-Caveat Lector- >It was at this time that the CIA turned to LSD-25, a derivative of lysergic >acid. LSD was a hallucinogen which they knew almost nothing about. They >looked at the first published study of LSD which was presented to the Swiss >Archives of Neurology in 1947. The CIA also knew that in 1951 hundreds of >respectable citizens in a small French village went completely berserk one >evening and jumped out of their windows into the Rhone River. Others ran >through the streets claiming that they were being chased by lions and tigers. A couple of years ago I happened across a very old paperback (yellowed and falling apart) in a used-book bookstore that was about this outbreak in this French village in 1951, and the above description is not quite accurate. While many people DID succumb in varying degrees to the ergot that was in the tainted flour, only a dozen or so cases could be described as 'extreme' cases resulting in the unsuspecting victims going 'beserk' and thinking they were being chased by ravenous beasts or monsters (in fact I believe that one victim actually believed that he had TURNED INTO a tiger, not that a tiger was chasing him); and only one person jumped out of a window and died, another jumped into a river and drowned. A couple of other victims actually died from ergot poisoning. So all in all, while perhaps about 100 people were unwitting ingestors of ergot, only a handful had 'extreme' symptoms, and about 5 people died, 2 of them by jumping from heights (it is not known if they deliberately committed suicide, or jumped to escape some sort of hallucination)... It definitely was NOT 'hundreds' of citizens, respectable or otherwise, who fell victim to the ergot poisoning, which was caused when the local baker had to accept delivery of flour from a supplier he didn't usually patronize, as his usual supplier for some reason was unavailable that day. That region of France had experienced unusually wet weather since the wheat harvest the previous fall, and this incident happened in late spring or early summer, before the new crop was ready to be harvested...which meant that the silos holding the previous season's wheat were pretty low, and what was left was old wheat that had become infected with ergot due to the unusually wet weather since the previous autumn... This was a very rural area in southern France, so there wasn't a large population to infect, and not everyone in the area patronized this particular baker; therefore some residents never got infected, either having gotten their daily bread (and in France, people DO buy fresh bread every day) elsewhere, or deciding to do without on that day. The people who DID buy the bread from the baker with the infected flour ended up getting their bread much later than usual, because of the delivery problem the baker had experienced. So only a few residents had that baker's bread for the noon meal, and those are the people who first exhibited symptoms by mid-afternoon. The rest of the victims first ate the bread at the evening meal; whether most didn't eat much of the bread (it was described as looking grey and 'tasting funny', probably due to the mold infecting the flour) or whether some people for some reason had more of an ability to tolerate the ergot, most people who ate the bread experienced no symptoms, or complained of a slight headache and feeling a little queasy. Most people went to bed, slept throughout the night, and awoke in the morning no worse for wear...only to start hearing stories out on the street about how strange certain people in town had been acting since late the day before... Probably some loaves of the infected bread had more ergot in it than others -- just a crapshoot of where the infected grains of wheat ended up in the bread batter -- which also explains why some people could eat the bread and exhibit little or no symptoms... The townspeople almost lynched the baker in question, but when it was found out that he was unsuspecting in the matter, their wrath turned to the operators of the grain silo where the wheat had come from...and I believe they and the French government ended up successfully suing the owners. It IS correct that the CIA, and other spook organizations in other countries took much interest in the events that occured in this village, as little was known about what effects LSD (which is derived from the ergot compounds) had on the human psyche.... 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