ARMY'S CONQUER BY CANNABIS PLAN

The U.S. Army, in a search for "nonlethal incapacitating agents,"
tested cannabis-based drugs on GI volunteers throughout the 1960s
according to Dr. James Ketchum, the psychiatrist who led the
classified research program at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.

Ketchum retired as a colonel in 1976 and lives in Santa Rosa. He has
written a memoir, "Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten," in
which he describes experiments conducted at Edgewood and defends the
Army's ethical standards. In a talk to the Society of Cannabis
Clinicians in Los Angeles last month, Ketchum recounted to 20 doctors
the Army's experiments with cannabinoid drugs.

(The society was founded in 2000 by Dr. Tod Mikuriya, a Berkeley
psychiatrist with a long-standing interest in cannabis therapeutics,
to provide a forum in which doctors monitoring cannabis use by
California patients could share information.)

Ketchum was a young captain finishing a residency at Walter Reed Army
Hospital when he was assigned in 1961 to be the supervising
psychiatrist at Edgewood Arsenal. The new president, John F. Kennedy,
was enthusiastic about funding the search for nonlethal incapacitants
(first authorized by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958).

The synthetic analog of THC tested by the Army in pursuit of this
ideal, EA 2233, was developed by a chemist named Harry Pars employed
by the Arthur D. Little company of Cambridge, Mass. It was a mixture
of eight isomers of the THC molecule (different arrangements of the
same atoms). EA 2233 was ingested at strengths ranging from 10 to 60
micrograms per kilogram of body weight. Although its effects lasted up
to 30 hours, they were not potent enough for military purposes.

Ketchum excerpts an interview in his book between a scientist and a GI
on EA 2233:

Q: How are you?

A: Pretty good, I guess.

Q: Pretty good?

A: Well, not so good maybe.

Q: You've got a big grin on your face.

A: Yeah. I don't know what I'm grinning about either.
..

Q: Suppose you had to get up and go to work now. How would you
do?

A: I don't think I'd even care.

Q: Suppose the place was on fire?

A: I don't think it would be -- it would seem funny.

Q: It would seem funny? Do you think you'd have the sense to get up
and run out or do you think you'd just enjoy it?

A: I don't know. Fire doesn't seem to present any danger to me right
now.

Q: Can you think of anything now which would seem hazardous or worry
you? ...

A: No. No. Everything just seems funny in the Army. Seems like
everything somebody says, it sounds a little bit funny.

When the isomers of EA 2233 were isolated and purified following 1964,
they were tested by Edgewood doctor Fred Sidell (while Ketchum focused
on more promising incapacitants, mainly an atropine derivative with
opiate properties, known as BZ, and LSD). Two of the THC isomers
caused dramatic drops in blood pressure, according to Ketchum, so the
lab stopped testing all of them. But Ketchum still wonders if one of
the potent isomers would work as an incapacitant.

"The finding that isomers 2 and 4 possessed uniquely powerful postural
hypotensive effects that prevented standing without fainting led
Sidell to discontinue testing out of an abundance of caution for the
welfare of the subjects. It later occurred to me that this property,
in an otherwise nonlethal compound, might be an ideal way to produce
temporary inability to fight (or do much else) without toxicological
danger to life."

Only a small fraction of Ketchum's work at Edgewood involved THC
derivatives. Ketchum says he was motivated to write his memoir because
the media has conflated the ethical, scientific drug studies conducted
by the Army on knowing volunteers with the kinky, unsafe drug studies
conducted by the CIA on unwitting civilians.

A chapter of Ketchum's book is devoted to informed consent. GIs
considered Edgewood Arsenal what we used to call "good duty" and
volunteered with alacrity for the two-month stint.

"We never needed to browbeat, threaten or hint at repercussions for
someone's unwillingness to participate in a drug test," Ketchum
writes. "Invariably, would-be volunteers inundated us with
applications, year after year. An abundance of troops were obviously
more than willing to jump through all the hoops required in order to
make the list of accepted candidates. In fact, the ratio of the number
of applicants to the number accepted increased progressively
throughout the 1960s."

When Ketchum arrived at Edgewood in 1961, the detachment of test
subjects consisted of 20 men. By 1963 it was 50. "Eventually a cohort
of 60-80 arrived, requiring the prior review of as many as 300-500
applicants," he writes. Some 7,000 enlisted men took part in the
program, most between 1961 and 1970.

"None, to my knowledge, returned home with a significant injury or
illness attributable to chemical exposure," Ketchum says.
"Nevertheless, years later, a few former volunteers did claim that the
testing had caused them to suffer from some malady." Those claims came
from subjects exposed to agents other than EA 2233, he says.