Project Chatter was a United States Navy program beginning in the fall of 1947 focusing on the identification and testing of drugs in interrogations and the recruitment of agents. Their search included laboratory experiments on both animal and human subjects. The program operated under the direction of Charles Savage of the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, from 1947 to 1953.FOIA Documents from the Department of the Navy
/ref> The project was geared to identifying agents both synthetic and natural that were effective during

interrogation Interrogation (also called questioning) is interviewing as commonly employed by law enforcement officers, military personnel, intelligence agencies, organized crime syndicates, and terrorist organizations with the goal of eliciting useful informa ...

, as well as testing possible treatments for depression. The project was centered on, but not restricted to, the use of anabasine (an alkaloid),

scopolamine Scopolamine, also known as hyoscine, or Devil's Breath, is a natural or synthetically produced tropane alkaloid and anticholinergic drug that is formally used as a medication for treating motion sickness and postoperative nausea and vomiting ...

and

mescaline Mescaline or mescalin (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine) is a naturally occurring psychedelic protoalkaloid of the substituted phenethylamine class, known for its hallucinogenic effects comparable to those of LSD and psilocybin. Biological sou ...

. It was the first U.S. government project in which Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) was used on human subjects. The Navy ended the project in 1953 when its experiments were merged into Project MKULTRA.

References

Central Intelligence Agency operations Psychedelic drug research Mind control 1947 establishments in the United States 1953 disestablishments in the United States Code names Human subject research in the United States {{US-navy-stub

See also

References