Critical Analysis Of The Bread Drama Incident
On August 16th, 1951, a massive outbreak struck the people of Pont-Saint-Esprit, a little village located in southern France. More than 300 people were affected by “madness” and “hallucinations” and it was assumed that this outbreak was caused by possible ergotine in the bread, thus having this affect on many people. But, in recent years, that may have not been the case. There is a theory that this may not have been purely an accident, but something more sinister; the CIA may have spiked the food with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (also known as LSD) in Pont Saint Esprit for another one of their mind control experiments at the time. In my opinion, I agree that this theory may be true and that the CIA may have had some sort of connection to “the cursed bread drama”.
The reasons why I believe that this theory may be true is because this incident happened around the exact time LSD was first being experimented with while a man working for the CIA was in this french village, there were declassified documents confirming that this tragedy that had happened was indeed caused by the drug, and the CIA was conducting similar experiments on people in the US and were told to stop at nothing to further expand their experiments. As this bread drama incident happened around the same time as the Cold War, this was when the CIA really started working on experiments that included the use of LSD. This social context contributes to the understanding of this conspiracy because it gives some sort of context on what possibly could have started and caused the Pont Saint Esprit incident. Hank Albarelli was an American researcher in the secret services that was investigating the suspicious death of Frank Olson, who was one of the main biochemists working for the CIA. Olson was known for carrying out experiments using hard drugs, one of them being LSD. Frank was also spotted in France a few months before the Pont Saint Esprit outbreak occurred. Having the Pont Saint Esprit bread incident occurred around the same time Olson was in France a few months before the incident happened seems too specific to be a coincidence, since Olson was working for the CIA during that time. So it’s possible that Olson may have been the person who had brought LSD into this little village and somehow managed to contaminate the bread with the drug. It was also reported that once Olson came back from France, he called into questioned about the ethics of the experiments that were carried out and he started slowing sinking into a depression shortly afterwards, but in November 1953 the CIA had put LSD into his glass unknowingly and died by jumping from a hotel in New York. After Albarelli had been searching for more clues on Frank Olson’s death, he had come across a file coming from The White House that had linked Olson’s name to the Pont Saint Esprit incident Towards the end of the documentary “CIA: Covert Experiments”, it is revealed that there were declassified documents confirming that the incident at Pont Saint Esprit was not caused by some sort of ergotine, but was in fact caused by LSD as they found traces of the drug in the bread. There would be no reason for the CIA to put LSD into Olson’s drink if there wasn’t anything to hide, but the declassified documents confirming that LSD was the cause of the Pont Saint Esprit incident must have been something that the CIA wanted to cover up. America also conducted experiments on their own people. This social context contributes to the understanding of this conspiracy because it shows that what the CIA and the US army were capable of, despite the Nuremberg code already being implemented.
The Nuremberg Code was a set of rules that were established in 1931 that were guidelines for any kind of human experimentation. The main rules of the Nuremberg code were “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential” and “The experiment must be designed to avoid all unnecessary suffering, physical and mental harm”. However, despite those rules, there have been many reported cases of the CIA and US Army conducting horrible experiments on people in their own country. The CIA was specifically interested in the psychological manipulation that could wipe memories and “turn humans into robots”, basically brainwashing them and using their test subjects for their own benefit. Some experiments that were conducted were: spraying whooping cough bacteria off the coast of Tampa that killed two people and affected dozens of people, releasing mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and dengue into little town of Savannah and Avon that resulted in several deaths and hundreds of people infected, and had even sprayed LSD into the air off the coast of San Francisco where 11 people were hospitalized and one person died. Another smaller case involved the use of psychological manipulation, where Karen Wetmore was emitted to a hospital and was cut off of any sort of contact from her family because she was told “it was for her own good”, when in reality, the CIA had wanted to erase her memories and turn her into a “robot” at their command. Wetmore talks about how she had been bound up with a straight jacket and locked up in an isolated room, and would also tie her hands behind her back and make her sleep on the floor naked. If the CIA were capable to do such experiments on their own people in their own country, it would seem likely that they would try to do some similar tests on other countries. There are two sides of the argument: the claim that the CIA had nothing to do with the Pont Saint Esprit bread incident, and the claim that the CIA was working with the french government to conduct this “experiment” on this little village. For example, when called into question, the heads of the CIA lie and downplay the actual facts by stating that “great things could be done with hypnosis” and “we were testing if we could make a person do something under hypnosis that a person would not normally do”. With the heads of the CIA making claims and trying to minimize the experiments done onto people, they make it seem as if they could never even consider branching out to other countries to do their experiments on. However, with the evidence of the declassified files that LSD was the cause of the Pont Saint Esprit incident, and another file from The White House linking Frank Olson, who was one of the main biochemists working with the CIA, to the Pont Saint Esprit incident but then the CIA mysteriously puts LSD into Olson’s drink, seems like a pretty compelling argument that the CIA was indeed involved with the bread incident of 1951.
Another piece to support this is that the person who discovered and created LSD, Albert Hofmann, even claims that the side effects that the people of this small french village had dealt with were the same side effects of LSD, but then months later recanted his statement and suspiciously became uncontactable. Looking at both the claims from both sides of the argument, it appears that there is more evidence into possibly proving that the CIA did have some sort of involvement with the Pont Saint Esprit incident. With all the evidence that has been discovered and presented to the public about the events that occured in that little town in France in 1951, I believe that the CIA did have some sort of involvement with that event because a man a biochemist working for the CIA had been in France months prior to the incident, documents proving that traces of the drug that the US and the CIA have been experimenting with were found in the bread of Pont Saint Esprit, and the CIA was willing to conduct very similar experiments on the people living in their own country, regardless of the consequences. It has been almost 70 years since the tragic event of Pont Saint Esprit had happened, but even with all the information presented to all of us, this theory remains unsolved.
Citations
- Ghooi R. B. (2011). The Nuremberg Code-A critique. Perspectives in clinical research, Retrieved September 30, 2019
- Pighetti, O. (Director). (2015). CIA: Covert Experiments [Video file]. Java Films. Retrieved September 30, 2019, from Kanopy.
