Category: Drug Experimentation

• The OSS and the Drug Trials

  This theory claimed that the Office of Strategic Services was already conducting covert drug experiments on unwitting soldiers or other human subjects during World War II and that LSD, or substances like it, were being tested as truth serums, interrogation aids, or behavior-control tools by 1944. The historical record shows that the OSS did pursue wartime truth-drug research, but the best-documented substances in that phase were mescaline, scopolamine, and a marijuana derivative known as TD. LSD’s psychoactive effects were first identified in 1943, and the broader intelligence history of LSD belongs more clearly to the late 1940s and 1950s than to a firmly established OSS soldier-testing program in 1944.