CONQUEST BY CANNABINOIDS

A U.S. Army Pipe Dream

The U.S. Army, in a search for "non-lethal incapacitating agents,"
tested cannabis-based drugs on GI volunteers throughout the 1960s
according to James Ketchum, MD, the psychiatrist who led the
classified research program at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Ketchum
retired as a colonel in 1976 and now lives in Santa Rosa. He has
written a memoir, "Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten," in
which he describes experiments conducted at Edgewood and staunchly
defends the Army's ethical standards. In a talk to the Society of
Cannabis Clinicians March 9 in Los Angeles, Ketchum recounted the
Army's experiments with cannabinoid drugs.

Ketchum was a young captain finishing a residency at Walter Reed Army
Hospital when he got assigned in 1961 to be the supervising
psychiatrist at Edgewood Arsenal. The new president, John F. Kennedy,
was enthusiastic about funding the search for non-lethal
incapacitants (first authorized by Eisenhower in 1958). Camelot's
ideal weapon: one that leaves the infrastructure intact and the
population manageable.

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 stereoisomers 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 with a GI on EA 2233 in his
book. The Responses are pretty much what you'd expect from someone
who had ingested mucho THC being questoned by an unthreatening
authority figure.

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. [Note the realism of the test subject and the scientist's flight
of fancy.]

Q: Can you think of anything now which would seem hazardous or worry
you or are you just in a--

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

When the eight isomers of EA 2233 were isolated and purified in the
years following 1964, they were tested by an Edgewood doctor named
Fred Sidell (while Ketchum focused on more promising incapacitants,
mainly an atropine derivative known as BZ, and LSD). Sidell found
that two of the THC isomers caused such a dramatic drop in blood
pressure that the lab stopped testing all of them. Ketchum still
wonders if one of the two potent isomers would work as an
incapacitant. He writes, "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 non-lethal
compound, might be an ideal way to produce temporary inability to
fight (or do much else) without toxicological danger to life." The
dream lives on!

Ketchum's presentation to the pro-cannabis MDs was followed by a
succinct chemistry lecture by Alexander T. Shulgin, PhD. It was
Shulgin who gave Harry Pars the idea to synthesize nitrogen analogs
of THC back at the start of the '60s. (Later in life Shulgin gained
renown for designing "designer" drugs, including MDMA.) The session
was organized and moderated by Tod Mikuriya, MD, the Berkeley
psychiatrist who has a longstanding interest in the history of
cannabis therapeutics.

Only a small fraction of Ketchum's work at Edgewood involved THC
derviatives. 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 extremely kinky,
unsafe drug studies conducted by the CIA on unwitting civilians.
"Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten" is published by
ChemBook, 2304 Fairbanks Drive, Santa Rosa, CA 95403. Learn more at
forgottensecrets.net

A chapter of Ketchum's book is devoted to what is now called
"informed consent." GIs considered Edgewood Arsenal good duty and
volunteered eagerly for the two-month stint. Ketchum writes, "We
never needed to browbeat, threaten or hint at repercussions for
someone's unwillingness to participate in a drug test. 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." Some 7,000 enlisted men took part in the program, most
between 1961-70. "None, to my knowledge," writes Ketchum, "returned
home with a significant injury or illness attributable to chemical
exposure. 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 good old
EA 2233. Ketchum questions their validity, noting "None of the three
careful follow-up studies found statistical evidence for any
particular illness, and death rates were lower than expected for
every drug tested, except for non-significant higher rates in those
who received atropine or scopolamine."

The Society of Cannabis Clinicians was founded by Mikuriya in 2000 to
provide a forum through which doctors monitoring cannabis use by
California patients could share information. Twenty MDs attended the
March 9 meeting, the first the society has held in LA... Ketchum and
his staff at Edgewood Arsenal had no inkling that EA 2233 in low
doses was therapeutic. "We weren't looking for benefit," he
acknowledged... He mentioned that Hitler was so afraid of chemical
weapons being used against him that he wouldn't authorize the use of
thousands of tons of nerve gas the Nazis had synthesized and stockpiled.