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Originally Posted by ChatCat  |
Journalists and History experts review the work of H. P. Albarelli Jr
H. P. Albarelli Jr
Worst Science Article of the Week: The CIA Dosed a French Town With LSD! | Discoblog | Discover Magazine
Worst Science Article of the Week: The CIA Dosed a French Town With LSD!
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The Telegraph’s article immediately drew sharp responses from other journalists, who dismissed the report as bunkum. David Steven of The Global Dashboard points out that Albarelli’s theories were rejected out of hand by Steven Kaplan, a history professor at Cornell University and a noted bread expert who has written a book on the incident.
Terming the report “incoherent and harebrained,” Kaplan told France 24:
I have numerous objections to this paltry evidence against the CIA. First of all, it’s clinically incoherent: LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople.…
It is absurd, this idea of transmitting a very toxic drug by putting it in bread. As for pulverizing it [for ingestion through the air], that technology was not even possible at that time. Most compellingly, why would they choose the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half-destroyed by the US Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War. It makes no sense.
The report also came under fire for not getting its science right. Derek Lowe, a chemist who has worked in several major pharmaceutical companies, points to the reporter’s assertion that the hallucinations were caused by diethylamide, the D in LSD, as incorrect.
June 17th, 2010, 01:11 AM
Worst Science Article of the Week 
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