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 top-secret committee to create a “truth serum” for the Office of Strategic Services (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 persons 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; psilocyben or amanita muscaria 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 to 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 had ever occurred.

    It was three decades before the Freedom of Information Act forced the CIA to admit their 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.

the authorized on-line version of Jack Herer’s “The Emperor Wears No Clothes”
text from “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” © Jack Herer
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