Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Is there such a thing as a truth serum?

Episode Date: October 14, 2017

In this week's SYSK Select episode, ever since people have had secrets, other people have been looking for ways to get it out of them. Law enforcement and chemistry alike have searched for a drug that can remove the ability to lie. Join Josh and Chuck as they check in to see how it's going. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen one on Truth Serums, which originally came out in April of 2013.

Turns out all we always thought was a Truth Serum was actually just a handful of goofballs. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant back in Saddle again, man. It's been a while. That was a goat boy being whipped. That's you.

You're the goat boy. Right? Do you remember Goat Boy from Seren Alive? Yes. What was his name? Jim Brewer? Yeah. He was goat boy with me.

I think so. Was it called Goat Boy? Great classic SNL character. Agreed. Yeah. Agreed. That was pretty good. Thanks.

How are you doing? Oh, I'm great, man. Good. Inject me with the Truth Serum and ask me, and then you'll get the truth. It may or may not work, though, and it's not even Serum. You know, we've got a pretty cool case coming up where this is going to be used. Well, cool. Well, no, but I'm saying, like, thank you for correcting me because no, it's not cool.

It's interesting. Sensational. Yes. Yeah. And this is actually what made me think that we should do something on Truth Serum was the James Holmes case, the Aurora Colorado Batman shooter who has been saying that he's insane or acting insane ever since he was caught. But a lot of people think maybe he's not so insane.

Right. And a judge just recently in the middle of March approved him to be tested under narco analysis. Yeah, which is... Or narco interrogation really is what it is. Yeah. It's unusual these days in the US for something like that to happen, and a lot of folks are saying, what's up with this judge?

Like, are you for real? Yeah, and it turns out that there is a very long history, especially in the 20th century, of people using what has been popularly dubbed Truth Serum, but incorrectly dubbed Truth Serum because it doesn't necessarily generate the truth or uncover the truth, and it's not a Sira. Yeah. Watery part of coagulant blood. Is that right?

Yeah. Is that all it is? I believe so. And I think there's a plant-based Sira as well, but either way, none of that is... None of the Truth Serum drugs that they use are serums. No, and we should probably get out of the way right now that LSD, not a Truth Serum or a Truth Drug. Okay.

Well, no, I think most people think about when you think of being interrogated under the influence of drugs, that they give you LSD and start shouting at you. That's what I always thought. I never would have thought that. I had no idea about this, but it reminds you, you know, you harken back to the days of the polygraph when that first started. It was like, well, okay, society is saying that we shouldn't beat people with rubber hoses to get the truth out of them anymore, and it's possible that this isn't even the

truth. They're just saying what we want to hear because they want us to stop, so let's try some other techniques. And as a result, you had the polygraph, Truth Serums, which we're going to call incorrect or no. That's what they're called, basically. Because there isn't really a clinical name for them. Is there?

I don't know, Narco Analytical Drugs. Well, that's kind of like the, yeah. I just made that up, but that's really what it is. So basically, there's two reasons why you would use Truth Serums, and they come down to Narco Analysis and Narco Interrogation. And the one I should say that James Holmes is going to undergo is, I guess, kind of a combination of both because they're trying to get at the truth of the sanity, but at the same time, it will be interrogated because he's a suspect in a massive murder trial.

Although, I would say that's just the psychological, because the other, the probate of Truth is they're trying to get a revelation of a crime. Oh, yeah, I guess that's true. And not necessarily their mental state. Yeah. So those are the two differences. Are you trying to, say, inject you and say, did you steal the painting? What?

Yeah, no, it's a good one. Art theft. There's a lot of podcasts on that. Or like some sort of psychological truth that they're trying to uncover about themselves. Right. And that one, as far as Truth Serums go, is probably the one where the drugs will be most effective. Yeah, sure.

Because it's kind of unlocking like an unconscious revelation of the person, like uncovering a neurosis that maybe they didn't understand that they had. Now, there's some sort of catharsis that these drugs have allowed to just kind of let their guard down. Sure. Now they're flowing out with a catharsis and they're feeling better afterward. Yeah. And most of those studies too have been, not been on like prisoners, but maybe volunteers

and things. So it's a more friendly environment. So maybe they get further that way. But we'll get to all that. All right. So let's talk about the history of this, Chuck. You're not so old, the idea of using drugs to get the truth out of somebody, and actually there was a Texas doctor, Dr. House.

For real. Yeah, the real Dr. House. Bobby House. He was a Dallas, Texas doctor, an obstetrician. And back when he was delivering babies, they were using a combination of chloroform, morphine, and scopolamine, which you may have heard of before if you've ever taken motion sickness drugs, that patches scopolamine. And he noticed that when women were on this combination of drugs, they tended to be very

candid and forthright with stuff sometimes that didn't have anything to do with the child birthing process. And Dr. House said, hey, I wonder if you could use this on criminals. Yeah, and truthful. That's the most important part. Well, yeah. He found out that they were accurate. And so, yeah.

He said, you know what, who's not forthcoming and who doesn't tell the truth are lying, lying criminals. Right. So maybe we should get them pregnant and then give them scopolamine. Right. Actually, not to get them pregnant. And he sort of resisted the whole truth serum thing. Supposedly that came about in 1922 at the Los Angeles record was when it was first used.

In this paper? Yeah. He eventually would come around and embrace that term and use it himself because, you know, once things take hold in the public consciousness, you just sort of have to give in. Yeah. And he, in that way, kind of resembles, though, that the inventor of the polygraph or the guy who brought all these disparate parts of the polygraph together, William Moulton

Marston, the guy who invented Wonder Woman, just kind of became a promoter of his law enforcement tool. Of course. Self-comics. Yeah. So the first time, not by getting a bunch of guilty guys, found guilty, but of a study with three men who said they were innocent, he gave them the scopolamine, I guess interrogated them, found that they still said, no, I'm innocent, all three of them.

Yeah. And then they later got off, even though, like, all the evidence was against them. They didn't get off because of the truth serum. That was a separate study. Right. So they prepared the two and said, hey, this is going to work like gangbusters. Yeah. And despite that, I guess, sort of success, I guess he certainly touted it as such.

But there haven't been a whole lot of studies on scopolamine. Just a few different cases. They've actually had, like, police interrogations using scopolamine. And interestingly, and I totally buy this because it kind of harkens back to old movies. Just the threat of it was sometimes enough to induce, like, a confession. Yeah. And it reminds me the movies of the guy approaching, like, with a needle in his hand. Right, exactly.

And squirting it in the air and saying, you know, if you have a vase of making you talk. Yeah. And all of a sudden they go, screw it. I'm just, I don't want that junk. I did it. And I wonder if it's because they had committed so many crimes that they hadn't been caught for. They didn't want to implicate themselves in a bunch of other ones.

Maybe. And they were just being utilitarian, saying, I'll give you this one. I bet it was more they were just, like, you know, it became a big thing in the public consciousness, like, truth serum, and so they didn't know what was going on. Right. So if they were using it enough that it had gotten out, how unpleasant the whole experience was, maybe that was what they were protecting themselves against, because there were a lot of psychological effects, including falling asleep.

What's wrong with that? Babbling. What's wrong with that? Becoming delusional and having hallucinations. Those are great. And then the physiological effects far outlasted the psychological effects. And you would have probably dry socket, I get the impression of the mouth. Your mouth was so dry that like your saliva glands dried up too, which is extraordinarily

painful. Yeah, and they would actually use that in surgery too, because they wanted you to have dry mouth surgery. Right. But also, like, headaches, rapid heartbeat, blurred vision, it didn't last long as a truth serum because of these reasons. It didn't, despite Dr. House's efforts, it did kind of fall to the wayside. But if you are interested in scopolamine, there's basically a legend that Colombian

drug gangs use this. If you go to Colombia and you order a Coke, you better watch them pour it, because they will dose you with scopolamine, they being Colombian drug gangs. They're living in the 1920s. Yeah, and I guess one of the effects that it has is amnesia, but you're still conscious and moving around and hanging out and using your ATM card to get the money for them, because you're very forthcoming with whatever is asked of you. It sounds like one of those things, like the old traveling wives' tales.

It definitely does sound like that, and I'm sure it is largely, but I read a Vice Magazine article on it, and supposedly the author went down to Colombia and found all this stuff out firsthand. It was pretty eye-opening. Have you ever seen Floating with Disaster? Yeah. I remember that Mary Tyler Moore had this story about on the highways, they'll bump you in the car and then get you to pull over and then rob you, and then they get bumped

on the highway and they think it's there being robbed, but they're not. I don't remember her in that. Yeah, she was the adoptive mother of the Ben Stiller character. Really? Yeah. She was great. So, scopolamine, eh, xed out. Scopolamine's out.

Up next, we have everyone's favorite truth serum, barbiturates, and they were discovered, not barbiturates, but to use them like this was discovered by accident by Arthur Lovenhart, and he was at the University of Wisconsin, Go Badgers, and he was doing some experimenting with respiratory stimulants and injected a dude who was catatonic, mute, and rigid, and all of a sudden he loosens up, opens up his eyes, and talks a little bit. And they think, wow, you know, this could be a big deal. This seems like this drug, woke this guy up, and we are getting information out of him about his life.

Maybe we can use that as a truth serum. Yeah. So, they started to, a guy named Clarence W. Mulburger, head of the Michigan Crime Detection Laboratory in East Lansing, started using barbiturates. And these are, if you hear of truth serum being used in any narco interrogation, including James Holmes, you, they're talking about the use of barbiturates. These are the only ones who have been proven to even possibly uncover some sort of truth in an interrogation.

Right. So, you've got amobarbital, thiopental, and secobarbital. And any of these three, a.k.a. yellow jackets, pink ladies, goofballs, red devils, all those guys. Those of them should be, in the hands of an expert, capable of producing some sort of truth. Or at least to get somebody talking. And they aren't quite sure how, but they think possibly that the cerebrum is detached,

the cerebrum which monitors the higher functioning of the cerebellum, is detached, and so doesn't say things like, you don't want to say that, you should probably stop talking now. Right. That's what they think is happening. So, they have used those with some success anecdotally, or I guess not anecdotally, but in experiments, but they still have the battle of actually using them in an investigation because courts aren't prone to allow, you know, a confession if you were doped up. It depends.

I mean, this judge in the James Holmes Aurora Colorado trial said, go to it, I sign off on it. Which means that it should be admissible in that judge's courtroom, you know. Well, that's not a confession though, that's, they're looking for his psychological wellness again. It depends. And I kind of have been thinking about what you're saying. I don't know because they, right, but is he faking, is he malingering?

And this is how barbiturates have been used as truth serums in the past. One of the first cases, one of the first studies was carried out by a couple of people named Gerson and Viktorov, and they used sodium amatol to interview 17 suspected malingers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, basically some army guys who were thought to just be lazy and shiftless and faking an injury so they didn't have to do army stuff anymore, right? So they gave these guys sodium amatol and they found that they were forthcoming seemingly against their will about their conditions, about faking it or not. Right.

That is true. They did not tell them they were going to be taken as they sprung it on them. Yeah, like a minute before. Yeah. And they interviewed them before they took the amatol at all by a psychiatrist. So I think they wanted to get just a comparison, I guess, I don't know if you call it the control, so it was the same people, but at least a control interview. Right.

And they dosed them up and... Yeah, and they said they had no saying as they had to do it. That's right. And the difference between that and the therapeutic is... Who wrote this? Do we have an author's name? Yeah. His name, he works for the CIA, is George Bimmerrell.

So Mr. Bimmerrell points out that the setting and the type of patients and the kind of truth is going to make all of the difference. So it depends on what you're looking for and what kind of setting, because like I pointed out earlier, when it was like student volunteers, it's way more friendly and a lot of them reported like, oh, I feel you fork and this is great, I'll tell you whatever you want, not criminals who are hiding a crime. Yeah. So Bimmerrell points out that the rapport between the interviewer and the interviewee

is extremely important. Sure. It's important in any way, you know? Yeah. And that one of the flaws or one of the significant points about that Fort Dick's interview or experiment was that these people still fessed up to being malingerers, even though there was a hostile attitude toward the interviewer because they didn't have any choice in the matter and the guy sprung it on them.

Yeah. And they also manipulated them. And I think this is one of the reasons that I didn't find any cases where the court had actually admitted a confession, drug-induced confession to a crime. Really? No. I mean, I saw all sorts of uses, but never one that said, all right, we put this guy on drugs and he confessed and we can use that.

Did you find any? Well, there was, in the 80s, a New Jersey man shot his ex-girlfriend at Point Blank Range and he said that he had seen the devil when he did it. And he used a narco interview to basically have his sentence cut in half and it worked. But again, that was psychological wellness. That wasn't confessing to a crime. Right. No, he was guilty.

There was psychological wellness. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I haven't found a single case where the confession under a drug was allowed. So I see what you're saying, and yeah, it also said that the judge didn't allow any use of the word's truth serum or barbiturate or anything like that. But the psychologists and psychiatrists who gave their opinion of this guy were allowed to use that narco interview to help form their opinions. Right, exactly.

Yes, so I guess it is just kind of a tool that you can't use in court, but you could use to kind of further explore other evidence, right? Well, and one of the reasons, which is what I was getting to, was that they would manipulate people. Like when these soldiers were coming out of this state to a more fully conscious state, they would lie to them sometimes and say, hey, you already confessed all this stuff. Like in Zero Dark Thirty? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, because you have amnesia, you don't form any memories. You're physically incapable of forming memories when you're under the influence of barbiturates at a certain point. Yeah, they think they've used this before on terror suspects, like in the 80s. And of course, it was a big part of MKUltra, our favorite government program of all time. Yeah. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb?

And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca.host. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, I guess we should say there's different stages to being under the influence of barbiturates. There's the sedative stage, there's unconsciousness where you are hyperactive, but you're unconscious, but you've got the Jimmy legs. There's unconsciousness without reflex, even a noxious stimuli. And then the last one is death. So can't help out at that point.

Right. And you can also see why you would want to have a skilled physician present at this interrogation, because this is a possibility. Which is also one of the problems. Thanks to killing somebody. With using it? Sure. You can't just like, the Joe Cop can't administer this stuff.

Right. And Joe Cop, even if he could, couldn't just give you pills. No. This has to be done through an injection. And what they do is they take you into the sedative stage, which can be divided into three planes. Well, Bemeril does at least. Plane one is, there's no really obvious effect.

Plane two is cloudiness, calmness. You're kind of a little high. Yeah. You forget everything. Yes. But you still kind of have your wits about you, from what I can tell. Plane three is slurred speech. Like that?

You're right. I'm on the third plane, man. Old thought patterns are disrupted. You have an inability to integrate or learn new patterns, also form memories, poor coordination, and you're unaware of painful stimuli. And this is what they call the psychiatric work stage. Right. They get you to this stage, which only lasts for like five or 10 minutes.

And then, well, I'm sorry, they get you to unconsciousness, that first stage of unconsciousness. And then as you come back out of it, you pass through that third stage and they start asking you questions. Yeah. When you start to become more and more conscious, they inject you again and make you unconscious and then you come back out of it. And they may do this like several times. There was one psychotic prisoner who was given a gram and a half of barbiturates over the

course of this interview. So I mean, that's probably a pretty long interview that the guy underwent. And that's a lot of barbiturates, you know? Well, yeah. But that's one of the problems. These are heavy drugs and like back to the Fort Dick soldiers. Some of them experienced delirium and fantasies and delusions and said that they had kids that they didn't have and that I'm going to kill my stepfather who was already dead.

So it's kind of like sort of just throw it all out the window at that point, you know? Well, they don't know what's the truth and what's not. Exactly. So I guess what they'll do is they'll put you into sleep, bring you out, ask you questions, and they probably write down everything you say. And then they'll go back and fact check that kind of stuff and see what they can use against you or in addition to probably, as you're coming out finally at the end of the interview, there may be some things that they know.

If they suspect you of something and you say something that implicates you, they'll probably work that up pretty hard when you have no memory of it. Or they'll just lie and say, yeah, you admitted to a lot of stuff, do you want to talk a little more about it? Exactly. And you think you're caught. Have you ever been with Yumi when she's coming out of like Twilight Sleep for a procedure or anything?

No. She's been there for me though. It's good stuff. Yeah. That's where you get the good stuff. Yeah. If you ever do have some questions ready or your tape recorder, like Emily had to go under not too long ago and I went in and I was typing everything she was saying to me because I wanted

to read it to her later. That's awesome. Pretty funny. She thought they were throwing her a party because they had the curtain that they pulled around the hospital bed and she thought that they were decorating for a party and I wish I remembered everything she said was really funny. And then when I had my tooth done, I said all kinds of crazy stuff to the doctors. I'm sure that's the best part of their day.

Are there recordings of that? No, I don't think so. Yumi records me when I'm talking in my sleep. Oh really? Yeah, it's really intrusive, man. And then she'll play it for me the next morning and laugh and laugh. And you'll delete it? No, she's got it all on tape still.

Oh really? Yeah. I'm trying to. I don't know where she keeps it. All right, so you pointed out one thing that they actually did mention in the article too is that persistent and careful questioning is the only way that you're going to reduce these ambiguities that are going flying around. It's not just like a regular interrogation.

You have to understand that this person is heavily drugged and you've got to weed through a bunch of stuff to get to what may or may not be the truth. And here's the big thing about using narco interviews, narco analytical interviews. If you're a skilled interrogator, you should be able to get all this from the same person without the use of drugs. Well that's what they say too, right? Yeah. Most of the experts said I would have eventually gotten to this point had I just done it clean.

Yeah, had I had enough time or had we had somebody in there who knew what they were doing more to interrogate the person. We would have gotten the same thing. So yeah, I have the same impression that barbiturates are a shortcut as far as getting to like probative truth to use in like a narco interview or interrogation. It's a little bit of a shortcut, but it also makes it much harder like you were saying for even the most seasoned interrogator because there's so much baffling stuff that they include that may or may not be true, that may or may not be related to anything that can actually

kind of cloud the truth more than if they were just sitting there lying. Yeah. Well, and if you're just Joe Cop, you may not be some trained psychologist and a lot of times it helps to weed through that stuff. I think Joe Cop should stay away from the barbiturates and the suspects at the same time, you know? Benzedrine has actually been used as well. You wouldn't think stimulants would be effective if you were trying to question someone, but

Benzedine and Methadrine, they found potentially... Which is amphetamines and methamphetamines. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's hardcore speed. Pharmaceutical speed. It was what Neil Cassidy, like, died doing speed and scoplamine. No way.

Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. How weird. At this wedding. I just saw that on the road movie. This made me think of that. I don't remember him dying and on the road, especially not on the road.

No, he didn't die and on the road. But he died, you know, Neil Cassidy was the real dude that the character was, but in real life he died at some wedding in Mexico and they sort of... But it's not necessarily in the movie. He'll just have to see it. So is it a movie and again? I mean, are you on the road fan? Yeah.

I mean, it's very faithful and it's very beautiful and the casting was great. Okay. That was what I was worried about the most. They do a good job with it, but you know how tough it is to make a coherent, like, traditional movie out of that book. Right. So I think he did a good job. Yeah.

I enjoyed it. Okay. So anyway, hardcore speed was used for a while because they thought that there was so little time for them to consider formulating a lie that people, when they're on the speed, would just barf out everything as quick as they can. Right. And just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Right.

So if you're going to do that, you could still maybe formulate a lie even though you're talking really fast. Right. You know, you're going to get your bituits and the, the methamphetamines together and see what happens. Right. And I think he mentioned at least one study that found like, yeah, it kind of works a little bit at the very least.

If you're in Molley Crew. If you're in Molley Crew. If you're in Molley Crew. I just finished their autobiography, by the way. Really? Yeah. That's what made me think of that one. Is it good?

Oh, it's amazing. Is it really? Yeah. That's cool. There we go. Enjoy. We can't wait to do it. Hey, friends.

When you're staying at an Airbnb, he might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb and if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb, the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca-host. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So J.M. McDonald, he's a psychiatrist in Denver, and he's had a lot of experience with this, and he is one of the people that is pretty hardcore against the confession aspect of it. Like, we can use it for a lot of things, but we can't use it as the truth of a confession of a crime.

That's just sort of his stance. Here's why. Do you remember the psychopath I said that got a gram and a half of barbiturates? This guy was totally in control. He was completely self-possessed, as I think they put it, throughout this interview, and actually was asking more than once, like, hey, can I have another injection? I have a feeling he's a serious drug user. Yeah.

Or at the very least, he was after that. It sounded like he had experience. So he didn't give up anything. And what McDonald thinks, and what I think a lot of psychiatrists believe, is that if you are a very self-possessed person with a strong mind and I guess a strong will, you might put it, you're not going to give up anything. All the way until unconsciousness, they can knock you out and you're not going to say it.

He even faked amnesia as part of the whole ruse. Right. Have you seen side effects? Not yet. It's good. You don't even say anything else? No, no, no. Spoilers.

Yeah. All right. Yeah. Well, you're exactly right, though. He faked all this stuff, and if you're neurotic, on the other hand, or the kind of person who is prone to confess like a guilty conscience type anyway. But exactly like you feel relief by telling people things. Then you're more likely.

Right. So it depends on who's asking, what they're asking, who the person under the drugs is. A lot of different factors on whether or not it's legitimate at all. Right. Chuck, like we said, this is a CIA white paper from 1993 that we're working off of. It's a white paper? Yeah, it is. And it was recently declassified, pretty cool paper if you ask me, although it is really

kind of all over the place. The structure. Sure. I've become an admirer of it. I know you're not. But I liked it. Well, it's okay. The guy's in the CIA.

He's not a professional writer. He did a fine job. So he points out that, okay, I'm in the CIA. How do we use this for the CIA? But he says that it has been used before, for example, to find out if a foreign subject knows a language that they say they're not. Like maybe they're actually a foreigner, a double agent or something like that. You get like, I don't know, speak English.

And then all of a sudden you get them under the spell of the drugs. Exactly. So they can sniff out someone who says they don't speak your tongue. Right. And he says that one of the problems is you're going to have a hostile interrogation and rapport like some of the guys in this field of psychiatry have done studies on this show it's really important. But he kind of comes to the conclusion that if you use a doctor, you have automatically

somebody that's universally trusted to some extent. And if you use a doctor to conduct these interviews, you're probably going to have a little more rapport. And if it's a doctor who knows what they're doing with interrogations, then yeah, this could be kind of useful. The problem is, is in the West as he puts it, the use of truth serums is not, it's not, it's frowned on. Sure.

It seems unfair. They did it behind the iron curtain though, right? They... Wasn't Russia big into it? No. He found the CIA writer found that there was two mentions of Russia and truth serums. Oh, really? One of them, they said Russia doesn't use these.

I don't buy that. That's what he says. He's the CIA author. Right. So you'd think he would know, you know? Was that from the Comrade Files? Did he found that? Right.

Or was it like real information? He was doing it, I guess he was doing a survey of publicly available stuff. Gotcha. I'm sure the Russians wouldn't be like, yeah, we use this stuff all the time, chief. He did say that, okay, if we're not going to use it, our guys should be aware of what ... of possibly having to experience this, and there's only one way to train somebody, and that's to do it to them. Oh, really?

So I'm wondering as a result of this 1993 paper, how many CIA agents have been dosed up with barbiturates and given the third degree? Because that's what this recommendation was, is like, if you're an agent, you should be tested on this, and not only will it give the agent the first-hand experience, and you should videotape it so they can see, they didn't actually talk about this, so they can't be manipulated into saying, oh, you said a bunch of stuff, still no. But also it gives the agency the awareness of like, how much this person's going to give up under interrogation when they're drugged, and maybe they shouldn't be sent to Latvia,

maybe they should just be sent to Brazil instead. That's a good point. So like, testing the dudes to see how they would react in the field in case they're in some back room somewhere. Right, and Bemerul, he also suggests, remember we said LSD doesn't work as a truth serum? He suggested that agents possibly be given LSD, so if they're about to be dosed with truth serum, they can take some LSD and just start going crazy, is how he puts it in essence. All this stuff they say will be bizarre and unreliable.

Wow. Yeah. Pretty cool stuff, huh? You got anything else? I think that's about it, man. Yeah, I'm curious to see how this Holmes trial, what happens with that, because there's so little, like I think it was, well, you said you got the idea from seeing that. Yeah.

I was going to say it was coincidence, but I guess not. No, no, no. There's very few cases to even draw upon these days, so well done. Well done to you too. Can't wait to see what happens, Mr. Holmes. So truth serum, we'll keep an eye out for the James Holmes thing. If you want to learn more about truth serum, you can try the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, but you may also want to read this CIA white paper, Truth, Drugs, and Interrogation by

George Bemerul, and it's from September 1993, published by the CIA. And now it's time for listening. Yes. Josh, I'm going to call this one, oh, I can't remember what this is. Oh, wait, wait, let me stop you for a second. Before we get to listener mail, we need to give a shout out. Remember how we said, remember our horror fiction contest? Oh, how could I forget?

And we said that any of the people who entered as thanks, if they went on to publish anything, let us know and we would tell everybody. Well, one of our horror writers, Melissa Menini, has a short story called The Hanger that's included in an anthology of women horror writers called Mistresses of the Macabre. It's available on amazon.com and on darkmoonbooks.com. So go check that out. Yeah. Excellent.

Way to go, Melissa. Congratulations. Okay, now it's time for listener mail. Sorry. That's right. We are going, I was able to title it in that brief break. This is Aaron's Grandpa, who's what I'm going to call it. Hey guys, today at work I was re-listening to older podcasts when I heard how tickling

works. I was delightfully surprised to hear you call out for stories about Disney, in particular fascinating ones about the dark side. This isn't one of those emails, however, but my grandpa, Ron Brown, worked as an actor for Disney in the late 60s to the late 70s making movies and TV shows with animals and also behind the scenes doing animal taming to a point in training. He was well known for being able to train bears, but most love for his strange assortment of critters he would bring home from work to entertain my mom and her siblings.

During childhood, she had a pet squirrel skunk and multiple pigs that would make their home in her bed. He was the lead in two movies, which I am almost positive you have not heard of, Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar, and Lefty, The Dingling Lanks. I have not heard of either one of those. Disney was pumping him out though, you know. Even though he never made it big in Hollywood in his older years, he would always tell interesting stories hanging out with John Wayne or how he was one time in an elevator with Walt Disney

himself. He chickened out telling him how much he loved all the time spent working for him. When he moved to Seekwem, Washington, he helped move retired show bears up to the Olympic Game Farm where he would continue to train them and impress tourists while making bears fun tricks. Anyways, I love my grandpa very much and I mostly just want to share these memories of him that have been passed down to my favorite podcasters. So that is from Erin and she sent a photo to of grandpa Ron with John Wayne.

So he wasn't making that up. Wow. It was pretty cool. That is cool. So Erin, we love stories about cool grandpas and things. For sure. Thanks Erin. And thanks to your grandpa for being a cool grandpa.

Exactly. If you want to tell us about your cool grandpa or any cool relative that has a pretty interesting story, whether it relates to the podcast or not, we want to hear them. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And our home on the web is our website, appropriately titled StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.