Aim High: The Long, Strange History Of Drugs In The Military | Answers With Joe

foreign video about drugs in the military what on July 4th yeah just so unclear uh you want to not only guarantee that this video is going to be demonetized by talking about drugs you want to talk about the military using drugs on July 4th I mean it about Memorial Day oh God what do we do for Memorial Day oh it was the one about why all soldiers go to hell because they're murderers what okay I'm kidding of course it wasn't about that we'd never do this video like that on this channel you know we never make a video like that do you even watch this channel I don't know we've gotten pretty dark lately no it was the lightning round video about the lunar crew Dragon oh yeah that's not bad it's interesting maybe it won't get demonetized I did a video one time about oxytocin the cuddle hormone and I titled it is love just a drug demonetized well thank God for our sponsors yes thank God for our sponsors this video is supported by brilliant [Music] Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman once said war is hell I feel like a lot of people have said that but for some reason that stuck on him but yeah human body is being ripped of shreds all around you while every moment feels like it's your last um yeah I think hell is an appropriate term for that let's face it sometimes a human being just needs a little extra help to perform in those conditions and for centuries armies all over the world have used stimulants to provide that kind of help this helped in a lot of ways from enhancing troop performance to keeping the soldiers awake to even helping the soldiers bond with each other which kind of led to better group of cohesion and morale and that kind of thing the short of it is that soldiers have been fighting while high for most of world history alcohol is probably the oldest and most popular motivator for soldiers for example the British soldiers would turn to Rum Russian soldiers would use vodka ancient Greeks and Romans preferred wine the Germans well beer of course and for Americans it's been whiskey since the Civil War but just like for most of us alcohol is pretty basic when it comes down to it if you really want to get lit you need to get a bit more herbal for example when the British tried to conquer the Zulu tribes in 1879 they got more than they bargained for in fact the enemy seemed almost impervious to their gunfire turns out the Zulu warriors have been given various herbs by their Shaman herbs like intellisy which is a traditional plant that basically makes you feel Fearless it also gave them Daga which is a South African variety of cannabis that has a stimulating effect it was also the Bushman poison bulb which could cause hallucinations now I know you might hear that and think why would they give that to their soldiers wouldn't that make their soldiers crazy well they're being sent into a crazy situation so maybe that's an advantage in Eurasia mushrooms were often used by soldiers and Siberian tribes for example the main psychoactive component of the Toadstool mushroom is musca Mall which can actually enhance combat performance yeah Soviet soldiers were reportedly uh intoxicated on mushrooms but it helped them to fight fearlessly at the Battle of Sea Catch for hairvar in Hungary in 1945. during World War One French and German pilots and Canadian soldiers were known to use cocaine London pharmacists even sold medical kits that contain cocaine and heroin they were advertised as useful presents for friends at the front and women would buy them and send them to the soldiers to be fair they gave cocaine and heroin to kids back then too so but next up was World War II and this war was all about the amphetamines the Nazis especially conducted just systematic military doping with an early version of crystal meth called pervatin the drug would apparently increase alertness energize the body reduce fatigue and boost confidence troops were issued around 35 million pills during the peak of the Blitzkrieg in Spring of 1940. some soldiers even took up to 4 bills a day it's believed that between 1939 and 1945 the German military took about 200 million meth pills seriously the Nazis were just meth heads so how do you beat an army of meth heads with your own meth heads yeah the Allies gave meth to their troops too in the form of Benzedrine tablets 72 million Benzedrine amphetamine tablets were issued to British troops during World War II the US gave Benzedrine tablets to the Bomber Crew starting in 1942 before offering them to their infantry men one year later all in all this is nuts the Pentagon issued anywhere between 250 million to 500 million Benzedrine tablets to Ally troops talk about a drug war so starting in the 1950s and 1960s there was a new class of drugs that began to take interest in the U.S military psychedelics one of these drugs was lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD the story is that there was a chemist named Albert Hoffman who was working for Sandoz pharmaceutical trying to create a blood stimulant and one of the drugs that he synthesized in 1938 just happened to be LSD but he didn't know that it had any hallucinogenic effects until 1943 when he uh accidentally consume some that's a pretty upsetting way to find out that you need to clean your lab so psychiatrists started experimenting with LSD starting around 1950 and between 1950 and 1965 had administered it to more than 40 000 patients and wrote more than a thousand scientific papers on the subject but it was a 1960s when the drug became popular with the general public hence the Psychedelic 60s it was promoted by alternative thought leaders at the time like Timothy Leary with his turn on Tunein and Dropout Mantra but perhaps nobody wanted to tune in more than the US Military and especially the CIA project MK Ultra was a CIA program that started the 1950s through the 1960s where the CIA experimented with LSD and other substances on volunteers but also unsuspecting subjects dozens of medical facilities pharmaceutical companies and universities were involved the thinking was the LSD could be used as a psychological weapon during the Cold War But ultimately they decided that it was too unpredictable to be used in the field by the way this marked a bit of a shift in the use of drugs in the military like like all the previous examples I just gave were about you know enhancing their own troops performance and whatnot this was turning toward using drugs as a weapon against the enemy and to my knowledge anyway this was different like this hasn't been used in this way before unless you count you know chemical weapons like mustard gas and sarin and whatnot with psychedelics the Army saw an opportunity to confuse and disable an enemy in the field or to engage in psychological warfare with the populace by doping them against their knowledge and it didn't stop with LSD one of the more interesting and lesser known drugs they tested was three clinical benzylate also known as agent bz which I'll be referring to because I cannot I can't word it's an odorless white crystalline powder that can cause delirium hallucinations and the inability to perform tasks now if you want to get deep in the signs lingo it's called an anticholinergic drug which means that it blocks the action of acetylcholine which is a type of neurotransmitter that sends messages between neurons it gives the neurons a bad connection basically much like LSD this was also discovered by accident by a pharmaceutical company called Hoffman La Roche different Hoffman and the LSD guy by the way but they were trying to create an anti-spasmodic for GI conditions but in 1951 they realized that one of their formulas um kind of messed people up and then comes the military the US Army began experimenting with bz and its effects of the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland in the 1950s they were run by U.S army researcher John Ketchum he was a colonel who had spent most of his career researching into drugs like LSD and PCP and how they could be turned into chemical weapons Ketchum was fascinated by Daisy and its bizarre effects saying quote subjects sometimes display something approaching wit not in the form of word play but as a kind of sarcasm or unexpected frankness that sounds like a review of my channel the effects would last for several days and during the drugs Peak the subjects would just be completely like detached from their own minds just jumping from one fragmented reality to the next they'd even see Visions like tiny baseball players and a tabletop diamond and animals and objects that would materialize and then vanish and they reportedly barely remember the experience once the drug wore off his most notable bz test took place in May of 1962 and this was quite a production they literally built a fake Communications Outpost and then locked four volunteers inside of it for 72 hours they were provided with food and water and medicine and a chemical toilet and then they were given combat simulations to see how they would you know perform as a Communications team under the influence of BZ and all the while they had four cameras set up around the room so they catch them and several technicians could observe through monitors on the outside so there were four of these guys like I just mentioned and only one of them was actually named in customers report the rest of them remained Anonymous this guy's name was Private first class Ronald zadrosney the other is went by H C and L L was the leader of the group um that might be why he went by L but he was a control subject he didn't have any bz hnc got low doses of it and zadrosney got the largest dose so one example of a test that they were put through was Ketchum triggered an alarm that indicated a chemical attack and then the men had to put on their gas masks the guys with the lower doses did okay but zadrosney apparently was in a state of delirium and he had to be helped with it so during zadrosney's drug-induced weekend he was seen saluting imaginary officers he thought that a drape that was partitioned to a toilet was a group of men he would stay up all night pacing mumbling and trying to escape the room he began to improve at one point so they put him in front of a switchboard to see if he could handle a communication that would come in but he didn't understand that the phone had to go up to his ear so that he could hear out of it and when one of the other soldiers tried to explain it to him he said that he couldn't do it because quote it wasn't working with electrodes throughout the week the soldiers were subjected to 200 phony tactical messages and warnings of chemical attacks and in the end the experiment showed that bz could be used to render troops ineffective but it wasn't the end of the tests that same year a reservist named Walter Payne was told to inhale a cloud of Beezy in a wind tunnel he was unresponsive three hours later he was examined and showed quote signs of deserrobated rigidity with hyperextension of the back neck and limbs accompanied by irregular twitching movement of Limbs in other words there were signs of major head trauma and brain damage pain was quickly given an antidote thankfully and he recovered pretty fast about a month later they did an EEG test on him and it showed that he was back to normal dodged a bullet on that one I'm sure they're not going to do that again in 1963 they did it again with another volunteer named Jason Butler Jr this time they had him breathe in the bz in a wind tunnel and he immediately went into critical condition his head shook spastically his body temperature peaked at 39.8 degrees Celsius that's 103.6 degrees Fahrenheit he was given an antidote and sponge with water to cool him down the doctors then released him after about six days saying they looked normal and they vowed they would never ever ever ever do that again another test a year later tried to see if they could incapacitate a group of soldiers with a cloud of BZ in the field this was called project dork for some reason what do they look like Jimmy dorks they look like a couple of dorks your clothes [ __ ] this one is is kind of hilarious I kind of It kind of turns into a Mark's brother's routine so so they they had trouble getting the cloud to stick to the ground like long enough for the soldiers to inhale it right so because it just kind of dispersed in the wind so first they tried doing it at a specific time in the morning uh when the air and the temperature differences were just right to prevent it from drifting away that didn't work so so then they resorted to Having Eight soldiers running in place on the back of a moving vehicle that moved along with the cloud so they could breathe in as much of it as possible and it still didn't work so yeah seeing as how they didn't think they would be able to get an enemy group of soldiers to agree to drive along with a cloud of poison gas while their soldiers breathed in as much of it as possible they had to abandon the idea and admit that it just it just wasn't going to work the bz test officially ended in the early 1970s but there were some rumors that went around that they actually tested them on U.S soldiers in Vietnam um the ending of the movie Jacob's Ladder kind of refers to this but in the movie bz kind of turns everybody into violent aggressive animals which is not at all what the experiments reported so you know it's probably to some Hollywood fantasy but unfortunately for many of the volunteers in these experiments the effects of these drugs did change them going forward the Army published a study in 1980 that showed that 16 percent of volunteers who took LSD suffered psychological symptoms like depression flashbacks and suicidal ideation later in their lives another study showed that many of the subjects have been hospitalized for nervous system disorders and tragically in 1995 Ronald zadrosney killed his third wife and then himself although his ex-wife claimed that he never seemed to be bothered by any of the bz experiments now since that happened more than 30 years before his death it's probably fair to assume that the drug didn't really have anything to do with it or maybe it did we'll never know now believe it or not military experiments with psychedelic drugs are still continuing to this day but for a very different reason psychedelics have been shown to be useful in the therapeutic settings and now they're being studied to help with soldiers and Veterans to treat anxiety depression and substance abuse in 2020 the defense Advanced research projects agency better known as DARPA funded a 27 million project to create new medicines for this purpose darpa's announcement didn't specifically mention psychedelics but it did refer to quote certain schedule 1 controlled drugs that engage serotonin receptors and that have quote significant side effects including hallucination psychedelic drugs tend to sort of create a state of plasticity in the brain that makes it easier for people to rewire their neuronal circuits and learn new behaviors and for soldiers suffering with PTSD these drugs along with therapy might help them to increase their well-being there are currently more than 200 clinical trials registered on clinicaltrials.gov to test the effects of MDMA and psilocybin on conditions like PTSD and depression in the U.S Department of Veterans Affairs is following This research but it's going to take some time and some soldiers need immediate help one story involves Army Ranger Jesse Gould he had a disability claim for PTSD that took two years to be processed by the VA but the Department's recommended treatment wasn't working for him discovered psychedelics and took a chance on drinking Ayahuasca and according to Gold this saved his life and maybe with this new research many others lives could be saved as well so we seem to have entered sort of a third era of drugs in the military the first being performance enhancing drugs for the battlefield the second being you know weapons to use against the enemy and now we're studying how to improve the lives of soldiers once they've left the service and that's a goal that I myself can get behind you know what I can also get behind learning new things which you'll kick into overdrive using today's sponsor brilliant like say you want to learn more about electricity after all it Powers everything in existence and maybe you could start with the electricity and magnetism course learn about Maxwell's field equations which kick-started the electrical Revolution as well as Columbus law Faraday's law goss's law there's a lot of laws but don't worry this isn't a legal course brilliant teaches you with exclusive animations and interactive puzzles that make it all simple and more important fun what's great about brilliant is it's a different kind of learning platform you know brilliant uses Visual and interactive lessons to teach you by solving problems which is something that we all kind of know how to do on a 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patreon and the channel members who are helping to support this Channel and keep the lights on and being an awesome Community I can't thank you guys enough there's a few names I need to call out real quick we've got Nino lover uh Leo vyak Lisa Gibson Mark Johnson Grandpa Merlin and two for flinchen love that name uh thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them get early access to videos get access to exclusive live streams just be part of an awesome Community uh just click the little join button down below please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here I'll point you toward this video which has to do with some psychedelic stuff that I've covered in the past it's a little bit similar if you want to go a little bit deeper or there's other videos down here on the sidebar that have my face on them you can go check those out and if you like them I do invite you to subscribe I'll come back with videos every Monday okey dokey that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye-opening rest of the week happy Fourth of July for all you Americans out there stay safe safe and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 386,485

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Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022