1951. France 'St. Anthony’s Fire' mystery solved - CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD

By Henry Samuel ---- A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment. In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted. For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France. On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire. One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.
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Time magazine wrote at the time: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.”

Eventually, it was determined that the best-known local baker had unwittingly contaminated his flour with ergot, a hallucinogenic mould that infects rye grain. Another theory was the bread had been poisoned with organic mercury.

However, H P Albarelli Jr., an investigative journalist, claims the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The scientists who produced both alternative explanations, he writes, worked for the Swiss-based Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the Army and CIA with LSD.

Mr Albarelli came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the SOD who fell from a 13th floor window two years after the Cursed Bread incident. One note transcribes a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz official who mentions the “secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit” and explains that it was not “at all” caused by mould but by diethylamide, the D in LSD.

While compiling his book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, Mr Albarelli spoke to former colleagues of Mr Olson, two of whom told him that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was part of a mind control experiment run by the CIA and US army.

After the Korean War the Americans launched a vast research programme into the mental manipulation of prisoners and enemy troops.
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Scientists at Fort Detrick told him that agents had sprayed LSD into the air and also contaminated “local foot products”.

Mr Albarelli said the real “smoking gun” was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. It contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the “Pont St. Esprit incident.” In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Mr Albarelli claims, the US army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965.

None of his sources would indicate whether the French secret services were aware of the alleged operation. According to US news reports, French intelligence chiefs have demanded the CIA explain itself following the book’s revelations. French intelligence officially denies this.

Locals in Pont-Saint-Esprit still want to know why they were hit by such apocalyptic scenes. “At the time people brought up the theory of an experiment aimed at controlling a popular revolt,” said Charles Granjoh, 71.

“I almost kicked the bucket,” he told the weekly French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. “I’d like to know why.”

St. Anthony’s Fire

St. Anthony's Fire is an excerpt from Peter Conners book-in-progress, Generation Hallucination: Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and the LSD Revolution.

Saint Anthony the Great is a multifaceted psychedelic muse. He was born in 251 in Lower Egypt to wealthy landowning parents. When his parents died in 285, Anthony sold everything that they owned and gave the money to the poor. What he didn’t sell, he gave away. Finally, he sent his sister to go live with a group of Christian virgins, and then took off to disciple himself to a local hermit.

That is where his story gets interesting.

Anthony dropped himself lower and lower in material wealth until he was living alone in a closed tomb in the desert. He depended on locals to bring him food which they pushed through to him with little or no interaction. While Anthony was not the first Christian monastic, he was certainly one of the most hardcore ascetics. He believed that the more isolated, the hungrier, the more deprived he was – the closer he came to God. However, the story goes that to get to God, Anthony had to first do battle with the Devil. As Anthony isolated himself in a handful of remote, desert locations around Egypt for years at a stretch, the devil afflicted him with boredom, laziness, and visions of tempting women.  According to Anthony’s first biographer, Athanasius of Alexandria, Anthony fought back these diabolical assaults with the power of prayer. The Devil was foiled, but not defeated; he sent tiny demons to beat Anthony unconscious, thus forcing his caretakers to remove the mystic to a nearby church to recuperate.
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Once Anthony was healed, he moved to his most remote location yet. This time, Anthony retreated to an abandoned Roman fort by the Nile. The fort was located in what are now called the Der el Memun mountains. Anthony would stay there for twenty years; no one was allowed to enter his cell and those who came to him simply stood outside and listened to his voice. It is recorded that Anthony would enter the cell with only a six-month supply of bread to sustain him. While in the fort, the Devil forewent the visions of tempting women and, instead, assaulted Anthony with phantoms in the form of snakes, scorpions, lions, wolves, and other beasts. These visions were terrifying and would undoubtedly have broken the spirit of any nonbeliever. However, rather than shrink back in fear, the seasoned warrior-monk scoffed at these visions, saying, "If any of you have any authority over me, only one would have been sufficient to fight me."

His derision dispelled the beasts.

Finally, God gave Anthony victory over the Devil.

As the patron saint of infectious diseases, St. Anthony is regularly called upon to aid the afflicted in their suffering. Perhaps this is ironic considering that St. Anthony sought out suffering in the belief that it would bring him closer to God. However, saints’ lives aren’t meant to be imitated. They are meant to inspire. As the prayer goes, “Father, you called Saint Anthony to renounce the world and serve you in the solitude of the desert. By his prayers and example, may we learn to deny ourselves and love you above all things.”
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The combination of Saint Anthony’s faith, suffering, trials, victories, and – perhaps above all, visions – have inspired wildly imaginative depictions of his life by such artists as Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí.  The potent, timeless combination of hallucination and suffering also caused his name to be attached to the strange affliction known as ergotism.

On August 15, 1951, more than two hundred inhabitants of the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit (Bridge of the Holy Spirit) in Southern France went berserk. The first sign that something was awry came when local doctor Jean Vieu was examining two patients who complained of similar lower abdominal pains. While some of their symptoms matched those of acute appendicitis, their low body temperatures and numb extremities complicated the diagnosis. But what really threw Dr. Vieu were the hallucinations. In addition to their discomfort, his patients babbled wildly about visions they were having ranging from the paranoid to the sublime.

One of the first patients to be affected was M. Delacquis. He worked at the distribution center, Coopèrative des Cèrèales de Pont-Saint-Esprit, where grain passed through to get to area bakers. Just like Albert Hofman’s famous bicycle trip, M. Delacquis suffered his first hallucinations while riding his bicycle home from work. John G. Fuller vividly describes the bike ride in The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire: “The ride up the hill to La Villette seemed a million miles to M. Delacquis. The road seemed to shrink and expand in front of his eyes. The villas along the side of the road took on brilliant and indescribable colors. When he looked down at his hands on the handlebars, they seemed to stretch miles in front of him. The road would widen out to infinity, and then return to a size no larger than a ribbon. The front wheel of his bicycle would begin to grow until it seemed to encompass the entire world, and suddenly it would return to normal. He had a strange feeling of being outside himself, as if he were looking down at the figure pumping so laboriously up the hill. The journey seemed to be taking him centuries, yet at the same time he seemed to be moving at an incredible speed, whisking on wings of a magic carpet past the vineyards, but blazing rows of glorious colors.”  
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Baffled, Dr. Vieu consulted two other local physicians who were treating similar cases.

The caseload grew while they put their heads together in search of a diagnosis.

Within hours, Pont-Saint-Esprit was overrun with temporarily insane townspeople. The local hospital was soon filled with madmen and madwomen who were tied to their beds and raving like lunatics. Once those beds were filled, 70 private homes were converted into makeshift emergency wards. Every available straight-jacket was filled, but still not all of the afflicted could be contained. Horrific stories were arriving from every corner of town.  An eleven-year-old boy had tried to strangle his mother.  Average citizens were charging through the streets, screaming that they were being chased by demons or phantom enemies. Hospital patients howled that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies. Their heads had turned to molten lead. In the hospital, four patients attempted suicide; anything to escape from the inexplicable madness. But not everyone was affected so severely. Equally disconcerting were the townspeople who claimed to feel unaffected, yet who couldn’t sleep and radiated an intense energy while they spoke. They proclaimed, loudly, to anyone within earshot, that they felt wonderful, never better. Their pupils were huge and their hands were ice cold, but they had more energy than they’d had in years. Some had even taken to writing their ideas down in journals.  In addition, the streets were now filled through the night with townspeople who couldn’t sleep, were restless, wandering, wondering what was happening to them and their beloved town, but were also inexplicably filled with vigor. Fuller describes one restless patient who felt compelled to take a walk in the middle of the night. When he reached the town’s main thoroughfare, Boulevard Gambetta, he was amazed to find it filled with people. “They were talking about the sickness spreading over the village, but their talk was predominantly in a most light and frivolous manner. Many were laughing and joking about it; no one felt any desire to go back to bed. One told of a friend of his who had been stricken by the malady and had thrown up four litres of clear gastric fluid; this was found to be most amusing. The ripples of laughter from the groups were forced, high pitched, and eerie. The whole scene, in the darkness of the early morning hours, was most unnatural. The people were standing in ghostly silhouette under the plane trees, standing as if this were full daylight at the marketplace. Others were walking at random, very quickly, along the streets and allés, without destination, speaking to no one.”  

Working with law enforcement officials, local physicians attempted to pinpoint the root of this epidemic. They had already figured out that the overlying cause was food poisoning. So the question became – what foods did all of the patients have in common? It turned out that the answer was the most simple and common food in each person’s home. The same food that Saint Anthony ate to sustain himself during months of isolation.

Bread.

Each of the afflicted townspeople had eaten wheat bread from the same bakery. On September 10, 1951, three weeks after the incident, Time magazine reported on the outbreak. “What was the mysterious madness? Pont-Saint-Esprit speculated that the village idiot had hexed Baker Briand's flour, that the flour had been packed in fertilizer sacks, that rats in the grain elevator had contaminated the flour. The police knew better. They had traced the flour back from Briand's bakeshop through the government-controlled flour depot to a mill near Poitiers, nearly 300 miles away.   

“Last week the word came back from the police laboratory: ‘We have identified a vegetable alkaloid having the toxic and biological characteristics of ergot, a cereal parasite.’ Pont-Saint-Esprit had been stricken by ergot poisoning, a medieval disease as old as its proud bridge, so old that it had almost been forgotten. Modern medicine knows about ergot, but has rarely seen it in the form of an epidemic disease. It is a black fungus that grows on wet grain, contains chemicals that powerfully affect the blood vessels and the nervous system.”

It turned out that the strange case of Pont-Saint-Esprit was attributable to an archaic epidemic known as St. Anthony’s Fire. The last recorded outbreak – also in France - had been in 1816. Having synthesized ergot molecules to create LSD-25 roughly eight years earlier, this new epidemic undoubtedly caught Dr. Hofman’s attention. However, Hofman had been drawn to ergot because its extracts had been used for their healing and pain relieving properties. Midwives had also used an ergot concoction to induce labor in pregnant women. It was for these healing properties that Hofman had begun, as it were, playing with fire.

© Copyright 2009 by Peter Conners