Don't Drink The Water

Illustration by Emmanuel Romeuf

Andy Roberts’s feature on LSD in the water supply (‘Reservoir Drugs’) described the CIA’s obsession with this type of threat in the 1950s and the scare stories about hippies dumping drugs in reservoirs and similar media reports. I’d like to go back a bit and fill in the gap on the CIA’s own interests. The huge quantities of LSD needed might have meant that spiking water supplies was absurdly impractical… but a little thing like that didn’t stop the world’s favourite spy agency. 

In the early 1950s, the CIA approached the Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland, the company that had patented LSD, and requested 10 kilos of the stuff. They were politely informed that the total production only amounted to 10g, enough for some 40,000 doses, but far less than the Agency wanted. The CIA bought what it could from Sandoz, and used some of it in the notorious MK-ULTRA programme. Among other things, the programme explored the effect of LSD on unwitting subjects by spiking drinks at parties. But the idea of using gigantic quantities had not been abandoned. 

Dr Jim Ketchum was involved in the US Army’s programme for testing the military effectiveness of a whole range of psychedelic chemicals. He entered his office as Department Chief one Monday morning in 1969 and found a black steel barrel, a bit like an oil drum, in the corner. [1] The military does not always explain everything, and Dr Ketchum assumed there was a good reason for this unusual addition to the furniture. However, after a couple of days he became curious. He waited until everyone else in the building had gone home one evening and opened the lid. 

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...

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David Hambling @'Fortean Times'