Determining whether or not someone is telling the truth is an important but sometimes difficult
task for law enforcement agents investigating criminal cases.
Some guilty people are skilled liars and would say anything to spare themselves jail time
or execution.
They remain unfazed by common interrogation techniques such as being questioned in a small
room and presented with evidence in a high-pressure situation.
In the twentieth century, the possibility of another interrogation technique emerged
– truth serum.
Truth serums are psychoactive drugs that are administered for the purpose of extracting
information from someone.
They are supposed to make people tell the truth whether they want to or not, but do
they really do that?
A Business Insider article explains how these drugs work.
Lying is a mental activity that requires concentration.
The basic operating principle behind truth serums is to disrupt your mental concentration
so that you will find it difficult to lie.
On a physiological level, some of these drugs accomplish this by attempting to “slow the
speed at which your body sends messages from your spinal cord [sic] to your brain.”
Although ethyl alcohol and other substances have been used to “loosen lips” as the
saying goes, there are only a few drugs that are well-known for their use as truth serums
and have some documentation about their efficacy.
One of these drugs is scopolamine, which is also known as hyoscine.
A CIA report called “’Truth’ Drugs in Interrogation” briefly describes how scopolamine
gained the reputation of being a truth serum.
In the 1920s, an obstetrician named Robert House noticed that patients in a state of
“twilight sleep” brought on by a combination of scopolamine, morphine, and chloroform became
very responsive to answering questions and “often volunteered exceedingly candid remarks.”
He eventually conducted an experiment involving two criminal suspects who volunteered to take
scopolamine to prove their innocence.
The report states that “under the drug, both men denied the charges on which they
were held; and both, upon trial, were found not guilty.”
This led House to believe that someone given this drug “cannot create a lie,” and the
concept of a “‘truth’ drug” was born.
Scopolamine achieves its truth-telling effects by functioning as an acetylcholine blocker.
Acetylcholine is an important neurotransmitter that sends chemical messages across the central
and peripheral nervous system, including the brain.
According to the Neurohacker Collective, it is involved in “processes underlying memory
and attention,” so a substance that reduces the release of acetylcholine such as scopolamine
slows down these mental activities too.
A Science Explorer article notes that scopolamine has the potential to “strip someone of all
rational thinking.”
It can also render a subject unable to remember what happened shortly before exposure to the
drug.
Two types of barbiturates, pentothal (or sodium thiopental) and amobarbital (or sodium amytal),
have also been used as truth serums.
One article states that barbiturates were initially used for therapeutic purposes as
a way to get mental patients relaxed enough to discuss their problems, a treatment known
as narcoanalysis.
These drugs eventually became “militarized,” and so did narcoanalysis.
During World War II, barbiturates were used “to treat traumatized soldiers,” and then
they were “taken up by the CIA in the Cold War as method for interrogation and became
a centerpiece of the secret Project MKUltra.”
The CIA states that barbiturates also affect brain function but not in the same way that
scopolamine does.
They immediately affect the cerebral cortex, which is called the “center of the most
complex mental activities.”
Low doses of barbiturates can “impair the functioning of the cerebral cortex by disabling
the ascending (sensory) circuits of the nervous system.”
An intravenous injection of barbiturates causes someone to experience “all the stages of
progressive drunkenness, but the time scale is on the order of minutes instead of hours.”
During World War II, another drug that was used as a truth serum was TD, a derivative
of marijuana that has no taste, color, or odor.
It was discovered by researchers at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
“TD appears to relax all inhibitions and to deaden the areas of the brain which govern
an individual’s discretion and caution,” an OSS report said.
Cigarettes injected with TD became the standard way the OSS administered the drug to subjects.
And now it is time to answer the burning question: Do these truth serums actually work?
The answer is not very often.
Each of the drugs had a few success stories.
For instance, historian Alison Winter notes that scopolamine “drew confessions to a
string of two dozen ax murders in Alabama” in 1924.
The CIA discusses experiments “in which intravenous sodium amytal was helpful in detecting
malingerers.”
Malingerers are people who fake having a mental or physical malady for purposes of fraud,
and in these experiments the malingerers were soldiers.
Despite being “sullen, negativistic, and non-productive” at first, the soldiers eventually
“revealed the facts and causes for their malingering” under the influence of amytal.
In 1943, TD was given to “30 Americans suspected of being Communist,” and five revealed their
“Communist sympathies.”
While some success stories were the result of the drugs actually working, others were
not.
In the case of scopolamine, the reputation of the drug made some people fear it so much
that they avoided taking it all costs.
According to the CIA, “one police writer claims that the threat of scopolamine interrogation
has been effective in extracting confessions from criminal suspects,” while Alison Winter
describes a 1922 case in which the murder suspect was released in part because the “witnesses
against him refused to take the scopolamine test.”
As for barbiturates, the CIA notes one “exploitable” benefit of the drugs is “the fact that subjects
emerge from narcosis feeling they have revealed a great deal, even when they have not.”
Questioners were sometimes able to obtain confessions by tricking subjects into believing
they had already confessed under the influence of the drug even though they had not.
Some subjects who operated under this false assumption “defiantly acknowledged their
guilt and challenged the observer to ‘do something about it.’”
There were various problems with all of these drugs that rendered them useless as truth
serums.
The CIA says that the use of scopolamine as a truth serum was discontinued because of
“a number of undesirable side effects” that distracted subjects, including hallucinations,
disturbed perception, and blurred vision.
Researchers for the OSS also found that scopolamine was an ineffective truth serum because it
made subjects “too sick to reveal any secrets” according to one source.
Barbiturates were deemed unreliable for several reasons.
A Business Insider article states that sodium amytal “is no longer used as a truth serum
because subjects sometimes develop false memories after the fact.”
After experiencing what it is like to be questioned while under the influence of sodium thiopental,
BBC science journalist Michael Mosley cautions that “there is a serious risk you will say
what your interrogator wants to hear rather than the truth.”
The CIA pointed out other problems.
Experts discovered that subjects who were determined to deceive were able to lie even
after being given a barbiturate.
A psychiatrist named J.M. MacDonald found that “criminal suspects under the influence
of barbiturates may deliberately withhold information, persist in giving untruthful
answers, or falsely confess to crimes they did not commit.”
Based on his narcoanalysis experiences, he concluded that “a person who gives false
information prior to receiving drugs is likely to give false information also under narcosis,
that the drugs are of little value for revealing deceptions, and that they are more effective
in releasing unconsciously repressed material than in evoking consciously suppressed information.”
Barbiturates were especially ineffective on psychopaths, as evidenced by MacDonald’s
account of a criminal psychopath subjected to sodium amytal over a 5-hour period:
"He displayed little or no remorse as he (falsely) described the crime, including burial of the
body.
Indeed he was very self-possessed and he appeared almost to enjoy the examination.
From time to time he would request that more amytal be injected."
Another psychiatrist named L.Z.
Freedman concurred with MacDonald.
Freedman also “found that psychopathic individuals can deny to the point of unconsciousness crimes
that every objective sign indicates they have committed.”
TD produced unpredictable results.
It was given twice to a New York gangster named August “Little Augie” Del Gracio,
and Del Gracio had two different responses to the drug.
The first time Del Gracio smoked cigarettes spiked with TD, he was “obviously and extremely
garrulous” and “found himself mysteriously compelled to give an in-depth account of his
drug-trafficking network” according to one source.
However, a second round of TD did not work as well.
The gangster “got too stoned, felt pins and needles in his hands and feet, and had
to lie down for a nap.”
After these and other tests, TD fell out of favor for use as a truth serum, with intelligence
officials concluding that “it was not much more effective than giving people alcohol
or caffeine.”
Today, most of the world shuns the use of truth serums on ethical and legal grounds.
However, that does not mean they are relics of the past.
They are still occasionally used in the present day.
One recent example is the use of sodium thiopental on two murder suspects, Moninder Singh Pandher
and his servant, in the Noida serial murder case in India.
And there is the possibility that new truth serums will be created in the future.
Business Insider speculates that “we could be on the verge of a new type of truth-telling
and trust-enhancing drug.”
Time will tell if these new truth serums will avoid the pitfalls
of their predecessors.
Should researchers pursue the development of new truth serums?
Why or why not?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video called Can Russia Invade Europe?Thanks for
watching, and, as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
See you next time!