Excerpts from a
Fortean Times article, cleverly entitled "Reservoir Drugs" -
But of all the fortean fables associated with acid the ‘LSD in the water supply’ urban legend is by far the most potent and long-lived. And, unlike the rest of them, this one has at least some basis in reality...
All legends have their genesis in at least a grain of truth, and in this case the origins of the LSD-in-the-water tale appear to lie with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its fascination with the drug as a possible mind-control weapon...
Bercel dissolved some LSD in a glass of chlorinated water, which promptly neutralised the psychedelic, leading him to tell the CIA the idea was not worth pursuing. The spooks were unconvinced, allegedly designing another version of LSD that was not neutralised by chlorine. Yet although the experiment had failed, the idea that LSD could be used to mass-dose the population had been created... The CIA became obsessed with it...
And from a followup Fortean Times article:
The barrel was filled with sealed glass canisters “like cookie jars”. He took one out to inspect it; the label indicated that the jar contained three pounds of pure EA 1729. This wouldn’t mean much to most people, but to anyone working in this field the code was instantly familiar. Substances were given EA designations from the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal; EA 1729 is the military designation for LSD. The other glass canisters were the same, perhaps 14 of them in all. This was enough acid for several hundred million doses with, Ketchum estimated, a street value of over a billion dollars.
Some wild ideas about what to do next flitted through his mind, but in the event he simply sealed the barrel up again. By the Friday morning it had vanished as mysteriously as it arrived...
Via
BoingBoing.
The CIA has long had this particular psychedelic bee in its bonnet, and it has destroyed lives
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