Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning: Did the CIA spread LSD?

[dipsydoodle]

Nearly 60 years ago, a French town was hit by a sudden outbreak of hallucinations and hysteria, which left five people dead and many seriously ill. For years it was blamed on bread contaminated with a psychedelic fungus - but that theory is now being challenged.

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Doctors at the time concluded that bread at one of the town's bakeries had become contaminated by ergot, a poisonous fungus that occurs naturally on rye.

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That view remained largely unchallenged until 2009, when an American investigative journalist, Hank Albarelli, revealed a CIA document labelled: "Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin - tell him to see to it that these are buried."

F. Olson is Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who, at the time of the Pont St Esprit incident, led research for the agency into the drug LSD.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-10996838

For details of Frank Olson see here :

Frank Olson (July 17, 1910 – November 28, 1953) was a U.S. Army biological warfare specialist employed at Fort Detrick in Maryland, who was at first said to have taken his own life due to depression. Later it came out, in the 1970s, that he had been unwittingly given LSD at a joint meeting between CIA spies and US Army biowarfare experts, who cooperated on biological weapons and toxins and drugs under the umbrella of MKNAOMI and MKULTRA. This was said to have driven him to leap out of a hotel window ten days later. Further evidence pointed to the CIA having assassinated Frank Olson over fears that he would reveal the entire U.S. biological warfare program, as well as the chemical interrogation program, to the press. <1>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson