In 1951, a strange thing occurred at a commune in the Gard département in southern France, that apparently involved the mass-poisoning of hundreds of residents, and even the death of seven individuals during the chaos that ensued. Pont-Saint-Esprit, famous for its ties to John Vernou Bouvier III (father of Jackie Kennedy), has long been thought to have succumbed to a regional spread of contaminants, either from bread tainted by seeds affected with mercury, or by the infamous fungus ergot, from which Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman synthesized LSD in 1943. Still, ergotism was, for the most part, vanquished from Europe centuries ago, thus many argue that the events that took place in 1951 weren’t likely to have been caused by such a contamination.

Therefore, other theories exist. An article appearing in the UK’s Daily Mail last week detailed the peculiar event, also making assertions brought forth in journalist Hank Albarelli’s 2009 book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, which makes the case for the events being the result of a classified CIA experiment involving LSD.

Looking at descriptions of some of the activity that occurred during the outbreak, this isn’t difficult to fathom:

Some ran screaming through the narrow, cobbled streets, crying out that terrible, flesh-eating demons were in hot pursuit. Others, wild-eyed and clearly deranged, jabbered that their brains had turned to molten lead and their internal organs were flowing, ablaze, from their ears.

Another man decided to take a dangerous leap of faith from a window, shouting ‘I’m an aeroplane’, before taking an unsuccessful landing into the street below. The Daily Mail article describes how the man got to his feet and staggered for 50 yards on broken legs before finally collapsing “in a pool of blood.” Another man, local stonemason Gabriel Validire, proclaimed to his wife that he was dead, and that “My head is copper! I’ve snakes in my stomach!” Strangely, animals suffered the unusual effects as well.

Albarelli claims the LSD theory is based on declassified CIA documents, as well as “coded White House papers ordering that the ‘Pont-Saint-Esprit incident’ be kept under wraps.” All evidence, he says, points to some kind of trickery involving a planned “experiment” at the modest French commune.

The horrors involving psychedelics used in this way–particularly those as potent as LSD–stand in stark contrast to the way they were perceived by the drug’s earliest advocates. In Magic, Mysticism and the Molecule, I discussed the many observations of Albert Hofmann, who is credited with the discovery of LSD. Hoffman called it “medicine for the soul,” and was saddened that it was later outlawed, in spite of its potential medical benefits, which remain widely unknown and under-appreciated today. “It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis,” Hoffman said, explaining that the drug “was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960s,” and though he was firm in his estimation that LSD can be dangerous in the wrong hands (as best evidenced, perhaps, by the events at Pont-Saint-Espirit in 1951, rather than that of the 1960s hippie culture), he felt that liberalization of its use by counter-culturists ultimately led to its prohibition.

Timothy Leary, who is credited with the very movement Hoffman opposed, viewed his work differently. During an appearance on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in April of 1967, he argued that, “All the statistics that I’ve seen indicate that people who use psychedelic drugs are people who are pretty well adjusted by any standard or orientation you want to name: income, education, creativity, productivity; and they want more because what psychedelic drugs produce is not the dull, glazed three martini haze.” Nonetheless, those whom Leary hoped would lead the revolution of exploration of inner consciousness succumbed to both societal pressures, as well as the negative effects of the drug itself when used for mere recreation; circumstances under which LSD’s potential destructive side still pale when compared with the notion that such a thing might have been used for purposeful harm in the interest of measuring its effects on a foreign populace.

There is little argument that LSD has tremendous destructive potential, and if Albarelli’s assertions are correct, perhaps no greater example of this exists than the terrible mass-poisoning at Pont-Saint-Esprit. But what is even more alarming about this is that for it to become so destructive in a singular event, it must have been a planned and coordinated effort, used as a weapon against an unsuspecting citizenry. The substance alone is hardly any more dangerous unto itself than a pencil, an automobile, or a glass of water; it’s when an individual or organization with evil intent would use that pencil to stab someone’s eye out, mow pedestrians down with said automobile, or drown someone by forcing water down their throat that they become perceived as evil. Thus, Hoffman’s “medicine for the soul,” as well as Leary’s sophisticated class of people prone to the leanings of society’s intelligentsia, became demonized, and the drug itself may even have even been used for evil and destruction instead of the therapeutic treatments Hoffman had envisioned. Indeed, here history deals us a sad hand of warped affairs.