Although it did relax a patient, and enough of it knocked a person out, sodium pentothal didn't kill pain as much as they had hoped. It wasn't ideal for surgeons, but it came to be used by shrinks.
Psychiatrists during the World Wars saw some soldiers with acute shell shock who either had great difficulty speaking or were unable to speak at all.
Earlier barbiturates were used during therapy, but since it did not completely incapacitate a patient as much as they did, sodium pentothal was an ideal drug to be used in programs as an anti-anxiety drug which allowed the soldiers to speak and to eventually recover from their experience - provided addiction was kept at bay and their psychiatrist was conscientious. These programs, during which the drug was injected and the scientist asked questions, were surprisingly progressive, in that the drugs wore off and allowed the soldier to go back out into the community, instead of taking long stays in a psychiatric facility.
The idea was to remove inhibitions, including fear of reprisal, and let the soldier talk, then let him recover and go back out, fully integrated into the community. It is still, at times, administered in the UK for the treatment of phobias. These psychiatrists consulted at police stations, and it wasn't long before people began making the connection between removing a soldier's fear of past events and removing a criminal's fear of getting caught was made.
Truth serum has had no real history in the courts. Courts generally haven't been kind to barbiturate confessions. They have however, recognized confessions when the fact that barbiturates had been administered to the suspect went quietly unmentioned.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, scandals popped up when investigating officials found that police had administered such drugs to suspects. Even if the person never mentioned anything of substance while under the influence, they generally woke up with no memory of anything that happened. A signed confession waved in their face might induce an amnesic suspect to talk, or to incriminate themselves as the only way to save themselves from a harsh sentence.
Spies at least tested out the benefits of sodium pentothal, sodium amytal, and even good old scopolamine, was tested by the CIA and other spy organizations. They used it on spies they captured, and on their own agents, hoping to catch a double agent in the ranks.
Scopolamine was the most frequently used, because it not only wiped out memory during the session, but just previous to it as well, so a person wouldn't know the situation that led up to their memory loss.
While such technology may be the stuff of science fiction, Indian government officials have announced they will employ another technique that seems to leap from the pages of a s pulp novel: truth serum. Also known as narcoanalysis, administering psychoactive drugs for interrogation purposes has been around for just under a century, but it has been viewed with skepticism from the start.
Indeed, the practice is banned in most democracies, and evidence obtained from such an interrogation would have a hard time making it into an American court. But could "truth serum" reliably extract the truth from this man and other criminal targets?
We asked Alison Winter , a science historian at the University of Chicago, who has studied the origins and applications of truth serum. What does the term "truth serum" mean? That's a term that was used to describe the use of certain drugs, most commonly barbiturates like sodium amytal and sodium pentothal, to try to extract truthful statements from people about their past experiences.
What the term really meant was that the people who used the serum believed that it made people unable to censor themselves and they would just empty their memories into a narrative statement.
Who discovered these effects? In the mids, Dr. Robert House was an obstetrician who noticed that the popular obstetric anesthetic drug, scopolamine, also known as twilight sleep, would put his patients into a state where they would deliver information in a way that seemed automatic.
He didn't want to use it in interrogation, for the purpose of getting people to admit to criminal acts, so this is a quite different beginning from the association we have now.
At the time, he wanted to use it to provide support for claims people made about their innocence -- not their guilt. If somebody said 'I wasn't at the crime, I was in the library but nobody saw me,' then, perhaps, this would give support for the claim, because you would think they could not lie under the drug's influence. The maximum dose for an adult is one gram.
This drug is no longer used as a truth serum because subjects sometimes develop false memories after the fact. That's right. The Italian phrase In vino veritas, which is Latin for "In wine there is truth", is attributed to a Roman philosopher known as Pliny the Elder. So, humans have known for roughly 2 thousand years about alcohol's ability to loosen the tongue.
If you've ever had one too many, then you could easily recognize the feeling you would experience with other truth serum drugs. Whether you're drinking it down or taking it intravenously in pure, ethanol form, this drug will make you more prone to spilling your secrets, but as you probably know, does not make you incapable of a little white lie every now and again.
According to Washington Post reporter David Brown :. There is no pharmaceutical compound today whose proven effect is the consistent or predictable enhancement of truth-telling," Brown wrote in Despite the fact that truth serum's magical capabilities seem to be mostly fictional, US courts have in special cases admitted the use of truth-serum drugs.
One example was with accused Aurora, Colorado theatre shooter, James Holmes — a judge allowed the use of sodium pentothal on Holmes to determine if his claims of insanity were real, not if he was guilty. In fact, confessions of guilt admitted under the influence of truth serum drugs were ruled in admissible in US courts in Just because no truth-inducing drug exists today, doesn't mean there could be one in the future, according to Mark Wheelis, a professor and expert on the history of biological warfare and biological weapons control at the University of California Davis.
It would absolutely astonish me if we didn't identify a range of pharmaceuticals that would be of great utility to interrogators. The best way to find out if truth serum works is to experience it for yourself, which is exactly what TV journalist Michael Mosley did. To investigate sodium thiopental, one of the more popular truth serum drugs, Mosley took two different doses of the drug. After administering the first dose, a doctor asked Mosley what he did for a living and through fits of giggles Mosley managed to lie and say that he was a world-famous heart surgeon.
In less than a minute after the drug was administered, Mosley went into a fit of giggles from the light-headed, tipsy feeling he experienced from the drug. He said that the feeling was akin to drinking a glass of champagne.
Well, executive producer, well, presenter, some, mix of the three of them. Mosley explained later that when asked the question, it didn't even occur to him to lie, so he didn't. One of the biggest problems with using truth serum for interrogation, is the warm, friendly feeling it gives the subject toward their interrogator. Combined with a state of severe disorientation, this can lead a subject to tell their interrogator what they think the interrogator wants to hear, which could be true or not.
So I decided, as part of a series I've been making on the extraordinary history of pharmaceuticals, to try it out. Sodium thiopental is part of a group of drugs called barbiturates, drugs widely used in the s and 60s to help people sleep better. They are no longer used for that purpose because they are extremely addictive and potentially lethal - Marilyn Monroe famously died from a barbiturate overdose. I decided to take a low dose of sodium thiopental under proper medical supervision, with anaesthetist Dr Austin Leach monitoring my vital signs throughout.
Barbiturates work by slowing down the rate at which messages travel through the brain and spinal column. The more barbiturates there are, the harder it is for chemical messages to cross the gaps between one neuron and the next.
Your whole thinking process slows down until you fall asleep. With thiopental, that happens very quickly indeed. Although it was originally developed as an anaesthetic, it was soon noticed that when patients were in that twilight zone halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness, they became more chatty and disinhibited.
After the drug had worn off, the patients forgot what they had been talking about. It was decided that sodium thiopental might form the basis for a truth drug, an interrogation tool. But does it really work? I decided that I would have a go at trying to maintain the fiction that rather than being Michael Mosley, science journalist, I would be Michael Mosley, famous heart surgeon.
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