The Great French Acid Trip

In 1951, the unsuspecting people of Pont-Saint-Esprit, a small town in France, came down with a surprise case of psychotropic hallucinations. At the time, Pont-Saint-Esprit’s dealer was the best in the world, and his acid was par excellence. To protect our sources, let’s just call him Central IA. Frig. I just gave it away, didn’t I?

Back then acid was known as LSD-25, an accidental creation by chemist Albert_Hofmann in 1938. The US government took interest, hoping they could use the drug as a truth serum. Later, after confirming that honesty wasn’t really part of the long list of side effects, the CIA turned to LSD as a potential biological weapon. This shift in policy gave birth to the now-infamous MK-ULTRA projects.

The CIA’s new interest in acid coincided with a truly bizarre turn of events in Pont-Saint-Esprit—the day the entire town bripped talls. Until recently, doctor’s blamed the effects of a rare fungus for poisoning the town, claiming that a ‘contaminated batch of bread’ caused everyone to go looney toons and five people to die. A document recently uncovered by Hank Albarelli, an investigative journalist who’s followed the government’s experiments with LSD for years, tells a different story. The paper carries the sort of convoluted, highly-suspicious title you’d expect from a middle-school production of Goldfinger: “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin-tell him to see to it that these are buried.”

After unraveling all the lingo, Albarelli surmised that F. Olson stood for Frank Olson, a research scientist working for the CIA during the time of the incident. Belin, he figured, stood for David Belin, a member of the Rockefeller Commission charged with investigating wrongdoings by the CIA. With these names in place, Albarelli easily connected the dots, inferring that Frank Olson asked Belin to “bury” any documents concerning the CIA’s experiments on the townspeople of Point-Saint-Esprit.

Further work with the Freedom of Information Act revealed yet another document that clarified this great government bungle. An agent with Sandoz Chemical, the Swiss company who originally owned the patent to LSD, drunkenly revealed that “The Point-Saint-Esprit ‘secret’ is that it was not the bread at all.” The LSD had been administered to the town in some other way.

This is where the facts run thin. CIA think tanks tossed around the idea of using acid to contaminate a town’s water supply, and went so far as to order 10 kilograms of the stuff from Sandoz. Sandoz informed them that they only had about 10 grams of it total. Nevertheless, years later military scientist Dr. Jim Ketchum found a steel barrel filled with LSD in his office. The barrel was never explained to him and later disappeared. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find this barrel and deliver it to VBS HQ.