A "truth serum" is a colloquial name for any of a range of psychoactive medications used to obtain information from subjects who are unable or unwilling to provide it otherwise. Any information from the truth serum report is corroborated by further investigation. They have been used in the course of investigating civil and criminal cases, and for the evaluation of psychotic patients in the practice of psychiatry.[1] That application was first documented by Dr. William Bleckwenn in 1930,[2] and it still has selected uses today. In the latter context, the controlled administration of intravenous hypnotic medications is called "narcosynthesis" or "narcoanalysis." It may be used to procure diagnostically – or therapeutically – vital information, and to provide patients with a functional respite from catatonia or mania.

Active chemical substancesSedatives or hypnotics that alter higher cognitive function include ethanol (in vino veritas), scopolamine, 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, potent short or intermediate acting hypnotic benzodiazepines such as midazolam, flunitrazepam, temazepam,[citation needed] and various short and ultra-short actingbarbiturates including sodium thiopental (commonly known as sodium pentothal) and amobarbital (sodium amytal) (see figure at right)

Reliability[edit]

While there have been many clinical studies of the efficacy of narcoanalysis in interrogation or lie detection, there is no agreement that any qualify as randomized controlled studies, the scientific standard for determining such effectiveness.[6][7][8][9]

Used in courses at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, the manual says that to recruit and control informants, counterintelligence agents could use fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum (narco test), according to a secret Defense Department summary of the manuals compiled during a 1992 investigation of the instructional material.

Use by country[edit]

India[edit]

India's Central Bureau of Investigation has used intravenous barbiturates for interrogation.[11] One such case in which the CBI has used these techniques is the interrogation on Kasab.[12] Kasab was a Pakistani [13] [14]  militant and a member of the Lashkar-e-Taiba Islamist group, through which he took part in the 2008 Mumbai attacks in India.[15][16] Kasab was the only attacker captured alive by police. On 3 May 2010, Kasab was found guilty of 80 offences, including murder, waging war against India, possessing explosives, and other charges.[17][18] On 6 May 2010, the same trial court sentenced him to death on four counts and to a life sentence on five counts.

On May 5, 2010 the Supreme Court Judge Balasubramaniam in the case "Smt. Selvi vs. State of Karnataka" held that narco, polygraph and brain mapping tests to be allowed after consent of

accused.[19] In another case, Madhya Pradesh High Court permitted narco in the investigation of a tiger killing.[20]

Russia[edit]

A defector from the biological weapons department 12 of the KGB "illegals" (S) directorate (presently a part of Russian SVR service) claimed that a truth serum codenamed SP-117 was highly effective and has been widely used. According to him, "The 'remedy which loosens the tongue' has no taste, no smell, no colour, and no immediate side effects. And, most important, a person has no recollection of having the 'heart-to-heart talk'" and felt afterwards as if they suddenly fell asleep. Officers of the S directorate used the drug primarily to check the trustworthiness of their own illegal agents who operated overseas, including even heroes of the service, such as Vitaly Yurchenko.[21] According to Alexander Litvinenko,Russian presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin was drugged with the same substance by FSB agents during his alleged kidnapping.[22]

United States[edit]

Truth serums have been used by the Central Intelligence Agency as seen in the U.S. Army and CIA interrogation manuals declassified by the Pentagon in 1996.[citation needed] In 1963 the US Supreme Court ruled that confessions produced as a result of ingestion of truth serum were "unconstitutionally coerced" and therefore inadmissible.[23] The viability of forensic evidence produced from "truth sera" has been addressed in lower courts – judges and expert witnesses have generally agreed that they are not reliable for lie detection.[24]

"Early in [the 20th] century physicians began to employ scopolamine, along with morphine and chloroform, to induce a state of "twilight sleep" during childbirth. A constituent of henbane, scopolamine was known to produce sedation and drowsiness, confusion and disorientation, incoordination, and amnesia for events experienced during intoxication. Yet physicians noted that women in twilight sleep answered questions accurately and often volunteered exceedingly candid remarks. In 1922 it occurred to Robert House, a Dallas, Texas, obstetrician, that a similar technique might be employed in the interrogation of suspected criminals, and he arranged to interview under scopolamine two prisoners in the Dallas county jail whose guilt seemed clearly confirmed. Under the drug, both men denied the charges on which they were held; and both, upon trial, were found not guilty."[25]

"The salient points that emerge from this discussion are the following. No such magic brew as the popular notion of truth serum exists. The barbiturates, by disrupting defensive patterns, may sometimes be helpful in interrogation, but even under the best conditions they will elicit an output contaminated by deception, fantasy, garbled speech, etc. A major vulnerability they produce in the subject is a tendency to believe he has revealed more than he has. It is possible, however, for both normal individuals and psychopaths to resist drug interrogation; it seems likely that any individual who can withstand ordinary intensive interrogation can hold out in narcosis. The best aid to a

defense against narco-interrogation is foreknowledge of the process and its limitations. There is an acute need for controlled experimental studies of drug reaction, not only to depressants but also to stimulants and to combinations of depressants, stimulants, and ataraxics." [25]

A judge approved the use of narcoanalysis in the trial of the 2012 Aurora shooting to evaluate whether James Eagan Holmes's state of mind is valid for an insanity plea.[26] "Judge William Sylvester ruled that in the event of Holmes pleading insanity his prosecutors would be permitted to interrogate him while he is under the influence of a medical drug designed to loosen him up and get him to talk. The idea would be that such a "narcoanalytic interview" would be used to confirm whether or not he had been legally insane when he embarked on his shooting spree on 20 July last year."[27] The drug "would most likely be a short-acting barbiturate such as sodium amytal."[27] William Shepherd, chair of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association,... said that the proposed use of a "truth drug" to ascertain the veracity of a defendant's plea of insanity... would provoke intense legal argument relating to Holmes's right to remain silent under the fifth amendment of the US constitution."[27]

According to psychiatrist August Piper, "amytal’s inhibition-lowering effects in no way prompt the subject to offer up true statements or memories."[28] Moreover, "Psychology Today’s Scott Linfield noted, per Piper, that “there’s good reason to believe that truth serums merely lower the threshold for reporting virtually all information, both true and false."[28] "The Supreme Court asserted shortly after 9/11 that terrorism may require "heightened deference to the judgments of the political branches with respect to matters of national security", a statement which could have implications for the use of truth serums

RELATED ARTICLES:

The famed chemical sodium pentothal, which is commonly known as truth serum, has been a mainstay of spy flicks for decades. In real life, scientists have tested it on spies, psychiatric patients, pregnant women, and suspected criminals. They all talked, but did they say something meaningful? Or was it just what the people around them wanted to hear?

Like heroin, sodium pentothal is a brand name. The drug was manufactured and trademarked by Abbott Laboratories, and its free-for-all name is sodium thiopental. It's a barbiturate, a drug that acts on the central nervous system, which it depresses to calm anxiety, induce drowsiness, eliminate pain, and sometimes entirely knock someone out. That is not why it's become world famous. Sodium pentothal made its name in detective, spy, and pulp novels, where it was famously used as a 'truth serum.' Novelists weren't making it up. Psychiatrists and police officers both swore by it in the first half of the twentieth century - but which of its powers were fact and which were fiction is still debated.

The Innocent Origin of Truth Serum

The maddening thing about Truth Serum, and the damage its wrought over the years, is that its conceptual originator, Dr Robert House, meant it to exonerate prisoners. During his time in obstetric wards around 1915, he noticed the drug administered to women during childbirth, scopolamine, had a strange effect on his patients. They spoke automatically and unthinkingly, responding to any question. His mind went to prisoners who, under interrogation, maintained claims of innocence. That's easy enough to do when jail would be uppermost in their mind, but if a barbituate could make women forget that they were having a baby, it could certainly wipe ulterior motives from a person's mind. So if asked where they were the night before, if they answered automatically, 'at home,' then they couldn't have been out robbing a bank.

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The process by which sodium pentothal came to be used to obtain confessions of guilt was a circuitous one. The particular compound was invented in 1934 by Ernest H. Volwiler and Donalee L. Tabern, both of whom were trying to invent another pain killer. 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.

The Twisted Side of Truth

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. Just after September 11th, people began talking about administering it to suspected terrorists in custody.

While police officers and spies were attempting to get confessions from criminals, psychiatrists attempted to convince their patients that they had been the victims of crimes. Sodium pentothal use had slowly mutated over the years. While under the influence, soldiers would relate extraordinary stories of their time in the war, and of the time before that. Many doctors were shocked at the abuse that some soldiers had suffered as children. Doctors began to ask about it, and even expect it, and since sodium pentothal left a patient confused and semi-coherent, it led to misunderstandings. One of the most famous of these was the infamous Sybil multiple personality case, which sprung from a young woman under the influence of barbiturates telling her psychiatrists about a tonsillectomy that she had undergone as a child. The incident seemed like an assault to Cornelia Wilbur, her doctor. The doctor probed for more details, which were supplied by Sybil, and worked up a case history that changed psychiatry.

But Does It Work?

Well, it might. If someone is dead set against telling your their secrets it might make them so disoriented that they'll spill something. It's just that, to make it at all effective, you have to positively know what you're looking for already, because if they tell you that, they'll generally tell you a lot of other things as well. And you'll have to work on your tone, because someone under the influence of any of the 'truth drugs' will most likely tell you what you want to hear. The drugs make people a little more obliging, but mostly they suppress the parts of the brain that have to kick into gear if a person is to assess what's wrong with a question, articulate it, and assert themselves

to their questioner. It's easier just to let their imagination go with the flow and tell the questioner exactly what they want to hear.

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That is not a problem if all the questioner wants is a confession, right or wrong. If they want information, though, sorting out a person being honest, being imaginative, misunderstanding the question, and outright lying because it's easier, is tough to do. One of the reasons Multiple Personality Disorder was nailed down as only being cause by severe child abuse is Doctor Wilbur insisting that that was the only cause. Earlier patients mentioned mildly traumatic events in childhood but not necessarily direct abuse, nor was that trauma the only cause of the split in personality. Wilbur then founded an organization which trained therapists to use drugs and hypnosis and probe for childhood abuse. After many leading questions, patients would finally go along with what their therapists were saying, the therapist would declare that a memory had finally be recovered, and the cause of the illness would be reinforced. Recovered memory abuse would

range from Sybil's false memory of being flown to (occupied) Holland during World War II to help an English officer smuggle out his wife, all while in the persona of a twelve-year-old, to fantastic stories of Satanic cults sacrificing humans inside regular towns. When cases against parents started falling through, and lawsuits started piling up, truth drugs fell from favor fast. Meanwhile, when the Supreme Court declared that confessions under the influence were coerced, which was unconstitutional, and the easy confessions turned into a lot of freed prisoners, with occasional scrambles to collect old evidence.

In the end, sodium pentothal proved useless not because no one could get information, but because everyone could get too much. It gave questioners information in endless streams that were near-impossible to sort into fact and fiction. It dangled exactly the reply people wanted in front of them, but made anyone who was informed about the drug question if it was only there because they wanted it. It can't offer any certainty that information gotten out of a person was anything more than fantasy. And since certainty is what 'truth serum' is supposed to be all about, then it definitively fails.

Can a drug make you tell the truth?One of the great challenges of living in our society is knowing when people are telling the truth or not. We lie all the time and are remarkably bad at detecting when other people are deliberately deceiving us.

There are lots of urban myths about lie detecting, such as the claim that liars tend to look away, twitch their feet or touch their noses when lying (the so-called Pinocchio effect).

In study after study, it has been shown that professionals such as policemen are no more reliable at detecting liars than the rest of us. So it's not surprising that for many years scientists have been working to develop "truth drugs" - drugs that will make you open up and tell all you know to an interrogator.

One of the oldest and best known of these truth drugs is sodium thiopental. Although it was first developed in the 1930s, it is still used today in a range of settings, including, in some countries, by the police and the military.

I was intrigued but also extremely sceptical about the claims that sodium thiopental, originally developed as an anaesthetic, could make people speak the truth if they chose not to. 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 1950s 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. We started with a very low dose. Immediately I felt extremely light-headed, intoxicated. But would this make me more inclined to speak the truth?

There is an expression, "in vino veritas" (in wine there is truth). Alcohol is an anaesthetic and it depresses some of our higher centres, areas like the cerebral cortex where a lot of thought processing occurs. It reduces inhibitions but also slows thought processes, making it difficult to think clearly. The Roman historian Tacitus claimed that Germanic tribes held their important councils while drunk, as they thought it made effective lying harder.

One theory about sodium thiopental is that it works in much the same way. Because lying is generally more difficult and complicated than telling the truth, if you suppress higher cortical functions you are more likely to speak the truth, simply because it's easier.

I'm not sure if I lied effectively while under the influence of low dose thiopental, but I found that I could still lie.

"I am a cardiac - ha ha ha! - cardiac surgeon, a world famous cardiac surgeon," I shouted out when Dr Leach asked me what I did for a living.

"Would you like to tell me what the last operation you carried out was?" he enquired, politely.

"It was a heart bypass," I improvised. "They survived, yeah, I was awesome."

Not convincing, but I had just about managed to stick to my fictional story. But what would happen when the dose was upped?

At this point I felt some trepidation. There was a risk that I might say something that I really didn't want the world to know, but, confident in my ability to keep on lying, I told Dr Leach to go ahead

I was given another slightly larger dose of sodium thiopental and this time I actually felt more sober, more in control. So what happened next was a complete surprise.

Again Dr Leech asked me my name and my profession. This time there was no hesitation.

"I'm a television producer. Well, executive producer, well, presenter, some, mix of the three of them."

"So you don't have any history of performing cardiac surgery?" he asked gently.

"None whatsoever. None whatsoever"

I'm still confused about what happened because one effect of the drug is to distort short-term memory. But I think the reason that I spoke the truth on this occasion is because the thought of lying never occurred to me.

So does it work? Well my conclusion after trying it out and speaking to experts is that it will certainly make you more inclined to talk, but that when you are under the influence you are also in an extremely suggestible state. The reason you become more suggestible is probably because the drug is interfering with your higher centres, like your cortex, where a lot of decision making goes on. There is a serious risk you will say what your interrogator wants to hear rather than the truth.

The truth is we don't have a reliable truth drug yet. Or if there is one out there, nobody's telling.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24371140

The Truth Behind Truth Serum DrugsIt sounds like something taken directly from the pages of Harry Potter—truth serum, or drugs that “make people tell the truth.” Somewhat recently a U.S. judge approved the use of truth serum on James Holmes, the accused Aurora, Colorado “Batman” shooter. So clearly the answer to your question must be that truth serums do exist right?  Well, in short- yes… and no.A type of “truth serum” was “discovered” by physician Robert Ernest House, an obstetrician. House noticed that women given a cocktail of drugs, such as morphine, chloroform, and scopolamine during child birth would often speak extremely openly about things they normally would be very inhibited about.  He then made the somewhat suspect leap to thinking the women not only were more willing to speak candidly when under the influence of these drugs, but were even unable to speak lies in this state.

House then worked closely with patients with mental disorders and conducted research on their condition using some of these drugs. Specifically, in 1924, he experimented with scopolamine hydrobromide and found, as with the women in childbirth, his patients would fall into a mental state that made them more impressionable in terms of getting them to be willing to reveal what they thought was true. According to House, the patients were also not able to hide their reactions to certain statements, with the drug inhibiting their usual responses. House worked closely with criminologists for the next six years before his death in 1930, using scopolamine hydrobromide to determine the guilt or innocence of numerous individuals accused of crimes, despite the fact that the effectiveness of the drug was highly questionable.

Scopolamine hydrobromide isn’t the only “truth serum.” Truth serum refers to a number of psychoactive medications which alter a person’s cognitive ability in such a way as to make the person more susceptible to divulging information they would not have otherwise done.  In that sense, even alcohol can be used as such a serum at times.

The way most of the popular “truth” serum drugs typically work is by placing the patient into a “twilight sleep,” a state where the patient is conscious and unable to feel pain.  They usually can’t remember anything between the time the drug is administered and the effects wear off, which can be handy in convincing the subjects that they revealed more than they actually did after the fact, thus perhaps inducing a confession that way.  While in the drugged state, the patient becomes relaxed and calm and

typically feels warmth and closeness toward the interviewer, which would engender feelings of trust and provide an environment in which the patient would be more likely to tell the truth.

Studies have been carried out to see how reliable truth serum is. However, very few of the studies have lived up to normal scientific standards to determine effectiveness, though most seem to indicate that, while some truth serums do work in some case, in just as many other instances with the same drugs, they don’t work. Specifically, tests carried out on patients under the influence of Amytal, another popular truth serum, showed that they were capable of telling lies and that many supposed “truths” were likely a combination of fact and fiction. A person is also highly “susceptible to outside suggestion” under the influence of the drug, meaning that they might agree to something that the interviewer says even if it isn’t true.  Subjects also sometimes randomly make things up for no apparent reason. Thus, any information given under the influence of a truth serum needs to be corroborated by other evidence in order to weigh whether it is actually true.  This doesn’t mean the use of “truth” serum can’t be effective.  For instance, sometimes people can be lead to reveal things that lead the police to other hard evidence and sometimes a subject can be convinced they admitted to something under the influence of the drug or frightened into revealing part of the truth as they are afraid of what they might say when drugged. So testers simply need to realize that they can’t take anything said at face value.

Of course, there are also moral and legal issues to be considered when using truth serum, effective or not. In 1963, the Supreme Court heard the case Townsend v. Sain, the petitioner was a man confessed to a murder while under the influence of “truth serum” drugs and believed that his constitutional rights had been violated. He argued that the usage of the drugs resulted in him being coerced into confession without the due process of law, which went against the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court ruled in the accused’s favour, holding that confessions resulting from the use of truth serum were “unconstitutionally coerced.”

After the case, truth serums became less popular in the United States. However, the CIA is known to have extensively tested and used various “truth” serums over the years and it wouldn’t be surprising if they still do today.  Further, despite the Court’s ruling, as mentioned, a judge recently approved the use of truth serum in the case of James Holmes, the man accused of the Aurora, Colorado theatre shootings in 2012.  However, in this case, the drugs are not being used to determine whether he’s guilty or not.  Rather, the truth serum is being used to determine whether or not the “guilty by reason of insanity” plea would be valid here- i.e. whether he’s feigning insanity to avoid prison.

Even with this, as you can imagine, the ruling is highly controversial as it is in defiance of the previous Supreme Court ruling. In this case, individuals believe that the accused’s Fifth Amendment rights—the right to remain silent—are being violated, as Holmes would not be in the right state of mind to stop himself talking if he wanted to.

While real-life truth serum is seemingly not very effective at forcing a person to reveal the truth, it was once considered a fool-proof, fail-safe option to get confessions out of accused criminals. Sometimes it

might have worked, but sometimes it probably didn’t. Either way, until a truth serum can be shown to be 100% effective on the level of veritaserum, truth serum will likely not become used very often.  Further, due to the legal issues surrounding its use, perhaps violating people’s rights, even if we had a fool proof truth serum, it still is likely not to be used very often, at least not without consent of the accused.

Bonus Facts: Because of its amnesic effects, scopolamine is a popular date rape drug because the victims are unlikely to

remember the events that take place after ingesting the drug.

Alcohol induces many of the same feelings as truth serum if someone has had a few too many drinks. So, as mentioned, alcohol could be considered a type of truth serum, but the results from an interrogation with someone who’s been drinking would be even less reliable based on their drinking history and alcohol tolerance.

Truth serum is a wide-spread idea in fiction. You can find it in Star Trek, 24, Fairly Odd Parents, Meet the Fockers, Artemis Fowl, and other film, TV, and book series.  You’ll also often see “lie detector” tests given.  Like truth serums, lie detector tests are wildly inaccurate.

A Russian drug called “SP-117” has been widely used and is considered highly effective as a truth serum. It’s said to have no taste, colour, or smell, and could be easily placed in someone’s drink. Afterward having a “heart-to-heart talk” with the interrogator, the victim is said to have no memory of the event, which makes it a more useful drug closer to the fictional idea of truth serum if the reports are true.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/06/is-there-really-truth-serum-drugs/

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 mid-1910s, 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.

It was only later when other people used these drugs that they got the reputation for having the power to force people to provide information against their will.

How did they begin to be used for interrogation?In the 1930s, there were these committees to evaluate corruption in American policing, and it first came out that police were using these drugs in interrogations to get suspects to incriminate themselves. But there's not a lot of documentation of that.During World War II, these drugs were used in a very different way. They were the first intravenous anesthetics and were used to treat traumatized soldiers who had lost their memories or had aphasia [loss of the ability to speak or process language due to brain injury]. Doctors found that using these drugs would make it easier for people to say what happened, and this helped them feel better.

As a result, a lot of doctors who had been in the military during the war were familiar with these drugs. Sodium amytal and pentothal were no longer just used as surgical anesthetics, although that was their most common use, but they were sometimes used for this psychiatric purpose of getting people to talk.  In most cases, the drugs were not used in interrogations, but to help people talk about their memories in psychiatric consultations.  However, some of these military doctors eventually became consultants for police forces or they did psychiatric research for the government and began exploring different ways of using these drugs for interrogation.

Do experts believe they really work?The idea of a "truth serum" has never been widely accepted. Although there have been waves of enthusiasm for the idea of a drug that can extract information reliably, there has been even more skepticism. Ever since the 1920s, many judges, psychiatrists, and scientists have rejected the idea that there is a drug that can get memories out intact. They have claimed, instead, that it makes people feel like talking, but it also puts them in a state of extreme suggestibility: people will pick up on cues about what questioners want to hear and repeat that back. This is one of the reasons that

statements made under the influence of these drugs have never, as far as I know, been accepted in an American court.After 9/11, there were discussions in the national papers about whether it's a good idea to interrogate suspects using these drugs. Every time there is a desperate need for information from people, you get speculation about whether these drugs are going to get that information. But you also get consistent warnings that the information may be less reliable than what you would get without the drugs. That skepticism was there right from the start 80 years ago.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-truth-serum/

Dear Cecil:

What's the straight dope on truth serums? What are they? What exactly do they do? Do sodium pentothal and the like really make witnesses spill their guts? If so, why don't we use it for courtrooms and police interrogations? Please hurry, my suspect is wrestling his way out of the handcuffs.

— J.F.

Cecil replies:

Truth serums are based on a phenomenon known since ancient times, when Pliny the Elder coined the phrase in vino veritas: "in wine, truth." He meant anything that lowers your inhibitions is likely to cause you to say things you'd normally keep secret. Unfortunately for cops and CIA interrogators, what you spill isn't necessarily the truth.

Although people have been plying one another with liquor for centuries, the earliest confession induced using something stronger was reported in a 1903 criminal case involving a New York cop. He admitted under ether that he'd faked insanity when accused of killing his wife.

The first drug to catch on in a big way as a truth serum was scopolamine, a depressant and sleeping agent. Mixed with morphine, it was used to put women in labor into a

"twilight sleep" so they'd forget the pain. To gauge the dose, the doctor would ask the patient questions until she could no longer remember anything. The pioneer of truth serum research, a small-town Texas obstetrician named Robert House, claimed his patients always answered truthfully during these times, and from this concluded the drug rendered them unable to lie. In 1922 he tried the technique on two prisoners in a Dallas jail, helping to exonerate both. The age of truth serum investigation, also called narcoanalysis, had been born.

Although truth serum caught the fancy of reporters and some scientists, it was never widely accepted as a way of extracting criminal confessions. Several sensational early cases produced a variety of results. In 1924, five black men in Birmingham, Alabama, reportedly confessed under the influence of an unspecified truth serum to eight ax murders, then confirmed their guilt after the drug had worn off. (This comes from a four-paragraph account in the New York Times; I admit to some skepticism.) A few years later a chauffeur in Hawaii confessed under scopolamine to writing the note in a kidnap-murder case but repudiated his statement afterward; ultimately the crime was pinned on someone else.

By the mid-1930s, scopolamine had been largely abandoned in favor of safer drugs such as sodium amytal and sodium thiopental (of which Pentothal is a brand name). But the theory stayed the same: once you’re in a trance and have thus lost the complex brain functions needed to sustain a lie, you're reduced to telling the truth. Drugs were also said to be helpful in dredging up lost memories.

Sometimes they probably were. The problem with truth serums is the results can't be depended on. It's easy to find case reports of people recounting detailed stories under the influence of drugs of which they have no recollection afterward — and the stories check out. But researchers also admit despairingly that they know of just as many confessions that were demonstrably false. Drugs reduce some subjects to unintelligible babbling. Other subjects are suggestible and will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. Plus, just because somebody thinks something is true doesn't mean it is.

But hope lives on in the shadowy corners of government. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA, tried using cannabis extract to make people talk. Later generations of spies wondered whether they could get results with mescaline and LSD. In the 1950s the CIA launched a covert research program called MK-Ultra to explore the possibilities of truth serums and behavior-modification drugs; it's said to have run at least through the late 60s. The project gained notoriety after one participant jumped out a hotel window while on LSD.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that confessions obtained using drugs are inadmissible as evidence, on the premise that the practice violates the constitutional protection against self-incrimination. The European Court of Human Rights has likewise prohibited the practice. Nonetheless, drugs continue to be used to extract confessions in some parts of the world. Police in India reportedly used drugs to convince two suspects to confess to a series of grisly killings in 2007.

After 9/11, some in the U.S. argued that truth serum ought to be used to extract information from terrorism suspects. Nothing so far suggests American authorities tried it, although if they didn't I don't imagine it was out of an excess of scruples. The more persuasive argument in these nervous times is likely to have been a practical one. Let's say out of 100 bits of data forcibly extracted using drugs or other means, five are legitimate. How do you know which five?

— Cecil Adams

References

Geis, Gilbert. “In Scopolamine Veritas: The Early History of Drug-Induced Statements” The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science50.4 (1959): 347-357.

Jesani, Amar “Willing participants and tolerant profession: Medical ethics and human rights in narco-analysis.” Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 5.3 (2008): 130-135.

Kala, A.K. “Of ethically compromising positions and blatant lies about ‘truth serum.’” Indian Journal of Psychiatry 49 (2007):6-9.

Keller, Linda M. “Is Truth Serum Torture?” American University International Law Review 20.3 (2005): 521-612.

Marks, John. “The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’” New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991.

Muehlberger, C.W. “Interrogation Under Drug Influence” The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 42 (1951): 513-528.

Naples, Maria, and Hackett, Thomas P. “The Amytal Interview: History and Current Uses” Psychosomatics 19.2 (1978):98-105.

Odeshoo, Jason R. “Truth or Dare?: Terrorism and ‘Truth Serum’ in the Post-9/11 World” Stanford Law Review 57 (2004): 209-256.

Schwarz, Stanley M. “Everything but the truth- narco-analysis and its effect upon confessions.” Temple Law Quarterly 31 (1958): 359-371.