The common term “truth serum” refers to any number of sedative/hypnotic drugs which are used to induce honesty in a subject.
The idea of a truth serum is nothing new.
In ancient times, alcohol was used because as an anaesthetic, it depresses some of our higher centres, areas like the cerebral cortex where a lot of thought processing occurs.
It reduces inhibitions but also slows thought processes, making it difficult to think clearly, which is why the saying goes, “In Vino Veritas” (In Wine There Is Truth).
The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that Germanic tribes held their important councils while drunk, because lying is generally more difficult and complicated than telling the truth, if you suppress higher cortical functions you are more likely to speak the truth, simply because it’s easier.
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Modern “truth serums” include ethanol, scopolamine, 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, midazolam, flunitrazepam, sodium thiopental, and amobarbital, among others.
It most commonly is in reference to sodium pentothal whch is the brand name for thiopental sodium, the oldest and best known.
Although it was first developed in the 1930s, it is still used today in a range of settings, including, in some countries, by the police and the military.
It’s been a staple of spy movies and suspense comics for decades , but in real life, scientists have tested it on spies, psychiatric patients, pregnant women, and suspected criminals – they all talked.
Still Pop culture lies to us. Examples: IQ tests aren’t that accurate a measure of pure intelligence.
Polygraphs are unreliable and truth serum is guaranteed to set a patent to babbling, but there’s a good chance they won’t actually be speaking the truth. io9 ran a story on about the history of sodium pentothal, aka truth serum, chronicling its invention in the early 1900s to its latter-day discreditation.
Sodium pentothal’s early uses are really interesting: at one point, a doctor hoped to use some sort of truth serum to exonerate prisoners who were in jail for crimes they didn’t commit.
When sodium pentothal was invented in the 1930s, it was used to treat World War II soldiers recovering from shell shock.
It served as a light painkiller and relaxed patients without completely knocking them out, facilitating therapy.
The most high profile case it was used in , was the JFK inquiry, when District Attorney Jim Garrison administered it to Perry Russo for interrogation purposes.
Around 1915, a type of “truth serum” was “discovered” by Dr Robert Ernest House, an obstetrician.
He noticed women who were given a drug called scopolamine during childbirth, commonly used to reduce motion sickness and nausea, seemed uninhibited to talk about things they normally wouldn’t.
He then made the somewhat suspect leap to thinking the women not only were more willing to speak candidly when under the influence of these drugs and from what Dr. House could tell, their accounts were always truthful and accurate.
House then worked closely with patients with mental disorders and conducted research on their condition using some of these drugs.
Specifically, in 1924, he experimented with scopolamine hydrobromide and found, as with the women in childbirth, his patients would fall into a mental state that made them more impressionable in terms of getting them to be willing to reveal what they thought was true.
According to House, these patients were also not able to hide their reactions to certain statements, with the drug inhibiting their usual responses.
For some reason, his mind went to prisoners who, under interrogation, maintained claims of innocence.
House worked closely with criminologists for the next six years before his death in 1930, using scopolamine hydrobromide to determine the guilt or innocence of numerous individuals accused of crimes, despite the fact that the effectiveness of the drug was highly questionable.
So if asked where they were the night before, if they answered automatically, ‘at home,’ then they couldn’t have been out robbing a bank.
Seeing this, Mr. House believed that the drug could prove useful when interrogating suspected criminals, and he went ahead and arranged for some arrested people in a Dallas,TX jail to be administered the drug before an interview.
Both suspects he worked with were believed to be guilty,but denied their guilt under the effects of the drug, and as a result both were eventually acquitted of any crimes.
Scopolamine didn’t last too long as a truth serum, though.
After increasing use throughout the country, a case was brought to a judge in 1926, arguing that the drug had no scientific backing and potentially dangerous side effects.
A higher court judge ruled that the drug could not longer be used as an interrogation tool, but that didn’t end the quest for a truth serum.
Sodium Pentothal
In 1934, a new drug called Sodium Pentothal was invented by a few scientists trying to make a better pain killer.
Sadly, they failed — the drug hardly reduced physical pain at all but, it did have some interesting other effects.
Notably, it significantly relaxed patients. Psychiatrists started to administer it to patients, especially to shell-shocked soldiers.
The drug proved extremely effective at calming soldiers with PTSD, leading them to talk to psychiatrists and willingly work through their problems .
However, this success proved a double-edged sword.
Many of these psychiatrists treating soldiers also consulted for police stations, and with so many soldiers recovering as a result of Sodium Pentothal, the drug gained notoriety.
Notably, the public perception came to be that Sodium Pentothal removed all fears, and if it could strip soldiers of their fear and anxiety from war, it should strip criminals’ of their fear of getting caught or sentenced.
So, various investigators and police officers started to use the drug during interrogations, thinking it would force the suspect to tell the truth.
Somewhat interestingly, as a result of court cases like the one in 1926, courts did not support the use of Sodium Pentothal, and in fact would consider confessions under the effects of the drug inadmissible.
That didn’t stop people from thinking it worked, though, and so many of those administering the drug would simply fail to mention that it was used during interrogations.
This led to a number of scandals, where at the last minute it was found out that “Truth Serum” was used, and the evidence had to be thrown out.
In 1942, as World War II raged, the United States’ newly established spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), asked its scientists to turn their attention from their other projects to the urgent mission of creating a truth drug to interrogate prisoners of war.
The Cold War
The U.S. government researched and investigated a huge number of supposed truth serums during the mid-20th century.
It all started with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, which experimented with marijuana, scopomaline, and mescaline during WW2.
They found that the effects of these drugs were really no different than alcohol — they made people a lot more talkative and willing to communicate, but didn’t impact the truthfulness of the statements in any consistent way.
This research only encouraged the U.S. government to keep going and try some harder stuff.
The OSS first tried out mescaline, a hallucinogenic cactus derivative and scopolamine, a “twilight sleep” drug.
Both made test subjects too sick to reveal any secrets; so the OSS researchers settled instead on marijuana, using a tasteless, colorless, and odorless liquid extract called TD that could be injected into an unwitting target’s cigarettes.
“TD appears to relax all inhibitions and to deaden the areas of the brain which govern an individual’s discretion and caution,” an OSS report said.
Among other effects noted, “the sense of humor is accentuated to the point where any statement or situation can become extremely funny to the subject.”
After trying the stuff himself, in 1943 OSS narcotics agent George H. White gave the substance its first field test on August “Little Augie” Del Gracio, a drug-dealing New York gangster with connections to mobster Lucky Luciano.
He was caught in Germany with 1,430 pounds of narcotics, which brought him into interest with the German Authorities, American Authorities and the League of Nations.
White arranged a meeting with Del Gracio, plied him with spiked cigarettes, and listened as the gangster became “obviously high and extremely garrulous,” according to an account by journalist Dominic Streatfeild.
In the ensuing two-hour monologue Del Gracio found himself mysteriously compelled to give an in-depth account of his drug-trafficking network.
White considered the experiment a success, though a second meeting didn’t go as well. Del Gracio got too stoned, felt pins and needles in his hands and feet, and had to lie down for a nap.
A subsequent test that same year on 30 Americans suspected of being Communists was encouraging, with five admitting Communist sympathies.
But when the OSS tried to use the substance for actual intelligence gathering, comic disaster befell the interrogator, who accidentally smoked the adulterated cigarettes himself and started ranting about his boss making passes at his wife; the German U-boat captain being questioned coughed up little useful information.
TD was not used again during the war, and intelligence officials eventually concluded that it was not much more effective than giving people alcohol and caffeine.
Yet the quasi-scientific search for methods to extract information from unwilling subjects was far from over.
Driven by panics over Cold War espionage and violent crime, physicians, spies, and cops repeatedly heralded would-be truth serums and mind-reading technologies.
Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. government tried out LSD instead. The C.I.A., as part of Project MKUltra and Project MKDELTA, tested whether LSD could be used as a truth serum or mind control drug of some sort.
Needless to say, it didn’t work:
“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.” — the CIA
Truth Serum Today
In 1963, the Supreme Court heard the case Townsend v. Sain, the petitioner was a man confessed to a murder while under the influence of “truth serum” drugs and believed that his constitutional rights had been violated.
He argued that the usage of the drugs resulted in him being coerced into confession without the due process of law, which went against the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Supreme Court ruled in the accused’s favor, holding that confessions resulting from the use of truth serum were “unconstitutionally coerced.”
It is interesting that, from a legal perspective, what is being said here is not that truth serums aren’t scientifically valid. Rather, it is that, even if some truth serum were proven to produce the truth, it wouldn’t be constitutionally fair to use such a drug.
The supreme court and other judges argued it would be a violation of the 5th amendment (the right to remain silent), among other pieces of the constitution.
After the case, truth serums became less popular in the United States.
However, the CIA is known to have extensively tested and used various “truth” serums over the years and it wouldn’t be surprising if they still do today.
Further, despite the Court’s ruling, as mentioned, a judge recently approved the use of truth serum in the case of James Holmes, the man accused of the Aurora, Colorado theatre shootings in 2012.
However, in this case, the drugs are not being used to determine whether he’s guilty or not. Rather, the truth serum is being used to determine whether or not the “guilty by reason of insanity” plea would be valid here- i.e. whether he’s feigning insanity to avoid prison.
It’s unclear whether the examination ever took place.
While real-life truth serum is seemingly not very effective at forcing a person to reveal the truth, it was once considered a fool-proof, fail-safe option to get confessions out of accused criminals.
Sometimes it might have worked, but sometimes it probably didn’t. Either way, until a truth serum can be shown to be 100% effective on the level of veritaserum, truth serum will likely not become used very often.
Further, due to the legal issues surrounding its use, perhaps violating people’s rights, even if we had a fool proof truth serum, it still is likely not to be used very often, at least not without consent of the accused.
However, After 9/11, intelligence agencies turned to secret prisons and waterboarding of suspected terrorists, former CIA and FBI director William Webster said the United States should consider using Pentothal on al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
Another recent case involved a defector from the biological weapons Department 12 of the KGB “illegals” (S) directorate (e.g., presently a part of Russian SVR service) who claimed a serum code-named SP-117 was highly effective, and has been widely used.
According to him, “The ‘remedy which loosens the tongue’ has no taste, no smell, no color, and no immediate side effects. Most importantly, a person had no recollection having had the ‘heart-to-heart talk’,” and felt afterward as though they’d suddenly fallen asleep.
Officers of S Directorate primarily used the drug to verify fidelity and trustworthiness of their agents who operated overseas, such as Vitaly Yurchenko.
According to Alexander Litvinenko, Russian presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin was drugged with the same substance by FSB agents during his kidnapping.
Occasionally these drugs and devices have seemed to work, though psychologists point out they rely on antiquated notions of how memory operates, and legal experts liken them to torture rather than genuine investigative tools.
Even now entrepreneurial scientists continue to pursue new technologies that might extract truths from guilty minds.