quote of the day

[Mats Bergstrom <matsb@sos.sll.se>]

On Wed, 26 Jan 1994, zaaaaaaaap! wrote:

> Nobody ever speaks of them chemicals that make you talk. But they exist,
> and as well as cryptography techniques developed fast recently, trust the
> government, those chemicals must have made a few advances.
> Like, for example making you tell what you don't want to and then make you
> forget about anybody asking.

The effects of the classic truth drug thiopentale (Pentotale) are widely 
known by anesthesiologists and their nurses, although other drugs with
faster elimination (meaning you can drive your car home after some ours)
are replacing it as drug of choice for anesthetic initiation. If you
inject a sub-anesthetic dose of Pentotale the subject will become loose
in his associations and frequently offer his deeper feelings about
the situation to the audience (in the operating theatre) without being asked
to do so. Pentotale and other barbiturates have also been used in special
psychiatric treatment programs to induce loquaciousness and emotional
openness (at the moment very out of fashion). Most of these effects are
not very different from those of alcohol, we all know the overfriendly
wino, and can certainly be withheld by a determined non-talker. The same
goes for benzodiazepines (like Valium). But you usually do forget a lot
about it afterwards. Amphetamines can also make the subject very, very
friendly but not against his will and you don't forget about it. Opiates
obviously are bad choices making the subjects carefree but uncooperative.
Anti-depressives and anti-psychotic drugs also have no theoretical
advantages.

Some hallucinogens might be better choices though, at least as weapons
of torture making you talk just to be spared the next shot. Publically
known hallucinogens like LSD are well known to produce states of ultimate
terror if given to uncooperative subjects at the 'wrong' time. True
hallucinogens like (high dose) atropine might be even more effective. Many
synthetic psychodelic drugs started their career in anesthesiology but
were quickly abandoned because of psychic side effects. One of the weirdest
is still used sometimes (being extremely friendly to weak hearts and lungs):
ketamine. Basically the patient on ketamine can be awake during the operation
but in a state of utter confusion through selective disruptions of 
associative brain channels. My educated guess is that if serious work is
going on trying to find a truth drug, ketamine-related substances are studied
intensely. Anyway, there is no perfect drug that just make you say the truth
and then forget about it. And there never will be. And the polygraph is 
quackery.

Mats Bergstrom