIONS FROM PRACTICE
J.M. MacDonald, who as a psychiatrist for the District Courts
of Denver has had extensive experience with narcoanalysis, says
that drug interrogation is of doubtful value in obtaining confessions
to crimes. Criminal suspects under the influence of barbiturates
may deliberately withhold information, persist in giving untruthful
answers, or falsely confess to crimes they did not commit. The
psychopathic personality, in particular, appears to resist successfully
the influence of drugs.
MacDonald tells of a criminal psychopath who, having agreed to
narco-interrogation, received 1.5 grams of sodium amytal over
a period of five hours. This man feigned amnesia and gave a false
account of a murder. "He displayed little or no remorse
as he (falsely) described the crime, including burial of the
body. Indeed he was very self-possessed and he appeared almost
to enjoy the examination. From time to time he would request
that more amytal be injected." [21]
MacDonald concludes that a person who gives false information
prior to re-
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ceiving drugs is likely to give false information also under
narcosis, that the drugs are of little value for revealing deceptions,
and that they are more effective in releasing unconsciously repressed
material than in evoking consciously suppressed information.
Another psychiatrist known for his work with criminals, L.Z.
Freedman, gave sodium amytal to men accused of various civil
and military antisocial acts. The subjects were mentally unstable,
their conditions ranging from character disorders to neuroses
and psychoses. The drug interviews proved psychiatrically beneficial
to the patients, but Freedman found that his view of objective
reality was seldom improved by their revelations. He was unable
to say on the basis of the narco-interrogation whether a given
act had or had not occurred. Like MacDonald, he found that psychopathic
individuals can deny to the point of unconsciousness crimes that
every objective sign indicates they have committed. [10]
F.G. Inbau, Professor of Law at Northwestern University, who
has had considerable experience observing and participating in
"truth" drug tests, claims that they are occasionally
effective on persons who would have disclosed the truth anyway
had they been properly interrogated, but that a person determined
to lie will usually be able to continue the deception under drugs.
The two military psychiatrists who made the most extensive use
of narcoanalysis during the war years. Roy R. Grinker and John
C. Spiegel, concluded that in almost all cases they could obtain
from their patients essentially the same material and give them
the same emotional release by therapy without the use of drugs,
provided they had sufficient time.
The essence of these comments from professionals of long experience
is that drugs provide rapid access to information that is psychiatrically
useful but of doubtful validity as empirical truth. The same
psychological information and a less adulterated empirical truth
can be obtained from fully conscious subjects through non-drug
psychotherapy and skillful police interrogation.
APPLICATION TO CI INTERROGATION
The almost total absence of controlled experimental studies of
"truth" drugs and the spotty and anecdotal nature of
psychiatric and police evidence require that extrapolations to
intelligence operations be made with care. Still, enough is known
about the drugs' actions to suggest certain considerations affecting
the possibilities for their use in interrogation.
It should be clear from the foregoing that at best a drug can
only serve as an aid to an interrogator who has a sure understanding
of the psychology and techniques of normal interrogation. In
some respects, indeed, the demands on his skill will be increased
by the baffling mixture of truth and fantasy in drug-induced
output. And the tendency against which he must guard in the interrogate
to give the responses that seem to be wanted without regard for
facts will be heightened by drugs: the literature abounds with
warnings that a subject in narcosis is extremely suggestible.
It seems possible that this suggestibility and the lowered guard
of the narcotic state might be put to advantage in the case of
a subject feigning ignorance of a language or some other skill
that had become automatic with him. Lipton [20] found sodium
amytal helpful in determining whether a foreign subject was merely
pretending not to understand English. By extension, one can guess
that a drugged interrogatee might have difficulty maintaining
the pretense that he did not comprehend the idiom of a profession
he was trying to hide.
There is the further problem of hostility in the interrogator's
relationship to a resistance source. The accumulated knowledge
about "truth" drug reaction has come largely from patient-physician
relationships of trust and confidence. The subject in narcoanalysis
is usually motivated a priori to cooperate with the psychiatrist,
either to obtain relief from mental suffering or to contribute
to a scientific study. Even in police work, where an atmosphere
of anxiety and threat may be dominant, a relationship of trust
frequently asserts itself: the drug is administered by a medical
man bound by a strict code of ethics; the suspect agreeing to
undergo narcoanalysis in a desperate bid for corroboration of
his testimony trusts both drug and psychiatrist, however apprehensively;
and finally, as Freedman and MacDonald have indicated, the police
psychiatrist frequently deals with a "sick" criminal,
and some order of patient-physician relationship necessarily
evolves.
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Rarely has a drug interrogation involved "normal" individuals
in a hostile or genuinely threatening milieu. It was from a non-threatening
experimental setting that Eric Lindemann could say that his "normal"
subjects "reported a general sense of euphoria, ease and
confidence, and they exhibited a marked increase in talkativeness
and communicability." [18] Gerson and Victoroff list poor
doctor-patient rapport as one factor interfering with the completeness
and authenticity of confessions by the Fort Dix soldiers, caught
as they were in a command performance and told they had no choice
but to submit to narco-interrogation.
From all indications, subject-interrogation rapport is usually
crucial to obtaining the psychological release which may lead
to unguarded disclosures. Role-playing on the part of the interrogator
might be a possible solution to the problem of establishing rapport
with a drugged subject. In therapy, the British narco-analyst
William Sargent recommends that the therapist deliberately distort
the facts of the patient's life-experience to achieve heightened
emotional response and abreaction. [27] In the drunken state
of narcoanalysis patients are prone to accept the therapist's
false constructions. There is reason to expect that a drugged
subject would communicate freely with an interrogator playing
the role of relative, colleague, physician, immediate superior,
or any other person to whom his background indicated he would
be responsive.
Even when rapport is poor, however, there remains one facet of
drug action eminently exploitable in interrogation -- the fact
that subjects emerge from narcosis feeling they have revealed
a great deal, even when they have not. As Gerson and Victoroff
demonstrated at Fort Dix, this psychological set provides a major
opening for obtaining genuine confessions.
POSSIBLE VARIATIONS
In studies by Beecher and his associates, [3-6] one-third to
one-half the individuals tested proved to be placebo reactors,
subjects who respond with symptomatic relief to the administration
of any syringe, pill, or capsule, regardless of what it contains.
Although no studies are known to have been made of the placebo
phenomenon as applied to narco-interrogation, it seems reasonable
that when a subject's sense of guilt interferes with productive
interrogation, a placebo for pseudo-narcosis could have the effect
of absolving him of the responsibility for his acts and thus
clear the way for free communication. It is notable that placebos
are most likely to be effective in situations of stress. The
individuals most likely to react to placebos are the more anxious,
more self-centered, more dependent on outside stimulation, those
who express their needs more freely socially, talkers who drain
off anxiety by conversing with others. The non-reactors are those
clinically more rigid and with better than average emotional
control. No sex or I.Q. differences between reactors and non-reactors
have been found.
Another possibility might be the combined use of drugs with hypnotic
trance and post-hypnotic suggestion: hypnosis could presumably
prevent any recollection of the drug experience. Whether a subject
can be brought to trance against his will or unaware, however,
is a matter of some disagreement. Orne, in a survey of the potential
uses of hypnosis in interrogation, [23] asserts that it is doubtful,
despite many apparent indications to the contrary, that trance
can be induced in resistant subjects. It may be possible, he
adds, to hypnotize a subject unaware, but this would require
a positive relationship with the hypnotist not likely to be found
in the interrogation setting.
In medical hypnosis, pentothal sodium is sometimes employed when
only light trance has been induced and deeper narcosis is desired.
This procedure is a possibility for interrogation, but if a satisfactory
level of narcosis could be achieved through hypnotic trance there
would appear to be no need for drugs.
DEFENSIVE MEASURES
There is no known way of building tolerance for a "truth"
drug without creating a disabling addiction, or of arresting
the action of a barbiturate once induced. The only full safeguard
against narco-interrogation is to prevent the administration
of the drug. Short of this, the best defense is to make use of
the same knowledge that suggests drugs for offensive operations:
if a subject knows that on emerging from narcosis he will have
an exaggerated notion of how much he has revealed he can better
resolve to deny he has said anything.
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The disadvantages and shortcomings of drugs in offensive operations
become positive features of the defensive posture. A subject
in narco-interrogation is garbled and irrational, the amount
of output drastically diminished. Drugs disrupt established thought
patterns, including the will to resist, but they do so indiscriminately
and thus also interfere with the patterns of substantive information
the interrogator seeks. Even under the conditions most favorable
for the interrogator, output will be contaminated by fantasy,
distortion, and untruth.
Possibly the most effective way to arm oneself against narco-interrogation
would be to undergo a "dry run." A trial drug interrogation
with output taped for playback would familiarize an individual
with his own reactions to "truth" drugs, and this familiarity
would help to reduce the effects of harassment by the interrogator
before and after the drug has been administered. From the viewpoint
of the intelligence service, the trial exposure of a particular
operative to drugs might provide a rough benchmark for assessing
the kind and amount of information he would divulge in narcosis.
There may be concern over the possibility of drug addiction intentionally
or accidentally induced by an adversary service. Most drugs will
cause addiction with prolonged use, and the barbiturates are
no exception. In recent studies at the U.S. Public Health Service
Hospital for addicts in Lexington, Ky., subjects received large
doses of barbiturates over a period of months. Upon removal of
the drug, they experienced acute withdrawal symptoms and behaved
in every respect like chronic alcoholics.
Because their action is extremely short, however, and because
there is little likelihood that they would be administered regularly
over a prolonged period, barbiturate "truth" drugs
present slight risk of operational addiction. If the adversary
service were intent on creating addiction in order to exploit
withdrawal, it would have other, more rapid means of producing
states as unpleasant as withdrawal symptoms.
The hallucinatory and psychotomimetic drugs such as mescaline,
marihuana, LSD-25, and microtine are sometimes mistakenly associated
with narcoanalytic interrogation. These drugs distort the perception
and interpretation of the sensory input to the central nervous
system and affect vision, audition, smell, the sensation of the
size of body parts and their position in space, etc. Mescaline
and LSD-25 have been used to create experimental "psychotic
states," and in a minor way as aids in psychotherapy.
Since information obtained from a person in a psychotic drug
state would be unrealistic, bizarre, and extremely difficult
to assess, the self-administration of LSD-25, which is effective
in minute dosages, might in special circumstances offer an operative
temporary protection against interrogation. Conceivably, on the
other hand, an adversary service could use such drugs to produce
anxiety or terror in medically unsophisticated subjects unable
to distinguish drug-induced psychosis from actual insanity. An
enlightened operative could not be thus frightened, however,
knowing that the effect of these hallucinogenic agents is transient
in normal individuals.
Most broadly, there is evidence that drugs have least effect
on well-adjusted individuals with good defenses and good emotional
control, and that anyone who can withstand the stress of competent
interrogation in the waking state can do so in narcosis. The
essential resources for resistance thus appear to lie within
the individual.
CONCLUSIONS
The salient points that emerge from this discussion are the following.
No such magic brew as the popular notion of truth serum exists.
The barbiturates, by disrupting defensive patterns, may sometimes
be helpful in interrogation, but even under the best conditions
they will elicit an output contaminated by deception, fantasy,
garbled speech, etc. A major vulnerability they produce in the
subject is a tendency to believe he has revealed more than he
has. It is possible, however, for both normal individuals and
psychopaths to resist drug interrogation; it seems likely that
any individual who can withstand ordinary intensive interrogation
can hold out in narcosis. The best aid to a defense against narco-interrogation
is foreknowledge of the process and its limitations. There is
an acute need for controlled experimental studies of drug reaction,
not only to depressants but also to stimulants and to combinations
of depressants, stimulants, and ataraxics.
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5. -----. Evidence for increased effectiveness of placebos with
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