A 60-year-old French medical mystery concerning hallucinogenic bread and mass hysteria has now been blamed on undercover operations by the CIA. According to American investigative journalist Hank Albarelli, the agency spiked French baguettes with LSD in secret experiments just after World War II. Citing anonym­ous US Army and CIA sources, Albarelli claims that members of the US Army’s Special Operat­ions Division contaminated “local food products” with diethylamine – the D in LSD – to gauge the effect of the newly synthesised drug on French civilians.

The CIA connection is the latest in a number of possible explanations for a series of tragic events that unfurled at Pont-Saint-Esprit, a small town on the banks of the River Rhône in southern France, in August 1951. After an outbreak of food poisoning, upset stomachs, vomiting and diarrhœa soon gave way to mass folly and collect­ive hallucinations. Victims imagined themselves to have copper heads, stomachs full of writhing snakes or bodies engulfed by flames. One girl thought she was being attacked by tigers. A patient undergoing treatment thought he could fly and threw himself from the second floor of a hospital, breaking both legs. In a fit of madness, a young boy tried to strangle his mother.

Within days, almost 300 people had reported poisoning symptoms, more than 30 had been hospitalised and at least five had died. Many of the victims were found to have shopped at the same bakery and suspicion soon fell on Roch Briand’s baguettes. The tragedy became known as the affair of the pain maudit (‘cursed bread’).

One of the first to come up with a possible explanation for the tragedy was local physician Dr Gabbaï, who had treated some of the victims. Writing in the British Medical Journal, he sugg­ested that the symptoms indicated an outbreak of ergotism, caused by the parasitic mould ergot affecting grain. The disease was thought to have died out in France during the 18th century, but could it have resurfaced again in the Rhône Valley in 1951? Not all were convinced by the ergot diagnosis. The judge responsible for the enquiry suggested a poss­ible criminal connection and referred to contamination by a very toxic form of synthetic ergot.

The Case of the Cursed Bread drew the attention of foreign experts as well. Dr Albert Hofmann, who first synthesised LSD-25 from ergot in 1938, travelled to Pont-Saint-Esprit and confirmed the hypothesis of ergot poisoning. But once back in Basle, the Sandoz Laboratories, where Hofmann worked and which had introduced LSD as a drug for various psychiatric uses four years earlier, rejected the connection. Experiments with ergot-infected bread in the US also suggested that the effects seen in Pont-Saint-Esprit were unlikely to be due to ergotism.

The possible causes of the affair were taken up again by American historian Steven Kaplan more than 50 years later. Kaplan, a professor at Cornell University and expert on the history of bread, examined all the poss­ible explanations for the cursed bread: ergotism, infected water or contamination by fungicides or other toxins. None, he concluded in his 1,000-page tome Le Pain Maudit, published in 2008, could adequately explain the events of Pont-Saint-Esprit in the summer of 1951.

Then, at the end of 2009, came Hank Alberelli’s CIA allegations published in A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olsen and the CIAs Secret Cold War Experiments. “The most shocking thing to me was the CIA experiment in France,” he told the American Geek Entertainment TV after the publication of the book. “I didn’t want to believe that my government could do that.” But he is adamant he has proof that the CIA is behind the horrifying events at Pont-Saint-Esprit, and that these were part of a wider secret experimental programme. Between the late 1940s and the 1970s, he claims, the CIA tested LSD and other drugs on foreign civilians in Germany and Russia, as well as in France, and on 5,000 US servicemen.

Alberelli asserts that there was a lot of excitement in the CIA at the time about the possible uses of LSD in warfare. It was hoped that the drug could eliminate violence; the idea was that enemies could be bombarded with LSD, which would engender mass hallucinat­ions and acts of madness. The US army would then be free to march into enemy territory with little opposition.

The latest ‘revelations’ have been received with a mixture of disbelief, amusement and shoulder-shrugging by the French media and the population of Pont-Saint-Esprit. Albarelli’s evidence appears flimsy at the very least. And some, including Kaplan, have dismissed the idea on clinical grounds. It’s highly unlikely, they say, that an LSD-like substance would have affected the villagers in the way the pain maudit did. And why, after all, should the CIA have targeted this quiet corner of southern France?