FT266


Andy Roberts’s feature on LSD in the water supply (‘Reservoir Drugs’) described the CIA’s obsession with this type of threat in the 1950s and the scare stories about hippies dumping drugs in reservoirs and similar media reports. I’d like to go back a bit and fill in the gap on the CIA’s own interests. The huge quantities of LSD needed might have meant that spiking water supplies was absurdly impractical… but a little thing like that didn’t stop the world’s favourite spy agency.

In the early 1950s, the CIA approached the Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland, the company that had patented LSD, and requested 10 kilos of the stuff.