Science: Truth Serum

Washington Post science writer David Brown, who is also a medical doctor, was online to discuss his Monday science page story about the history and search for a truth serum, as well as speculation that scientists are still looking for one to enhance interrogation methods.

Read the story: Some Believe 'Truth Serums' Will Come Back (Post, Nov. 20)

A transcript follows.

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David Brown: Greetings everyone. This is the chat about so-called "truth serums." I'm drug-free but will try to answer truthfully to the best of my ability.

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San Francisco, Calif.: It's already here. It's not a drug.

It's fMRI

http://www.fmri.org/

They won't even have to ask questions. They'll just show you a Power Point presentation and judge your reactions while you are humanely strapped to the table.

It's been discuss some, but not widely. I think the main reason it hasn't been pushed is the interrogators fear they might become interrogates.

Imagine Hardball or Meet The Press when you could see if they actually believed what they said or not...Or a Tony Snow press conference where he couldn't lie without everyone knowing.

David Brown: You're right that functional MRI (fMRI) is another technology that is of interest to interrogators these days. My impression, however, is that it (like polygraph machines) is intended to determine when someone is deceiving the questioner. It obviously would not be useful in eliciting a fact that someone is willfully withholding---which of course is what "truth serums" are supposed to do. At least that is my understanding of this latest strategy for lie-detection.

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Rockville, Md.: I have a question about privacy. While I realize a truth serum would be great to have to interrogate terrorists and criminals, what are the ethical implications of discovering one and how do privacy protections play into this?

David Brown: This is of course a very complicated topic. Certainly at a minimum, any research on the behavioral effects of a new compound or a pharmaceutical used for a new purpose would have to be done with the consent of the experimental subject. So "informed consent" (which is related to privacy in some ways) would have to be observed on the route to discovering a truth drug. As to its use, the commentator in the Stanford Law Review that I mentioned in the story suggested that "it might be advisable to attach to any interrogation taking place under the influence of truth serum the same sorts of protections and requirements associated with electronic surveillance procedures"--that is wiretaps. This would require going before a judge, arguing the need for it, etc. Of course there are many, many people who would think that even with lots of legal restrictions and due process that giving a drug to someone to help force them to reveal something is a form of assault and that it could never be defended or condoned.

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Boise, Idaho: Have you read Jon Ronson's "The Men Who Stare at Goats"? Apparently one of the things Frank Olson was involved in was getting "expendables", i.e. captured Russian agents, hooked on heroin and then interrogating them as they went through withdrawal. Another version of truth serum?

David Brown: A number of readers have contacted me with their views of the death of Dr. Frank Olson, who fell to his death from a hotel window and was involved in the CIA MK-ULTRA program in some way. I understand that his son believes he was murdered and did not commit suicide, and that the body was exhumed 40 years later and at least one pathologist believes there was evidence of homicide (namely, a head wound.). But this is all totally second hand information to me; I have no knowledge about this case and don't really want to pursue it here. Also, I have not read Jon Ronson's book. As to heroin withdrawal as "truth serum"---no ideas on that, although I do know that some proponents of pharmaceutical interrogation aids believe that anything that gives a sense of well-being and relaxation might be useful. That is presumably some of the reason ethanol has been tried in the past.

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Bulls Gap, Tenn.: In the 1950's and ism, the CIA, including GHW Bush contracted with entire Ivy League Psychology Departments to make people talk, which is pretty easy actually. The big problem is making certain people forget- like John Hinckley and the terrorists.

During the Korean War, the Army used electro and insulin shock treatments and lobotomies, among others, to make sure soldiers wouldn't remember atrocities and the like, but those techniques are much too extreme by today's standards.

What is the current state of "Forget serum" research?

David Brown: Don't know anything about this either. As to "forget serum"---there are certainly pharmaceuticals that provide amnesia for an event that occurs while the drug is active (such drugs are used in colonoscopies and other unpleasant procedures), but wiping out memories that are already consolidated in the brain is an entirely different question that I don't have any competence to discuss.

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Lorton, Va.: I was horrified to see recently in Indian TC, the police recording statement from an accused after injecting some kind of truth serum. What is the your (ethical) view of injecting someone (accused not convicted) without his permission. I think it is equivalent to torture.

David Brown: It is true that police authorities in India occasionally use truth serum. My understanding is that after a train load of Hindu activists who had visited a disputed temple were killed by a fire set on the train by Muslims that sodium pentothal was administered to five suspects and the information was used to arrest others. But, again, this is all entirely second-hand information to me. I have not done any original reporting on it.

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Reston, Va.: Do we really want the Federal government developing or using truth serum drugs? Won't this lead to even more loss of civil liberties in America? How about legislation to ban the development and use of any such drugs?

David Brown: I was surprised to learn (again, from that Stanford Law Review article) that there are apparently no laws against the use of truth serum, although there are many court holdings against testimony derived from its use. Presumably legal bans could be enacted.

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Washington, D.C.: I absolutely agree that an effective truth serum would be a humane alternative to our current interrogation approach. Although this is surely moral relativism. Still, I'm highly skeptical about the efficacy of a drug designed to alter cognitive functioning. The whole idea reminds me of the age-old search for an aphrodisiac. And the market for that product is surely much larger!

David Brown: It seems to me that the use of a "truth serum" is predicated on the idea that the principal reason that someone doesn't answer a question truthfully is that there are inhibitions that are holding the truth back. Under this model, a truth serum would release the truth by removing those inhibitions, and the truth would pop to the surface from its own natural buoyancy, like a log freed from an underwater snag. This strikes me as a very simplistic view of what goes on when one answers a question truthfully and candidly. It seems to me--again, not a psychologist or expert in any way--that there is a lot more volition involved in truth-telling than the "truth serum" model would suggest. Plus there is the whole question of things that someone once knew but that have been genuinely forgotten and are therefore presumably beyond reach even if there is the will to answer truthfully.

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Washington, D.C.: So the recent article acknowledged that there was no way of knowing whether money was being poured into research for this. Why the sudden interest?

David Brown: No sudden interest. An editor brought up the question a couple of months ago, during the debate about the limits of interrogation of the Guantanamo detainees (and others), about what had ever happened to "truth serum." I believe Bill Clinton also made passing reference to truth serum in an interview.

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Philadelphia, Pa.: These efforts at truth detection: is it truthfulness or anxiety that is being detected, with the premise that one becomes anxious when lying? If that is the case, isn't it true that a person who can lie without anxiety can escape detection?

David Brown: Detecting lies is a different task from eliciting truth. As I understand it, polygraph ("lie detector") testing is based on the detection of anxiety during the act of lying. But as many, many people have pointed out (and shown) it is possible for people to be telling the truth and be very anxious about it---especially if you're all wired up and you know that if you're anxious you may be declared a liar! And then there are people who can control various autonomic responses and lie without anxiety.

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Columbia, S.C.: To what extent are ethical behaviors grounded in physiology?

Is it logical to suggest that, if there is such a thing as a "truth" serum, then there is also a "false" serum in which a person can tell nothing but lies?

David Brown: Well,if you have a materialist/scientific point of view, all behavior (and cognition and emotion) is grounded in physiology. As to a "false serum"---something that makes you talk crazy? There's been a lot of candidates for that over the years too, including alcohol, the original truth serum. As you can see, I'm a bit skeptical about both.

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Boston, Mass.: So how does sodium pentathol work? And why doesn't it work? Your article shattered a myth I'd clung to since childhood.... and I'm feeling oddly liberated without it!

David Brown: I don't have the pharmacology of Pentothal at hand, but the barbiturates clearly have sedative effects globally, and I believe may have some slight euphoria-producing effect as well. In high doses, they depress respiration, and in very high doses they are fatal, which is why they are used as part of the "lethal injection" cocktails for execution.

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Arlington, Va.: The fMRI comment earlier was perhaps referring to the phenomenon whereby you can measure the "recognition" of an image. Applied to a person's face, this would "elicit" an answer to a question, "do you know Person X" even though the interrogatee would not speak. In disclosing personal networks, associations and so on this is important. There is some evidence the Chinese are involved in this (using EEG or electroencephalograms), presumably with an eye to unraveling networks of dissidents.

Thoughts? (pun intended)

David Brown: I certainly understand how fMRI and other techniques (some of which involved the motion of the eyes) could be used to help determine whether someone has prior knowledge of something or someone presented to him. But I guess I don't understand how it could help very much if the question was: "On what airplane is the bomb?"

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False confessions: I went to a lecture by a former homicide detective discussing the surprisingly high rate of false confessions during interrogations from people with no intention of confessing and without any sort of high pressure tactic. He showed videos of various police interrogations that seemed so reasonable, calmly asking factual questions and with breaks for food and rest, and the alleged perpetrators ended up falsely confessing based on the smallest clues. These people were educated, alert and not in the least suggestible (or so it seemed), originally denied everything vigorously, but somehow ended up constructing very believable stories of confession based on the smallest details they subconsciously noticed. In fact, the detective stressed how carefully they try to do interrogations in a manner to prevent false confessions, yet it still happened. It was honestly scary, and it is very hard to believe that drugs will elicit very useful information. If the fully alert brain is capable of playing such tricks, won't a drugged one be even more susceptible? After all, torture has been completely discredited as a means to gain reliable information.

David Brown: I totally agree that the phenomenon of people confessing to things that they didn't do is extremely strange, hard to understand, and frankly scary. It suggests that, as I suggested earlier, that truth-telling is not the sort of simple mechanism that "truth serums" presuppose. I suppose someone who believed in a truth serum might say that the elaborate confabulation that goes on when someone confesses to something they didn't do would not be possible under truth serum. But of course these are all just dueling theories. The only way to determine the "operating characteristics" of a truth serum would be do research on its use in very different circumstances and by a wide variety of recipients. Which brings us back to the beginning----do we want to do this to begin with, or is it at base an unethical undertaking? That's a question I didn't really address in the story, but is one that would have to be answered.

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David Brown: Anyway, thanks for listening and to paraphrase Bud Collyer, host "To Tell the Truth" TV show--"don't you forget to tell the truth."

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