That One Time the US Army Built a Spray Gun to Spoil 'Condemned' Food with LSD

The idea wasn't to kill you. The idea was to fuck you up for your own good—unless you were an insurgent, in which case spasming, puking, shitting your pants, clutching your stomach (your insides burn), and hallucinating could well have been the fleeting first course of your uprising slowly fading, even starving, into oblivion.

The mission to create a foodstuff degrader occupies a curious place in the US Defense Department's long and sordid history of biological and chemical research and development. By the 1960s, the Army was already steeped in its so-called psychedelic Manhattan Project at Maryland's Edgewood Arsenal. Some of its engineers were busy designing [mind-control bombs packed full of 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate](http://would-be mind-control bombs.), the incapacitating agent better known as BZ. But until then the Army, let alone the Armed Forces writ large, had never quite confronted the problem with food head on.

Which is to say that food can always go very, very bad. Large stocks or batches of any particular foodstuff sometimes must be deemed hazardous. It can happen without warning and for any number of reasons (bacteria or fungal outbreak, terror plots, among other things) and becomes a matter of safeguarding the populace by labelling the reserves as inedible, transporting them out of sensitive areas, or maybe even destroying them altogether. Only that's just not always tenable, especially during emergencies or times of crisis. When there's simply no time to apply warning signs to doomed grain heaps, say, or when hauling away or destroying those reserves becomes a logistal nightmare, what should we do?

It was a public health issue, if anything, and still is. But it also had explicit wartime implications. The Secretary of the Army knew as much, putting out the call in 1964, as the theatre of war(games) roiled the Gulf of Tonkin, for a method of effectively and efficiently dealing with food reserves gone, or deemed, bad.

The trick lay in developing unique mixtures of psychoatives and contaminants capable of degrading so-called "condemned" food stocks so clearly that anyone in relative proximity to the caches knew damn well that the foodstuffs had indeed intentionally been debased, and as such weren't edible or fit for human consumption or food production, period.

It took time. Inventors William H. Collins, Vincent J. DiPaola (a former Edgewood staffer), and Louis M. Sherman plodded along for 16 years, from the thick of the Vietnam Conflict right into the Reagan era until finally, with a suitable approach to degrading foodstuffs "in such a vivid manner", the three inventors were awarded US Patent No. 4,479,889 (PDF) in 1984 for their Compositions and Method for Degrading Foodstuff. And perhaps most notably they recognized the potential in all those hallucinatory derivatives of d-Lysergic acid—agents like d-Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) that are resistant to degradations of air and light—to get the point across that this food isn't for eating by kicking up waves of "drunkeness filled with fantasy and exaggerated images."

Read the rest over at Motherboard.