The objective of a truth drug is to relax, a person’s mind so that he gives completely open and truthful responses to whatever he is asked – even if it means betraying his country.
Research into so-called truth drugs began in earnest during the Korean War in the early 1950s, following reports about ‘brainwashing’ interrogation methods carried out by the North Koreans and Chinese on prisoners of war. The US Air Force began a project to find a ‘truth serum’ so that American pilots could be given it and trained in how to resist brainwashing.
Experiments began with barbiturates, amphetamines, alcohol and heroin, but most of the drugs just helped the subjects to tell lies more skillfully.
Purge trials
Fear of mind-control techniques had been raised during Joseph Stalin’s notorious purge trails in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries in the 1930s and 1940s. Defendants appeared in court in an apparently befuddled state, with glazed eyes, admitting to crimes that they could not possibly have committed.
Sodium pentothal, a barbiturate used by anaesthetists to relax hospital patients before surgery, is often described as a truth drug. Its use in this context is to help create a disoriented state in which the subject’s awareness of his surroundings can be manipulated.
The subject is given a strong dose of the drug which makes him unconscious. He is then injected with the stimulant Benzedrine to revive him, but only partially. With the subject in a state of semi-consciousness, a psychiatrist can use hypnotic techniques to change his perception of what is going on around him.
When this method was used on a suspected Soviet spy in West Germany in 1955, his mind was taken back to a stage where he believed he was talking to his wife at home, and he freely gave a detailed account of his undercover activities.
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