Download PDF of this full issue: v9n3.pdf (8.6 MB)

LSD Victim, Vet Wins $1.7 Million

By VVAW

When the VA and Defense Departments' backs are against a wall, they are able to come through. This is clear from the case of ex-Army Private James R. Thornwell who will get a total of $1.7 million compensation as a result of his suit following illegal use of LSD by military investigators. It's only a matter of time before these institutions end up in the same position regarding vets with radiation poisoning and Agent Orange poisoning.

Thorwell's story—which the Army admits is true and which is not even being contested—adds a new page to the whole furor about mind control, human rights, and the Manchurian Candidate. The sinister machinations of Dr. No had nothing whatever on the slimy sorts of maneuvers carried out in the interest of "justice" by Army Intelligence in the case of Private Thorwell.

Thornwell, accused of stealing classified documents, was arrested by the Army in 1961. According to documents he got through the "Freedom of Information Act," the Army isolated him in a small cell, refused him food. Water and even toilet facilities, threatened and beat him, and called him a homosexual along with other obscenities in order to extract a confession from him. Six Weeks (!) into this interrogation, the Army injected him, without his knowledge, with LSD and, in an effort to simulate an interrogation by enemy powers, threatened to permanently extend his drug-induced state. Thornwell suffered, according to Army documents, "an extreme paranoiac reaction." (In the language of the real world, try to imagine the bad trip which would result from acid under these circumstances!)

Again according to Army documents, the Army dropped the charges against Thornwell, apparently afraid that their interrogation methods would come out in any investigation.

While the Army seems to say they were only "simulating" the methods of a "foreign power," there should be no mistake about what was happening. Thornwell was hardly a unique case. His interrogation was one part of a secret Army program known as "Third Chance," designed to test LSD as a truth serum that might be used on POW's by America's enemies (that's what the Army says, anyhow!) The overall program included the administration of LSD to thousands of soldiers at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, a fact which the Army admitted in 1975 (the government gave ?'s of a million dollars to the widow of a civilian biochemist who was a suicide victim after having been fed acid in 1953; this was a part of the Edgewood program).

1953—long before the so-called drug culture was a dream in the mind of Timothy Leary. 1961—8 years later, and the program was still going on. These military sleuths must have had a drug manufacturing operation which would have been the envy of the counter-culture or the Mafia.

The effects of the drug on Thornwell were brought out in the court suit, which originally demanded $10 million compensation. Nightmares, headaches, depression, psychiatric disorders, inability to hold jobs, inability to deal with the stress—and $1.7 million is a small amount to pay a man for 18 years of his life.

We have no way of knowing what bizarre techniques Army Intelligence is using today—but think about what anyone would have thought had they been told about the use of LSD in 1953! Forget the nonsense about "simulating the techniques of a foreign power"—the whole episode makes perfectly clear who the immediate enemy is!