Stranger than fiction: US army engineered super-soldier drug!
1)
DefenseTech.orgBZ or "
Agent Buzz" is the military name for 3-quinuclidinyl benzillate, an extremely powerful hallucinogen. After experimenting with a whole stash of mind-altering substances including cocaine, heroin and LSD, the Pentagon selected BZ for weaponizing. Its major advantages are that it can easily delivered in an aerosol cloud, and it is very safe. With many substances, the effective dose can be dangerously close to the amount needed to kill - ask any anesthetist. With BZ, the tiny effective dose (maybe two milligrams) is around one-thousandth the lethal dose. It is also odorless and invisible, and there is currently no means of detecting it.
Agent Buzz was tested between 1959 to 1975 on some twenty-eight hundred US soldiers at several locations. It proved extremely effective as an incapacitant. The physical effects are increased heart rates, pupil dilation, blurred vision, dry skin and mouth, increased temperature, and flushing of skin – as a med school mnemonic has it “blind as a bat, dry as a bone, hot as Hades, red as a beet.”
But the psychological effects are more important than the physical ones, as the subject is also rendered “mad as a hatter.”
It also produces uncontrollable aggression, Wouter Basson, the man behind South Africa’s chemical and biological warfare program, notes. His version of BZ, in fact, was modified with CB (Carboxy-Methoxy-Benzoxytropane)
specifically to reduce this effect.
The Serb army manual on their BZ munitions
implies a violent reaction: “it can be expected that such individuals or groups will subsequently, under the effects of [this chemical agent], inflict great damage and losses on their own forces.”
Over a hundred thousand pounds of BZ were produced by the US. However, it fell out of favor because its effects were considered to be too unpredictable. Destruction of the BZ stockpile commenced in 1988 and was reportedly
completed in Pine Bluff in 1990.
2)
Acid Dreams: BZ Bombs AwayDuring the early 1960s
Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the US Army Chemical Corps, received an average of four hundred chemical "rejects" every month from the maior American pharmaceutical firms. Rejects were drugs found to be commercially useless because of their undesirable side effects. Of course, undesirable side effects were precisely what the army was looking for.
It was from Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley, New Jersey, that Edgewood Arsenal obtained its first sample of a drug called quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ for short. The army learned that BZ inhibits the production of a chemical substance that facilitates the transfer of messages along the nerve endings, thereby disrupting normal perceptual pattems. The effects generally lasted about three days, although symptoms--headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and maniacal behavior--could persist for as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute effects," noted an army doctor, "the person is completely out of touch with his environment."
Dr. Van Sim, who served as chief of the Clinical Research Division at Edgewood, made it a practice to try all new chemicals himself before testing them on volunteers. Sim said he sampled LSD "on several occasions." Did he enjoy getting high, or were his acid trips simply a patriotic duty? "It's not a matter of compulsiveness or wanting to be the first to try a material," Sim stated. "With my experience I am often able to change the design of future experiments.... This allows more comprehensive tests to be conducted later, with maximum effective usefulness of inexperienced volunteers. I'm trying to defeat the compound, and if I can, we don't have to drag out the tests at the expense of a lot of time and money." With BZ, Dr. Sim seems to have met his match. "It zonked me for three days. I kept falling down and the people at the lab assigned someone to follow me around with a mattress. I woke up from it after three days without a bruise." For his efforts Sim received the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service and was cited for exposing himself to dangerous drugs "at the risk of grave personal injury."
According to Dr. Solomon Snyder, a leading psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University, which conducted drug research for the Chemical Corps, "The army's testing of LSD was just a sideshow compared to its use of BZ." Clinical studies with EA-2277 (the code number for BZ) were initiated at Edgewood Arsenal in 1959 and continued until 1975.
During this period an estimated twenty-eight hundred soldiers were exposed to the superhallucinogen. A number of military personnel have since come forward claiming that they were never the same after their encounter with BZ. Robert Bowen, a former air force enlisted man, felt disoriented for several weeks after his exposure. Bowen said the drug produced a temporary feeling of insanity but that he reacted less severely than other test subjects. One paratrooper lost all muscle control for a time and later seemed totally divorced from reality "The last time I saw him," said Bowen, "he was taking a shower in his uniform and smoking a cigar." During the early 1960s the CIA and the military began to phase out their in-house acid tests in favor of more powerful chemicals such as BZ, which became the army's standard incapacitating agent. By this time the superhallucinogen was ready for deployment in a grenade, a 750-pound cluster bomb, and at least one other large-scale bomb. In addition the army tested a number of other advanced BZ munitions, including mortar, artillery, and missile warheads. The superhallucinogen was later employed by American troops as a counterinsurgency weapon in Vietnam, and according to CIA documents there may be contingency plans to use the drug in the event of a major civilian insurrection. As Major General
William Creasy warned shortly after he retired from the Army Chemical Corps, "We will use these things as we very well see fit, when we think it is in the best interest of the US and their allies."
3)
emedicine.comCBRNE - Incapacitating Agents, 3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate
Background: The chemical warfare agent 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate (QNB, BZ) is an anticholinergic agent that affects both the peripheral and central nervous systems (CNS). It is one of the most potent anticholinergic psychomimetics known, with only small doses necessary to produce incapacitation. It is classified as a hallucinogenic chemical warfare agent. QNB usually is disseminated as an aerosol, and the primary route of absorption is through the respiratory system. Absorption also can occur through the skin or gastrointestinal tract. It is odorless. QNB's pharmacologic activity is similar to other anticholinergic drugs (eg, atropine) but with a much longer duration of action.
Pathophysiology: QNB acts by competitively inhibiting muscarinic receptors. Muscarinic receptors primarily are associated with the parasympathetic nervous system, which innervates numerous organ systems, including the eye, heart, respiratory system, skin, gastrointestinal tract, and bladder. Sweat glands, innervated by the sympathetic nervous system, also are modulated by muscarinic receptors. The ICt50 (concentration in air of QNB necessary to incapacitate 50% of exposed and unprotected individuals through inhalation during a set time) has been reported to be 100 mg·min/m3. Effects of QNB by any route of exposure are slow in onset and long in duration. The onset of action is approximately 1 hour, with peak effects occurring 8 hours postexposure. Symptoms gradually subside over 2-4 days. Most of the QNB that enters the body is excreted by the kidneys, making urine the choice for detection.
[o]
