Drugs: Sifting Fact from Fantasy

Truth drugs and hypnotism. Any TV espionage agent worth his salt knows that these are surefire tools for compelling a reluctant subject to tell the truth. Most lately they were employed in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Indicted last week on conspiracy charges growing out of that probe, Businessman Clay Shaw had been linked to the assassination during a preliminary hearing by State Witness Perry Russo, 25, a Baton Rouge insurance salesman. Garrison's investigators supposedly checked out Russo's veracity beforehand by hypnotizing him and giving him an injection of a so-called "truth drug," Pentothal Sodium.

The man who administered the drug, Orleans Parish Coroner Dr. Nicholas Chetta, apparently came away from the session convinced that Russo actually heard former Airline Pilot David Ferrie (who died mysteriously last month) plotting to kill Kennedy with Shaw and "Leon Oswald" at a party in September 1963. Defending his use of the drug on Russo, Chetta said that the technique successfully removes a patient's "mental blocks," thus helps him in "recalling things." That is an accurate enough statement of the drug's potential—as far as it goes.

Drowsily Dependent. Pentothal Sodium (actually a trade name for thiopental sodium), like such related barbiturates as Amytal Sodium and Nembutal, is a depressant that loosens the tongue in much the same way that whisky does. It often alters consciousness enough to make a patient drowsily dependent on the doctor, who then can coax him into spilling information that he has been withholding. By bringing a patient's repressed feelings into the open, truth drugs can be of considerable help in psychiatric therapy.

But psychiatrists warn that the value is limited. Strong-egoed subjects, for example, are apt to be largely unaffected by the drugs. Those most susceptible, the weak-willed and guilt-ridden, may succumb so completely, says Psychiatrist Fredrick Redlich, Yale's new medical dean (TIME, March 24), that they say what they sense their interrogator wants to hear. This can confound even highly trained psychiatrists. Truth drugs, says Redlich, put patients in "a twilight zone where it is very difficult to tell truth from fantasy." Some people, in fact, can lie at will under the truth drugs. In an experiment that pretty much proved this, the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Hospital supplied volunteers with a readymade lie, promised them $5 apiece if they would stick to it under Amytal. Most of them stuck to it and collected the $5.

No Guarantee. Even more of a problem is the fact that disturbed people who believe their own fantasies continue to do so even under truth drugs—a factor that also is known to produce unreliable results on polygraph (lie detector) tests. The Kennedy assassination, of course, holds particular fascination for many such individuals. Houston Psychiatrist C. A. Dwyer says that he knows of 15 people in his city alone who have spun incredible tales about the assassination (one tells of having seen Jacqueline Kennedy give Lee Harvey Oswald money), adds that some of them would probably give much the same accounts under the effects of thiopental.