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Table
of Contents
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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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REFERENCES
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3. Beecher, H. K. Anesthesia. Sci. Am., Jan. 1957,
198, p. 70.
4. -----. Appraisal of drugs
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5. -----.
Evidence for increased effectiveness of placebos with increased stress.
Amer. J. Physiol., 1956, 187, 163-169.
6. -----. Experimental pharmacology and measurement of the
subjective response. Science, 1953, 116.
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7. Brussel, J. A., Wilson, D. C., Jr.,
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CIA Director Stansfield Turners Testimony, Continued
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Opening Testimony of CIA Director Stansfield
Turner
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