In a 1971 book called “The Futurological Congress,” Polish writer Stanislaw Lem portrayed a future in which disobedience is controlled with hypothetical mind-altering chemicals he dubbed “benignimizers”. In the opening scene of the book, police attack protesters outside an international scientific convention with hallucinogenic agents. As the protesters and bystanders are saturated with the agents, they are overcome by delusions and feelings of complacency and love.

Well, new revelations suggest Stanislaw Lem may have been more a prophet than a fiction writer.

A small, Texas-based nonprofit has obtained Pentagon reports revealing shocking plans to promote psychopharmacological weapons and mind-altering drugs.

According to a report the Sunshine Project obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program conducted an extensive review of medical literature and new developments in the pharmaceutical industry. The report concludes, “the development and use of [psychopharmacological weapons] is achievable and desirable.”

The drugs that Lem called “benignimizers” are called “calmatives” by the military. The military was supposed to remove such drugs from its stockpiles following the adoption of the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1993.

But the Pentagon has other plans. They include using everything from valium sprays, hallucinogens, chemical cocktails, and fast- acting anti-depressants, to animal tranquilizers and a host of drugs that didn’t make it past the FDA because of excessive side-effects. According to the Sunshine Project, some of the techniques discussed in the report have already been used by the US in the so-called “War on Terrorism”.

This, as Washington beats the drums of war and marches towards an invasion of Iraq, because Iraq allegedly possesses biological weapons.

Democracy Now! called the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Project to ask them to join us today, but the calls were not returned.

Guest:

• Edward Hammond, bioweapons expert at the Sunshine Project, a small international NGO that works to avert the dangers of biological weapons. The Project’s name refers to how biological weapons break down and are rendered harmless by exposure to bright sunlight.

Related link:

• Sunshine Project