Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 140: Edgewood Part 2: Disco Soup

Episode Date: February 17, 2015

We finish out our two parter on the Edgewood Arsenal drug experiments with harrowing tales of LSD overdoses, soldiers on PCP, and the evil motivations behind an experiment that took us all the way over to France.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last time. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Oh, I'm having one. Oh what? Someone showed me this porno where this girl is having an orgasm. And every time she has one she goes, oh, I'm having one. That's right. Which is just, that's the worst way to have one. Oh, I'm having one.

Same dialogue as a fat guy at a buffet in an old country buffet when he's looking at the chicken tenders or something. But he's saying, I'll have nine. But he just says one at a time, you know. I'm having one again. Oh, the daggers. Edgewood part two, everybody. We're doing it. Edgewood part two.

Yes, we're back in here. I'm sorry, I was just perpetual having an orgasm. I'm having one. I love the way you come, Henry. You're the first person to ever say that. Well, that's why we have a soul connection. It's true. We're going to get into the heavy drug abuse and the heavy drug use in this episode, so it's going to be fun.

We brought up in the last episode a bunch of different ways the government has basically tricked soldiers into being tested. And someone brought it up on the Facebook page. It's true, it's something our soldiers have gone through a long time. To be honest, I didn't even think about it, but I remembered my uncle was a part of the, basically he was a part of one of the first battalions in Vietnam. Oh, yeah, the pastrami troop.

I remember the pastrami troop. They brought canices to the locals, but they were distrustful of them. They thought they were booby traps. But he was sprayed with some of the original, basically with the original tests of Agent Orange and caused all of my cousins to be retarded. So I know that this happens all the time. People think that that was a joke statement.

That is not. You actually have a lot of mentally disabled cousins. All of my cousins have some form of mentally, some sort of mental disability. I'm the only one who's as sharp as a tack. That's very interesting. We have a case study. There's a Browsky case study.

Well, speaking of Vietnam, one of the guys that was subjected to the drug testing at Edgewood Medical Facility, he said that the time spent there under the care of these experiments was worse than two tours in Vietnam. Well, I mean, to be fair, they had a lot of drugs in Vietnam, but they also had prostitutes. So he's just like, oh, yeah. Technically, his first tour was a wine tour.

Everything after that must have been a letdown. Yeah, he left Vietnam and he didn't get a purple heart, but he was a professional psalm, which is very good. Also, before we really get into this episode, I'd like to remind everyone again, I hope you're not listening to this episode with your fucking shoes on. Take them off. Put them in a bathing suit inside of your house.

Remove all your clothes. Tell everyone to just fucking lay off at the communication for an hour. That's right. Spark a fucking Jefferson's finger of the most premium fucking dragon eggs that you can, because we're going to trip you out the same way these guys got tripped out, except you're not going to get residual payments from the government. That's right.

Smoke that racist Jefferson weed. I'm in Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, that's the one. Not the one that was moving on up. Even though that's actually a good way to put it, you're going to smoke a weed because it gets you high. You know, Jefferson's are moving on up all the time because they're high all the time.

Good point. Good point. I'm having one. I'll have what he's having, please. Between 1955 and 1967, the military tested 740 soldiers and 900 civilians with LSD. What they would do is they would take these guys and they would lock them in these small, very poorly lit rooms with no door knobs on the inside

for some of the experiments. So those experiments would, they would lock them in the box and there would be a guy on a phone talking to him on the other side while this guy was isolated. Others, they were just one-on-one interviews between the experiment and the scientist. And there are multiple videos of these interviews. There's a shit ton of them out there.

If you watch the documentary Bad Trip to Edgewood, you can see a lot of examples of it. So what we're going to do right now is we're going to play you some of the LSD trips that these guys got into while they were under the care of these doctors at Edgewood. Now, a lot of them reacted differently. Some of these guys, they loved it. But that's like Dr. Ketchum's whole thing.

He said that basically he felt that the media was focusing on the people that had a bad trip. What they, when they really needed to do was go and focus on the people that like fucking had their minds blown. Right, right. I agree. Which is true. And I also remember everybody who has tripped on acid or has done any sort of hallucinogen,

remember the effects that you have when you took either one or two tabs of acid, right? So it's a feeling of heightened euphoria. You start giggling. You start maybe getting a little anxious. You get kind of uncontrolled your body. It's easy for you to get like lost in a closet. Oh, yeah.

Well closets are very tricky to get out of with all the clothes in them and you keep on tripping on shoes. That's the problem because you keep seeing all your alternate selves. Right. You know what I mean? In all the clothes.

But what I, so imagine taking six, again, six to a hundred times more than the normal dose of LSD and then being forced to sit in a chair with a headset on and answer questions from your fucking boss. Right. Even if you were just working at the Piggly Wiggly,

it's going to be a hard time. Well, I'm sure there's countless people working at Walmart right now tripping nuts off of mushrooms and they just keep on marking the same mac and cheese box with the 69 cent stamp and they haven't moved off that box in three hours. Imagine if it's the assistant manager, Herman,

fucking hassle on you while you're tripping balls. Instead, it's like Sergeant Staff Henderson and he's got a fucking crew cut and he's telling you how the Vietnam War is going to go on for another nine years. I can only imagine he's animated like a crumb cartoon. You can just see the saliva spit from his mouth and every single drop you can feel hit your face

as if it's a thousand pound weight. Every breath he takes, yeah, you can hear it like it's echoing through a cave. We're going to toss some tunes underneath these as well, correct? Of course, of course. Who do you think you're fucking talking to here? All right, let's get to some rock and roll.

He's just behind these things, so let's just fucking kick back and get tri-pay. Okay. I'm sorry, Doc. Come on, baby. That's all I can. All right. How do you feel? Feel like you're asking me now.

Yeah. How do you feel right now? You can't figure it out. All right. It's hard to figure out. It's hard to figure out? Oh, shit. I don't believe it.

I feel it. Wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it. This is a different guy. Do you know what first this is? Edward Austin. All right.

You think you could count back with my sevens if I gave you another one? All right. All right. How about 101? Taking away sevens, I don't know. That's 94. 87.

87. 81. From 101. And then subtract seven from the number that you get. I can't do that now. Okay. Can you take seven from 98? Seven from 88, 91.

21. 20 was a 37. About 21. 17 from, I mean, $5. So it was $5. 35. I don't know the rest of the money, but what's your roundup? Maybe it should have went 7 from 23.

7 from 98. Good move. I know it's difficult to try. 7 from 98 as well. And, of course, to that man's name was private Frank Zappa. He went on to be a great rock and roll musician. Yeah. And I'm going to be a great rock and roll musician.

He's a great rock and roll musician. I'm going to be a great rock and roll musician. He's a great rock and roll musician. But that's not an easy challenge. They frame it. Take seven from take seven from like that's difficult. First, feel the wrap your head around. Just like I'm fucking word puzzle.

But it's also like this guy's not smiling at all. But I love the fact that he couldn't answer the question. How are you feeling? That's pretty remarkable. Right. it's bigger than us, man. Yeah. How you feeling? The wind, man. The wind. All right. All right. And you kind of got a skeleton arm thing going on. You know, I'm kind of feeling skeleton arm a little bit. I'm kind of I'm feeling leprechaun's hat right now. You know what I'm saying?

I mean, at some point, these generals did have to realize that they weren't doing anything to advance a better soldier to make war, something that's going to be fought. They weren't making our army more superior by doing this. They had to realize that at some point. Absolutely. In fact, one of them was quoted the conclusion that they eventually came upon as a trippy shit, man. Okay, so in 1960, a scientist told an audience of military doctors. He said it may be possible to sow dosa man that he could describe an enemy soldier as green and purple striped cuboid and nine feet tall. But this is not incapacitation so long as he can still recognize this apparition as an enemy and can shoot him or impale him

on a bayonet. Well, the number one flaw is that they don't just see it as a frumpy Russian, which is what that person was probably looking at. They see it as someone that should be killed in galaxy galaxy of the guardians. Exactly. Playing a video game. That's so much scarier than just seeing a soldier. You know what I mean? And it actually feels like doesn't it make them more ready to murder? But also, it's it's just, again, they're just making people that want to play the sitar. They're not making super soldiers. I agree. All right. Here's some testimony from a guy that went through these tests. This isn't an actual video because a lot of the videos I'll say, I mean, most of them are guys, you know, it's

like take seven from 91 and from that and from that as far as the LSD videos goes. This is a guy that's describing what his trip was like while he was on LSD. Is it going to be super positive and he had a great time at his wife? So what happened? They saw Jimi Hendrix play the play for the first time. I just don't think these guys realized that a trip sitter needs to be like he needs to have like a friendly beard and like kind eyes. You know what I mean? And he has to have like a lot of oranges and like Thorazine. Like that's what a trip sitter is. Is he's he's Jerry Garcia. Yeah, I'll be your trip sitter. I'm General Patton Jr. I'm trying to prove to my dad that I'm a man. All right, take the asset. Yeah, my

dad said I wasn't strong enough to beat fellow Marines, but I will prove him wrong. Let's play cranium. And if you lose, I'm going to cut off one of your fucking toes. Sir, this would be scary if I wasn't on acid. I'm really intense at cranium. I love cranium. Great game. So here's a testimony from this guy. I started seeing giant spiders that appeared about two or three feet in size all over the walls. And I was not normally scared spiders. But I mean, the size just just just blew me. I could not believe they were in there. And it frightened me that these things were so big and they were so many of them a little room. And I started seeing boils on my body and blisters. That's like pretty like Pink

Floyd type stuff. You know, I mean, that's pretty intense. And I do like the fact that he was genuinely just scared of the size of them. Right. It was that he was seeing him. He was that he was just like, you know, I've seen spiders. And yeah, you know, spiders and only like small and they're bigger spiders. Those spiders are like really big. It's interesting though, because I would be I would be totally fine with four or five large spiders on the wall. I can have a good time with that. Okay. Hundreds of thousands of small spiders. I can't deal with all that. That would trip me out hardcore. You know what? I would rather hundreds of thousands of small spiders than one big six foot spider. You think I don't

know the six foot spider could become your friend. I don't think so unless it's down to be your friend. The problem is, first of all, has to be down to be your friend. And that's a lot of conditions to have with a six foot spider, especially when you're tripping fucking balls in a deprivation tank right in the middle of the Pentagon. Why didn't they just go to Greenwich Village and just like send in a secret, you know, they dosed all the Dose New York wall of enduring the operation big city. They got some of it. But I guess that also got to be pretty unstable as well. Yeah. Oh yeah, it all got out of control. And in fact, we will get later. We will get to an experiment in which they went over to

Paris to try this type of stuff out all sources shenanigans happen over there. We had another sim type character. Yeah, another sim type character, a guy named Sergeant Clovis. We'll we'll get to Sergeant Clovis later on. Hey, Henry, what does it sound like when Sergeant Clovis ejaculates? I'm having one. I'll have what she's having. Is it an orgasm? It sounds like one to me. It's possible. I want to thank your your co star there on A to Z for bringing that pornography film to your attention. I'm having one. I'm going to say that tonight if I do have one. But another guy, the other LSD flashback, do you remember the one where he said the police, the doctors face came off and walked across the table? No, I missed

that one. Yeah, he's like, it's again, it's just I mean, like I was administered the serum and I was I was asked several procedural questions. And then a heck of a thing later, his face just kind of popped off like it was Alice in Wonderland and started walking across the table and it's just like way that sounds the exact way that Bob Denver would have described it. Heck of a thing happened. I'm just so jaded. I think all of us are so jaded now. As a matter of fact, Marcus, you and I bonded years ago now over the over a viewing of Cannibal Holocaust. Yeah. And I feel like if we were on acid and all of these experiments were happening to us, giggles. No loved every second of it. We actually we were probably the people

that they were looking for. Yeah, we would have been great super soldiers. Who knows? I could have been a doctor if I got the government to give me some LSD when I was 21. I said I had to do it by myself. Right. So besides acid, they also gave these soldiers PCP, otherwise known as angel dust out on the streets, right, crank, crank, wet. I've heard the zipper in your brain. Hot step. God's tap shoes. But in addition to filming the LSD experiments, they also filmed the PCP experiments, which are actually quite a bit more entertaining because they gave a guy a shit ton of PCP and asked him to run an army obstacle course all by himself. My question here is like, honestly, with this one, I was kind of expecting

him to nail this. I know. That's I've watched enough episodes of the television show cops to know that guys on PCP, the one thing they can do, they can't speak, they can't think, but they can run. Yeah, and they can run hard. They run hard. Well, people don't talk about PCP is actually it's very good for doing your taxes. Oh, yeah, because you could do those taxes in your room. You could do those taxes in an office. You could do those taxes in the middle of a four lane highway. Doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter. Well, Henry, what describe what this guy looked like running this obstacle course? He is so slow. They gave him all this PCP and then it's just him just sort of going like, yep. Yeah, it's

kind of like kind of jauntily hops over the things and he slowly goes up the thing. But you can tell that he thinks he's fucking ripping it up. He is tearing this thing apart. But it's weird because he's staring at the wood, the wooden wall that he has to get over and he's trying to negotiate with it. He's like, I'm gonna out thank you. And it's like, it's what? Just hop get go. This is the other again, a problem. I'm also thinking they're overdosing him on PCP to they're not even giving him what you'd get on the street. No, by the way, is any war zone ever been fought in a place that was close to looking like any of these any of these courses, just random wooden walls? You've never heard of the Syracuse Jungle

Gym Wars of the year 2012. No, and it's so recent. We would think that I would have heard about it. No, it was just a bunch of kids fighting over the spring horse when you get on the horse and it wiggles back and forth and it gives little kids orgasm. Henry, you have just what does it sound like when a little child orgasms? You just gave me a flashback speaking of drugs and flashbacks that are terrible. The I was a big child and you know the spring your horse is it's just one spring there and kids like they like to like to go back and forth and back and forth. I went forth, but then I never made it back. So I just face planted and then the I broke. Yeah, and then the kids help me know they just laughed

and laughed and then I just kind of it's important for you to be pointed out by other people. What is your shortcomings? Right, right, right, right? Yeah. Well, luckily after this guy ran this course, he gave a bit of a post game interview with his superiors. So let's hear what this guy had to say following running the course on PCP. I feel pretty good, sir. Are you cold? No, I'm not cold at all. You tired? No, I'm not tired. Well, I could run. Yes, sir. I could run. I run 100 miles right now. That's right. I run through it. And now I feel good. And I'm not tired. And I can run through it again. See what I mean? Good Sergeant Ditches to give you any instructions about what you were supposed to do tomorrow.

Yes. Let me see. What was I supposed to do tomorrow? Tomorrow? What is today, Thursday? Wow, getting there. Lost some buttons there. And that's when he sort of wanders off preoccupied with the buttons on his jacket. I think you actually play the wrong clip there. I think that was a deleted scene from Forrest Gump. Lost some buttons, but he didn't lose the buttons were on the shirt. The shirt had come unbuttoned and he just couldn't. They didn't show the footage of him eating the buttons like they were chocolate chips right before the obstacle course. Yeah, the old crunchy raisins as he called them. There's some crunchy raisins. I gotta tell you, I could have a solid three dozen more of these crunchy raisins.

I would say it didn't look like it when you watch the footage. He wasn't really exuding himself that hard. He was fairly winded, though. He's raging on PCP. I feel like his body's just dealing with the PCP in a system because when you see the, you know, those foot the footage of people on PCP, there was like naked and running over cars in the middle of Compton. Like this is a guy. There's a guy here in New York City that I've seen. He looks like like the guy who wanted to kill the beast in the Disney cartoon Beauty and the Beast. He's just huge. And do you know what I'm talking about, Henry? And he would walk around Union Square shirtless, just covered in sweat and in a strut like I've never seen. He's going

nowhere. He was in a drug called confidence. Yes. But what, Marcus, do you know actually what PCP does to the body that causes you to sort of get winded? Yeah. Well, PCP can cause if you take too much of it, it can cause the sorts of respiratory respiratory failure that you get with brain damage. It can definitely, I mean, being out of breath is a fairly common thing. If you give this guy enough PCP, like for example, like Henry said, they gave him a hundred times the amount of LSD. So they gave these guys way too much of the drug for them to have like a good time Friday night party. So these guys are, you know, there's

if they would have given them less, he probably wouldn't have been able to do more. Let's just reiterate, 1955 to 1975. That's how long these experiments went on for. Shouldn't this 55 to 67, 55 to 67 shouldn't this just been solved in four hours? Well, we gave him drugs. They saw too much. Ella, that was too much PCP right there. I'm pretty certain. Do you remember when we gave private Laramon, like 97 milligrams of PCP and then he clung to the lamp for two days? Well, it depends what kind of army you want. Do you want someone clinging to a lamp that sees spiders and gets winded and can't run an obstacle course? Or do you want somebody who? Well, never mind. Let's just let's just go with it. Let's just

go with that army. Our strategy is called freak them out. So now this is the next drug that they tested on on our soldiers BC. Now this was the thing that in that could capacitate someone for up to three days, correct? And yeah, it lasted for up to three days. They said that they rapidly mumbled. They would just pick obsessively at things. One guy, Sim, the guy that we talked about in the last episode, the wacky doctor with the arm bone. I miss him. Yeah, I know. Well, we've got another wacky character coming out. So you know, you'll you'll fall in love again, Henry. He said that subjects sometimes display something approaching wit, not in the form of wordplay, but as a kind of sarcasm or unexpected frankness.

So they're sort of like like a Ricky Gervais type that they become. Is that what happens? It seems more like, you know, kids say the darndest things, right? Kind of things being like your tongue's real pink. But it's just because he's fucking tripping ball showing some wit there. Some good wit. I'd imagine probably extremely insubordinate as far as an army guy goes, right? Yeah. So the effects lasted for days at a time. The volunteers, they said that when they were on the drug, they were cut off from their own minds completely, just kind of going from one experience to the next. They said some of the visions that they saw. One of them said he saw tiny baseball players playing baseball on a tabletop. Another

Oh, that's honestly that's incredible. I would love that every one of these trips they're describing, I feel comfortable saying that I would enjoy. Yeah, one of them said that an animal or different people or objects would just suddenly appear and then they'd suddenly disappear. Right. Another one said this. He said I had a great urge to smoke. And when I thought about it, a lit cigarette appeared in my hand, I could actually smoke the cigarette. And the calm down on it was pretty fucking terrible as they started to come down. They had anxiety, aggression, pure fucking terror. In fact, catch him, the guy, the apologists for all this and the guy that says they actually did great work. He built padded cells to keep

these guys from hurting themselves while they were coming down. One of them actually escaped. He started running around. He thought that there were murderers after him. Another one. He said that he saw bugs, worms, one snake, one monkey and numerous rats. And that's a laundry. Let's a fucking laundry list of tears right there. I was just I just broke it into the zoo. And he thought that his skin was constantly covered in blood that he couldn't wash off. Another one broke a wooden chair and smashed a hole in the wall after tearing off a four by seven foot panel of padding so that it took three assistants and catch himself to do the guy. He said that he thought that they were all trying to kill him. Of

course. I mean, that doesn't seem completely irrational. They are the people who poison them. Yeah, point where they were tripping nuts for three days. Mm hmm. I mean, I remember I was on when I was on one of my worst trips that I've ever had. It's strange the kind of the preoccupations that you can have, especially almost on a normal dose of LSD and I got in my car and I appeared to be very small and the car was very big and it really freaked me the fuck out. Did you drive your car? I got in the car. Was it moving? I did. I got back to the house. There wasn't a lot in between. It was just like one of those things where I was driving. It's calm and it's like, man, you know what? I'm done tripping. I can get

and I can drive home and I got in the car and then it was just like, man, this car is so big and I'm so small and then I had a panic attack. I did a similar thing on with chocolates on mushrooms. I remember that mushrooms always kept me awake and I was like, I want to go see my friends in Milwaukee. And so I just took a couple of chocolates and then halfway through the trip. Holy Lord. That was an interesting drive and REM still makes me cry. God, that's a hell of a band and everybody does hurt sometimes and sometimes they hurt when they're driving tripping nuts trying to go see some buddies. I'll tell you this. There is a toilet in Lubbock Texas that is a portal to hell. I will attest to that. It is there, but you know, but eventually

if you wait it out, you can ride out of that toilet onto the roller coaster out into space. So you had your head in the toilet for a little while. Long time. Yeah. Real long time. And the roller coaster to space was my bed. See, that's that's a great ending to any television show. You know, what was it? Was it Dallas that ended in the snow globe? In the no, that would get the shower. That's what that was. That was the shower. What was the snow globe ending saying elsewhere? Just a movie. A television series needs to end with the person's head in the toilet and the whole thing was a trip. He said he's a soldier in 19 like every pretty much every single day. I'm waiting to like wake up and be seven years old again. You

know what I mean? Like I just like wake up and it's all been a weird long dream. But that's also because I've smoked a lot of weed here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's L. A. And you're living the dream, Henry, and everyone's very proud of you. Thank you. You're welcome. So there is a particular experiment that they did on these guys with BZ and this one is extremely cruel. Can you answer? What is BZ? Is it a combo of? It's a compound. It's just a chemical. It's just like LSD. It's just a lab manufactured drug. It was not a good one. Three days at a time is a bit much, you know, piety that they couldn't make it groovy enough to sell to America. So they're like, we'll save it for the fucking for the Iranians.

Right. But it is an interesting point. I mean, we know about LSD. We know about PCP. And you know, there's a lot of theories down through that the government kind of, you know, dropped a couple of bags on the street when they were walking to the old federal plaza or federal building or whatever. Well, PCP was originally made by a pharmaceutical company as of all things a sedative. Well, they got it wrong. Yeah, I thought you said that that was that was actually released on National opposite day thing was off because it was a big prank day. So everything was kind of okay. Yeah, they did a good job of keeping this BZ under wraps. So that's how dangerous it was. Yeah, it was just a bad drug. And it could be that

it was also very difficult to synthesize on, you know, on the public zone. It's who knows about this stuff. But in 1962, Ketchum had an entire Hollywood style set constructed in the middle of the forest outside of Edgewood as a makeshift communications outpost. So what the plan was is that they would get three soldiers and this outpost for three days. And all of them except for one of the dudes would be given BZ one of the guys would be given a placebo. And then the soldiers would receive a stream of commands and messages all based on a fictional scenario. Right. And so the here's my question. If you got the placebo and both of the people around you are tripping nuts all three three out

of the four three out of the four, don't you feel like you're the one tripping? You're in the you're in the minority. Everyone's like, No, this is normal to be up at three o'clock in the morning. We've got things to do. What's wrong with you, man? That's what's probably so incredibly cruel about the experiment also because placebo effects are known to be real. Like people are you watching other people triples? I you are definitely going to start feeling residual effects. You're gonna feel like you're going nuts to and watching them lose. It's got to be torture. Yeah. And they also up the paranoia in this room. They for some reason put a huge switch on the wall and hung a sign above it that

just said danger. Do not touch. Of course, for no reason. A good that's a good way to tell someone and not touch something. Right? Yeah. And then they put cameras behind the wall panels so they could watch him the entire time. And so after the BZ took effect, they triggered and triggered an alarm that a chemical attack had happened. And as far as these guys knew, this was all real. I mean, theoretically a chemical a chemical attack did happen, but it was a three or four three out of four of the guys. Yeah. So all the men went to put on their gas masks. But there was the one guy that couldn't do his name was Ronald Zadrosny, a very, very fucking sad story on this guy, tiny little guy with soldiers, very mild mount

mannered. Yeah, of course. And it said catch him said later, if he panicked at some point, the others could no doubt subdue him. Assume, of course, that the lower dosages would not remember render them too incompetent to react appropriately. So they gave him they gave him the delirium producing dose. They gave this is the guy that got the highest dose of everyone and the smallest one would specifically choose the weakest. Yeah, it was like their favorite thing with certain experiments. So it's like when they were doing the astronaut class experiments, the idea was to choose the strongest soldiers in order to test them in order to just like basically see how much they could withstand with these experiments, they were specifically

choosing the weakest members to give the most drugs to. Yeah, that's because we we wanted to win the space race. Yeah, I don't know what war we were trying to even what is all Cold War stuff, right? Yeah, all of it's called war. So the entire the entire drug trip of Zardosny lasted about 36 hours. He would salute officers that weren't there. He thought that a drape partitioning the toilet was just a bunch of dudes hanging out that weren't there. He stayed up all night. He pays he'd mumble. He tried to escape, but they wouldn't they wouldn't let him out. And as he like try and kind of started to come out of it a little bit, he just sit in front of the switchboard. And one of the guys said to him like, Okay,

you can't hear anything unless you have the telephone up to your ear. And the only thing he said was, it wasn't working with the electrodes. Yes, yes, of course, that is always a problem. With the telephone. If you got the electrodes in your brain, your brain jelly, it's so hard to have the telephone up to your because all you'll hear is Madonna's, uh, uh, you know, gavoke. Yeah, it's Madonna's vogue that keeps getting kind of pumped in by your own brain. It seems like he was acting sort of like an average tea party or on the fourth of July, just random salutes. So over the 36 hours, catch him and the other scientists fed 200 phony tactical messages, warnings of chemical attacks and various other pieces of intelligence

to the men in the room. The only problem was they ran out of script before the experiment ended. They fucking blew their load on all the things they had to say. So they just got to go straight to the blooper reel. Yeah, you can't improvise this. He said he said in his memoir, he said, in an urgent brainstorming session, we put our heads together and came up with an agonizingly improvised scenario. We told the military communicators to start sending new intelligence to the group inside the room in a simple code. The messengers informed the man that enemy forces were planning to move a train loaded with chemical weapons along a certain route. Eventually catch him in the good technicians resorted to gibberish

using poker terms referring to the dealer and a full house as the BZ et al soldiers struggled to interpret their code because it's literally just being like, and we get, uh, is this, is this a drosny? Is it drosny? You wouldn't believe it, but there's, there's like nine pelicans and they're all, they're all playing, they're all playing cribbage out here into there. Is there anything you can do about it? There's one guy in there who was stoned sober. Yeah, it was just like, and what is happening? Yeah. And, but as I said, the placebo effect, I mean, I'm sure he was affected by it. I mean, it reminds me sort of of the difference between Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Like Buster Keaton, the world was

crazy. Chaplin, he was the one making the world crazy. This guy, it was, he was just living in a Buster Keaton world. Yeah. He kept calling it, you know, every time they send a message, they're like, okay, Tristan Ross. Hey, man, okay, he's real. There's he nurse this guy. He's made out of burgers. He's gonna show up and he's gonna, he's gonna beg you to eat him when you can. You're not allowed to eat him. Don't eat him. Oh, I like that trip. I'd eat always eat the burger. Always eat the burger, man. He's gonna fuck his one. Look what he's doing. He's kind of like, oh, he's looking at the window. Uh, he, uh, yeah, in 95, he killed himself and also killed his wife. Sure. Sure. So it's

a sad ending. Negative effects. He was old though. He made it a long time. Yeah. Yeah. You can see that as a common thing. Basically all of these guys had a very bad end because most of them were pretty because they didn't know what they were being given and they weren't totally explained to that. It wasn't totally explained to them like what they were going through. And honestly, the doctors didn't even know what was going to happen to them when it when they were administering to them. It wasn't that it wasn't even totally explained. It wasn't explained. They were lied to. Yeah. Yes. So they, um, a lot of these people thought they were genuinely going insane. And so sometimes just the thought of being that you feel you're

genuinely going insane can kind of spin you off. Yeah. In fact, let's hear, let's hear some testimony from a guy talking about that exact feeling. This is one of the Edgewood people. Two weeks after I left Edgewood, uh, is when the flashbacks started. And they have lasted now for 20 years until I finally got some medication to help me control it. It don't never stop in your mind, but the medications keep you from being terrified over. And, uh, this is the way I've lived all these years. I thought I was going plum crazy. And, uh, I was afraid of that too. I didn't know what to do. And I lived with it until I got out of service in 1959. I came home and tried to work. I could not hold work, could not

hold a job. My mind just wouldn't function. What I will say is I go plum crazy every single time there's a fruit sale of the Albertsons. That's a different story. That's a joke. That's a joke and not what happened, you know. No, I mean, it's just weird because you, when you think of soldiers coming home from war, you think of their, their families out there applauding them. Random people in the community on the streets, hailing them as heroes. This guy just came back like a person from Woodstock. He just, he just came back like, uh, like the character from Taxi that, uh, was that Lloyd, uh, what's that guy's name? Travis Bickle. Bickle? You bring him Bickle up? That name out rhymes with Pickle. It's Travis

Bickle. Love the Bickle. He is very, it's, it's, it's honestly, it's a fucking shame because they had no idea what they went through and they, they, and they got what we said before, there was no outpatient program. There was no, there was no helping these people. And a lot of times what you'll hear is like with, with another one of these testimonies is that basically he says, he's like, I had to keep my pain a secret. Like, like a lot of these guys like, oh, he was saying, it's like, again, think about this. These are not normal flashbacks. It's like, I've had flashbacks, like certain patterns move for me. I've done enough hallucinogens that it's like, I'll, I'll have like an experience where like, I

had an acid flashback during the middle of pretty face the first season when I was submerged in water and I had to pop my head out of this water and I, I had a full on flashback and it's vivid and crazy, but not the level of these guys, how much acid they had to take. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, Congress ordered that all the test subjects were, uh, to be given health checkups, but out of 2,500 people that were on record as to being tested with various drugs, only 220 were reexamined. And of those, all the reports said that there were no physical long-term risks, but out of those people polled, 24% of them reported long-term adverse effects

and all of those were psychological. There are a ton of testimonies on bad trip to Edgewood, just guy after guy. There's another guy that just says like, he's like, I can't touch my kids. He's like, I can't tell my wife what I am going through. He said he once put his wife through a wall and didn't remember it. Right. It was just something that he just went fucking insane. He just had done, he has not, and as the years go by, he gets worse and worse and worse. And it is, I was actually going to bring up the Roger Goodell NFL, like, uh, concussion

situation. It's very similar. You know, they keep it secret for so long. And absolutely. And the reason, and Ketchum actually does give a reason for why they didn't tell these guys, uh, that there was going to be any, that there could be any sort of adverse effects. He says that, uh, the reason why they didn't tell them was because he said it was like a doctor telling a patient that there was something wrong with them when there was less than a 1% chance that they might actually have that. But I always say that's, that's the doctor's job to tell you if you're possibly going to die.

Yeah. I think so. To me, it seems like you should, you should have at least imagined like what could happen to them. Yeah. Isn't that exactly opposite as a matter of fact of what a doctor is supposed to do? The doctor's always supposed to tell you what could be wrong. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But he said that if they, there was less that he thought there was less than 1% chance of them having any kind of adverse psychological effects.

Right. So he thought that if he, he told them that there was the possibility of psychological after effects, then those after effects would be imagined that the guys would start to think like, oh, this is because I did this LSD experiment. The reason why I've got anxieties because of this LSD experiment. Right. Right. What I'll also say too is that there may be, there also is some truth that they've,

I mean, again, the people who don't want to talk about it, I imagine could have had a positive experience and there probably were people who didn't have a positive experience. Even like one man said, one of the guys in a bad trip to Edgewood basically said, I would, I would go back and I'd do it again. We all know people that can take drugs and people that can't. And growing up, there were people who went into the military and then there was people who went to college and the people who went to college could take drugs. And for the most part, the people that I know that went into the military were not drug addicts.

No. And so you're also testing on some of the more type A, what type A personalities, right? It's very like matter of fact, like this is the way the world is and nothing will ever change it. These are the facts. Absolutely. An LSD and something specifically like LSD is like the idea is that I feel again, if you have not experimented with LSD, it is a worthwhile, beautiful thing to do.

It's hallucinogens are really great for your brain. But the thing is, is that you need to be a willing participant and it's creating a proper environment. And this was not exactly the grooviest environment to be given a hundred times the normal dose of LSD. You know, you got a bunch of people with huge teeth and huge teeth and crew cuts screaming at you. Yeah, one test subject said that the entire experience quote tugged at his patriotism.

Yeah, I fucking bet. Yikes. And one guy actually did sue the government to find out what the drugs they had to find out what drugs I actually gave him, and the government did admit that like, yes, we did give you an overdose of LSD, but he was not able to sue for any monetary gain or for any sort of, you know, paying for medical bills or anything like that, because the government has immunity for being sued by its own servicemen. Well, isn't that convenient?

Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know that. But yeah, a Marine cannot sue the government for anything that the government has done. That's a good that's a net that doesn't exist in any other area of American life. No, it just seems like if you of all the people who would sue the US government, it would be people that got hurt by serving them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, as a soldier saying that, you know, because my lieutenant made

a mistake, I lost my arm. So I hold the government culpable for it. I mean, then again, though, is that went but part of that when they sued them and basically they popped on the other side when journalist Linda Hunt basically said when they went through all the paperwork, and they were like, they are eight Nazi scientists from Project Paper Clip that are fucking the bosses of this whole program, right? And it's just like, and so they were trying to say like, Oh, you can't compare it to the Nazi like experiments and like what Mengele did, but it's like, you got the fucking staff.

All the nurses and shit, or all like trying not to sigile each other like in fucking Dr. Strange Club. But it's like, we have to trust them because now they're American. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So the dissenting judge in the case, you know, saying that, you know, the servicemen couldn't sue the government, he compared it to Nazi experiments in his judgment. You know, he brought the Nazis up by name.

It's a tough sell, though. You have certain people that were sent into war zones where the army, the US government knew they were just going to die. They were just human shields for the most part. Those guys, you know, they're real heroes. And then you have all other people who were just like, you know, completely mutilated and mangled because of wrong government information that they were given about, you know, invading certain homes and stuff.

And then you have somebody being like, they gave me asset. They gave me the thing that kids like to do on the weekends. There isn't a lot of sympathy, I don't think, from the American people when it comes to the people who were forced to take hallucinogenic party drugs. It seems like it's the downside of having a volunteer army where it's like, this is the problem. Well, this wasn't volunteered yet. This wasn't, this was still, this wasn't, no, this was like, this was draft.

Well, again, during Vietnam was draft. So yeah, they were, they were all just stuck between a rock and a hard place. And again, they, they were asked to like, who wants to get out of weekend cooking duty? Who doesn't want to clean the kitchen this weekend? But if you frame it like that, who wants to be scrubbing old fucking lasagna off of pans, especially when Linda makes it because Linda's got a heavy hand with the fucking wrecking now. Yeah, she was turning up the oven to, to high getting that lasagna stuck all over the

pan. So I want to talk about, to go back to Edgewood for a bit, a man who started off in Edgewood but actually took the entire operation off site on behalf of the United States Army, a man named Major Ernest Robert Clovis Clovis. So the army not content with just sticking to their own soldiers in America in a military base, tested on them, they decided they needed to take the whole operation over to Europe. So they had a three man unit, which was named the special purpose team. All right, from that's from the jerk, right?

Special purpose. So that was an officer from army intelligence, a doctor from the medical core and an officer from Edgewood, who was Major Ernest Robert Clovis, he was a chemist and a psychologist. He worked very closely with our man, Sim, that we talked about in the last episode, clucky cluck, the chicken based clown, clown in a chicken costume. Does it have to be, can you come, do I have to explain everything I would only purchase your services if you also have a clown in a chicken and clown makeup, chicken themed clown.

Right. But do you hold, do you hold a chicken and clown makeup as well? That would be like a fun sidekick. I'm clucky cluck and I hope everybody has got enough acid. So Clovis, like all the rest of the people who worked at Edgewood was a bit of an eccentric. He kept an entire cabinet filled with little jars and vials. One of the jars or one of the vials was labeled putrescence, which, oh yeah, that's just the pickled eggs that Henry keeps in his closets as well.

He was a substance that smelled like rotting flesh and he was called it the stinky Jell-O. Oh, I love it. Sounded better. I'll just have the Nutella, please. And he maintained that it could be used as a non-lethal weapon. Absolutely, because it's just stinky juice and you just spray stinky juice on somebody and it just makes them, I guess it makes them bad at meetings. Yeah, I love, that was a better, it's a better time, you know, when they were just like thinking

of warfare or being like, this will make them feel all icky. That's great. So in April of 1961, the Special Purpose Team, they flew over to Europe for something called Operation Third Chance. That's kind of on the nose. I love that we were like, this is your third chance, Europe, we've saved your eyes as twice. This is it. So their whole thing was just to dose people with LSD and see what happened.

And in each country, they'd join with local operatives and they'd rehearse these huge scenarios to bring people to the spot where they could be given LSD and interrogated. They would- What we're gonna do is we're gonna give out this free stuff that's called Disco Soup. Right, right, right. Got some potatoes in there, we got some carrots in there and it's just fucking, just like you see that pink stuff all over the top of it? That's pure LSD.

Right. From now on, from now on, your official names are the Glitter Boys. Get out there and dance, guys. Aren't we undercover? You put on that LED light hat and you shut up. Well, they would bring people in that they thought were Soviet dissidents or people that had some sort of connection to the Soviets. Right.

Anybody with a wool hat. They'd bring them in and they'd make them comfortable, they'd offer them refreshments, and when they gave the person the drink, of course, they would be powdered LSD inside and then they would start interrogating the person. But they weren't content to just it, they thought, all right, we've done it on regular people. Well, let's try it on an American soldier over here in France. So they gave LSD to this guy, his name was Private James Thornwell.

He was from South Carolina and he was the only black guy at the entire station. Apparently, he would have had a bit of a contentious relationship with his superior. He'd been demoted and he was also suspected of stealing 172 classified documents that had gone missing. So they figured this guy, we don't like him. So what happened was his superior stole 170 documents and then blamed it on him. I would imagine so. Yes.

On the only only black soldier in the middle of France, they give a bunch of LSD. Yeah. Yeah. They figured we don't like this guy. We need to scapegoat. He's black. We can do whatever we want. What was the name of that movie?

The, uh, they fucked that movie. There needs to be a film about this unsung American hero. By the way, the guy that they gave a hundred times the dosage, the normal dose of acid to it, Edgewood, that guy was also black. Wow. So it's also interesting is that this guy actually turned into the story of the legend of Bagger Vance. I didn't know that, but that's a sort of magic catty after.

So, uh, they for 99 days, this guy possibly had it the worst out of any other person who got went under LSD testing. For 99 days, he was on acid and was interrogated continuously. He was in a small room, kept awake for a really long stretch of time. They wouldn't give him access to food, water, a toilet. One of the interrogators told him, if you talk, you get your physical needs taken care of. He was beaten.

They called him racial slurs. What did they want him to talk about the, uh, the documents, basically trying to kind of gaslight him into talking about, I guess, either the documents or the thing he was doing. Right. The idea is to also just kind of see what would happen. And he was, uh, he told, uh, his interrogators told him that they were there to protect him from white soldiers who were trying to hunt him down and kill him.

They told him they were protecting him from assassins working in French intelligence. And eventually the guy just, I mean, he kind of couldn't fucking take it anymore. Just took a big O shit on his interrogators desk. Thank. Oh, that's great. So mad when that happened to him because he knew how special his desk was. But he knew because that's where he kept his eggs. It all comes down to funny college pranks, doesn't it?

It really does. And he did a hell of a job keeping himself staying or saying he would play imaginary chess on the wall. He dictated a whole novel like he would just just dictate it out loud. Uh, but I mean, it really wasn't, I mean, it wasn't good enough. I mean, he said that every day, like he didn't know who he was, where he was. He didn't know why it was happening. And then finally, after 90 days, the army did a test on a military psychiatrist did a test on him and said that he exhibited, quote, an anti-social

personality with paranoid trends. That's so weird. He didn't like, he didn't become a pop star after this. Wild. However, he is one of the very few people to actually gain some sort of monetary settlement from the U.S. government for the mistreatment in 1982. South Carolina senators obtained a private congressional bill for him and he was awarded $625,000. Wow. That's actually very impressive.

I believe Strom Thurman was the, uh, was the senator there in South Carolina at the time. Really? Strom, yeah. Really? Yes. That's weird. Yes.

He's a segregationist. He's a racist. Yeah, I know. That's why it's weird. Yeah, well, well, four years after that, he was found dead in a swimming pool at the age of 40, at the age of 46 years old. Isn't that interesting? That's the exact story to some degree of Rodney King dead in the bottom of a swimming pool.

It is. It is such a shame. Crazy. Like again, it's just, but we see a lot of that even modern day of bullying within the army and like any one of the armed forces, it's a machismo thing. It's been fucked for a long time and this poor fuck, it's just, it's horrible. Never get a swimming pool. Your kids will die in it or you'll die in it.

It's the problem is the swimming pool. I agree. Thank you, Henry. It's the problem. Yeah, yeah. Uh, and there was another lawsuit in 2009. That was done by the Vietnam veterans of America and the sorts of plowshares and eight Edgewood veterans against the CIA, the army and various other agencies, uh, essentially what all they

wanted was they wanted, uh, they asked the court to defend it to determine that the defendants actions were illegal and that the defendants have a duty to notify all victims and to provide them, uh, with healthcare, uh, and the plaintiffs actually did not seek any monetary damages at all. Uh, they only, uh, they sought quote only declaratory and injective relief and redress for what they claimed was several decades of neglect and the U.S. government's use of them as guinea pigs and chemical and biological agent testing experiments. And the judges found that the army has an ongoing duty to warn and ordered the army through

the DVA or otherwise to provide test subjects with newly acquired information that may affect their wellbeing that has learned since its original notification now and in the future as it becomes available. So as of two thousand say you're sorry. Yep. That's all that was. Yeah. So that's pretty much it.

Uh, but, uh, on the other end, it is on the books now that from 2009 on, if there is any sort of medical testing, then by law, the army has to inform them of the effects that it has had on various other soldiers or the possible effects that it may have on them on in the future. I want to sign up for the Molly one. That's going to be huge. Oh, I can't wait. The new ho ho test.

Oh ho ho is to be released back into the United States population. I'd like to be a part of that test and they don't want to warn me as shit because I know what's good. That's right. Well, the official Department of Defense position on all of this is they said that they quote did not detect any significant long term health effects on the Edgewood Arsenal volunteers. So while they did have to acknowledge while the army did have to acknowledge that these

tests were done and they did have to acknowledge that they had to give these people this information, their official stance is still that they did nothing wrong. Yeah, of course, because in the end they said what we said constantly, it's all of the different validations of like they volunteered. We gave them opportunities to leave even though it was all bullshit. Yeah. The only thing they've I mean, they can't really justify MK ultra. But you know, this was something that they if they can justify it, they will.

This is a little bit like MK ultra light though. It's very much MK ultra light. Yeah, no, what it is is that it's basically it gave them the due diligence and the research to know how much it's like basically only one needed out of this experiment was just directly see how much LSD does it take for their brains to fucking like literally crawl out of their noses. You know, there's that. But I'm you know that these dose measures from measurements that pharmaceutical companies

say or recommended for individuals, those those don't come from nowhere. You know, I'm sure all these studies were used by big pharma and things like that to create a bunch of different kind of medicines that we're currently all addicted to. Just so you know, you might not want to give them this much PCB because it makes them really bad at obstacle courses. Right. Right. Noted.

So that's pretty much the story of Edgewood. That's pretty intense. I mean, like, I'm glad that it's covered by the by the New Yorker. But it's, you know, that that's all the information it's like we tested on our soldiers and again, it just proves if one thing is real, if the these ludicrous things are documented and proven by your courts, then what does it mean? What else is real? Yeah.

What else is that? Like, what do we not know about? I think this one's actually not the worst situation that's ever happened. I don't think it's the worst thing that the US government has ever done. But it's an interesting one. That's for damn sure. Yeah, it's just it's just that I would still even knowing this, if I had to go back into a time machine and I was sitting somewhere and someone was like three day weekend, you

want to go to Edgewood? I'd be like, absolutely. Let's rock and roll. Let's fucking do this, bro, can I bring my guitar? That's what you want. Right. But it's just it's, you know, hopefully you would be like that. But the problem is, it's just again, it's it's more about mentality.

It's how our government views our soldiers as it's like pieces on a chessboard. That's it. That is how they view them. But that's how the soldiers view themselves in a lot of ways. Yeah, I guess so. That's very sad. But we're so this is we got this so fucking I hope I hope you ate some mushrooms and you're doing it in your own way, your own Edgewood experiments, but it involves like get some

fucking like paint. Oh, yeah, have one wall that you're going to repaint in a week or the next day. Get some finger paints and just have a bunch of people over. Yeah, ruin a wall night. Here's a couple other good here's a couple of tips. All right. Get a bag of random ass costumes and put them in a duffel. They put a bunch of random costumes and go out to your quad or your college or the fucking

main square or your tiny town and just walk around and eat a bunch of mushrooms and just walk around and, you know, try buying bicycle. It's a great idea. And go to the cave comedy radio page and buy a t shirt or a donate cave comedy radio dot com slash last podcast on the left. That's where you can go to buy your very own last podcast on the left t shirt. You get it free with a donation of $25 or more. If you're a United States resident or $40 more if you live anywhere else in the entire

world and you don't even have to give us 20 if you want to just go in and give us like a dollar or $5 something like that. Every tiny little bit helps and we appreciate anything that you guys can can give to us for for doing this show. Yeah, because we were planning on a trip out to the UK. That's right. That's a part of what's going to help us fund that which we're very excited for. Can't wait for the UK tour.

So in order to help us out with that would be amazing if you went to iTunes and like left a comment or something and be like Ben's tall and then he's also fat and then he's also the ugliest. Say something like that. It doesn't matter what you say. Just a yeah on all you UK listeners out there like send us an email cave comedy radio at gmail.com or go to the Facebook group and post and just let us know where you live. Like let us know where in England, you know, the biggest concentration of last podcast

fans are. So yeah, we're planning this thing out and we're going to be we're going to be coming to fucking the England. We're going to become England. We're happy of all the suggestions people gave me to go to Los Angeles. I'm in Los Angeles. I'm going to those places. I'm a fucking report from them.

I want to thank Annie for the the good luck rune that I was sent. That's so nice. And I I you don't want to we know what I want out of today. I need a heartfelt hail Satan from everybody. That's what I need. Give Henry a nice hail Satan Marcus hail Satan and this Satan. Did we thank this Parker kid Andrew Parker. Thank you.

We got to thank Andrew for sending us a wonderful little grab bag of I got some wonderful bones yeah and a wonderful comic book. Henry got a CD which I'll have for you once you get back been got a nice old movie Midnight Skater. Yeah. So awesome. No you guys are the best. You're the best.

The best people face the planet. And we also got some particularly fucking awesome little envelope in the mail. Yeah. And this is from a listeners Elena Rice and Josh Graham out of Los Angeles. They gave us a little baggie that has actual fragments of the fireplace of Sharon Tate's home from the night of the Manson murders. Unbelievable. And this is like I'm holding it in my hand right now.

It's this dearly departed has several Tate La Bianca related books death certificates and autopsy reports and other official documents available to purchase an all gallery. So that's Hale Satan dearly departed tours dot com. And thank you so much. Elena and Josh that's fucking amazing. That's so awesome. Make goos delations to you both. My goos delations.

And of course Hale yourselves and how game help me and we will talk to you soon. See ya fuckers.