The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 277 No 7432 p781-782
23/30 December 2006

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Drugs used in the search for truth

In this article, Peter Cooper, FRPharmS, reports on drugs that have been used in trials and interrogations

Christmas miscellany 2006 index

One of the meanings of “ordeal” is an ancient test of guilt or innocence by subjecting the accused to severe pain or some terrifying experience. The ordeal’s effectiveness depends on the degree of stress that a suspect can withstand before giving in to the pressure. There was a belief that innocence confers strength and courage and this presented a problem for seekers after “the truth”. Much ingenuity has gone, over the ages, towards devising methods of interrogation, in order to overcome this problem, with an inevitable bias towards the inquisitor’s point of view.

In the old days, individuals suspected by their neighbours of practising witchcraft might be subjected to ordeals involving walking over burning coals, enduring the application of heated irons to various parts of the body, or swimming to safety after having been thrown into deep water. In Saxon times being forced to swallow an item of food or drink while declaring innocence on oath was an ordeal. If this resulted in choking it was an indication of guilt. Even as late as the 17th century, in Britain the mother of two young girls accused of murder by enchantment, and herself accused of aiding and abetting them, tried to establish her innocence by swearing when eating some bread and butter that it would choke her if she were guilty. It did; after the first mouthful she choked and died. The only logical conclusion was that the consciousness of lying to the inquisitors induced the choking. It was a possibility that the mere knowledge that one was being dishonest was a factor in triggering a self-destructive reaction.

Natural poisons

In primitive societies, particularly in parts of Africa, the use of plant poisons was widespread as aids to interrogation, since a wide range of products lay close to hand. For example, among the Sotho the plant Aster muricatus was often mixed with the food of suspects in order to prompt confession. The logic of such a choice is not clear but recourse to solanaceous plants (eg, nightshades) is traceable. These were used long ago by the oracular priestesses of Delphi and were given the name of “truth drugs”. This attribution earned solanaceous alkaloids the reputation of being efficacious in situations where the truth was sought and hyoscine was adopted early in the 20th century, on the recommendation of the American doctor R. E. House (1920s), to produce a lethargy in a patient who was unco-operative. The Nazi “angel of death” Josef Mengele experimented with hyoscine as an interrogation drug in Auschwitz and, in the US and Europe, hyoscine achieved some notoriety as an adjunct to forensic examinations. However, in the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency investigated the use of hyoscine as a truth drug and found that its hallucinogenic side effects meant the truth was prone to distortion.

The most dangerous of the ordeal poisons used by primitives in Africa was the Calabar bean (Physostigma venenosum). An infusion was drunk or the bean was chewed. In Nigeria it became so popular that efforts were made to destroy the creeper, which grew along the riverbanks, to stamp out the ritual. It was said by Sir James Frazer (‘The golden bough’, 1890), that one small tribe that had settled along the Calabar River used the bean so much that its people became threatened with extinction. In 1840, the plant was brought to England. In 1855, Sir Thomas Christison, on hearing that its consumption brought about a high mortality, one evening took six grains of the bean, out of curiousity. This had no effect so he doubled the dose. He then experienced giddiness, which increased, so he decided to drink a mug of soapy water. This acted as an emetic, and he suffered no further effects. Christison concluded that Calabar beans offered a humane method of executing criminals but, so far as is known, this idea was never followed up.

A tribe in what used to be Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) used another leguminous plant, Julbernardia. When chewed, its leaf induces retching. Infusions were reputed to make the taker roll about in apparent pain, foam at the mouth and lose the power of speech.

The ordeal tree

The ritual drinking of an infusion or decoction of the bark of another equatorial tree of the leguminosae family, Erythrophleum, led to its being called the ordeal tree. This tree has legitimate medical uses and is also used in dyes. The seeds and bark are highly toxic, slowing heart rate and causing respiratory failure. Bark constituents include saponins and cardiotoxins. The plant also goes by the names red-water tree, goho, lucasse and muavi. In ‘Travels through central Africa to Timbuctoo’ (1830), the explorer Rene Caillie discussed the muavi ordeal as practised among the tribes of French Guinea. Individuals suspected of witchcraft might confess and pay a fine. Those who protested their innocence underwent the test. Both the accused and the accuser, in a state of nudity, had to drink an infusion of muavi until they could tolerate no more. “If the poison is expelled by vomiting the accused is innocent, and then he has the right to reparation; if it passes downward he is deemed not absolutely innocent; and if it should not pass at all at the time he is judged to be guilty.” The dose was often calculated to be lethal. If the accused family made a payment the victim was allowed to limit the doses and was immersed in warm water and trampled on by the interrogator until the poison was vomited.

David Livingstone in his “Missionary travels and researches in South Africa” (1857), published further information on muavi, claiming that a second dose was often tried if the first brought a negative result. In 1827, the explorer Richard Lander, when at Badagri, was forced to clear himself of suspicion by taking a muavi draught. Having been forewarned he had an emetic at hand, which he took immediately, thus vomiting and saving his life. In Angola, African women were not afraid of the ordeal (they welcomed the opportunity to prove themselves), which was carried out secretly and often killed them. A chief who suspected one of his wives of witchcraft would make all of them, fasting, swallow a muavi draught, innocence being signalled by vomiting.

Ordeal by proxy

Among the Barotse, Livingstone informs us, ordeal may be by proxy, a domestic animal being given the dose and observed for vomiting or purging. A poison oracle called benge was used by the Azande of the lower Sudan. The source of the poison was a species of Strychnos for which the Azande had to make a week’s journey to the Congo because it was not available in Sudan. In doing this they ran the risk of punitive measures imposed by European authorities for crossing the frontier. This ordeal is still performed today. The bark or root of the plant is powdered, made into a paste with cold water and filtered between leaves of the same plant. Graded doses of the filtrate are tested on fowls to determine potency. Testing plant extracts on animals is a fairly recent development. Among the Azande the ordeal ritual has been performed using birds as the subjects instead of humans, although in severe circumstances an accused person might volunteer to drink the preparation if animal tests proved negative. Where cases of suspected adultery were concerned, both the man and the woman involved were required to take the test. To avoid testing someone of superior rank in the community, a boy might be substituted in his or her place.

Mboundou

Another ordeal poison derived from a Strychnos species was mboundou, which enjoyed notoriety in the Congo in the mid-19th century. According to Paul Du Chaillu, the root was scraped into a bowl, covered with water, and allowed to ferment, the liquid becoming red. The drinker was not allowed to be present during the preparation. If, five minutes after drinking the potion, the accused staggered, his limbs twitching and his speech thick (involuntary micturition was usual), this was accepted as an indication of innocence. As a rule, the mboundou ordeal involved drugging the witch doctor rather than the accused person, the bystanders being permitted to interrogate him to discover the truth. This made it a rather selective process in which the outcome could be influenced by what the witch doctor chose to say. Even though the accused did not have to take the poison and it was probably less dangerous than the muavi test, mboundou seems to have been greatly feared.

An ordeal poison used in Rhodesia was made from a species of Elaeodendron, which contains cardiotoxic glycosides. As with other methods, innocence was assumed if the taker suffered purging and vomiting, loss of consciousness being an indication of guilt.

The djave nut, taken from the forest tree Mimusops djave has seeds containing a toxic saponin and the rubiaceous tree Crossopteryx has bark containing a glycoside and an alkaloid. In West Africa, draughts of an infusion of these plants are relied on to test suspects by inducing either unconsciousness because of guilt, or vomiting and purging because of innocence. Madagascar provided an extract from the apocynaceous Tanghinia containing tanghinin and a desacetyl derivative, both of which produce pharmacological effects resembling those of strophanthin, a powerful cardiotoxic agent.

It appears that the continent of Africa, and particularly those regions of it that have been settled by true African tribes, holds the main locations of the poison ordeal. Nowhere else in the world has there been a similar recourse to it on the same scale for the purpose of judicial enquiries. It is suspected that the conception that we take for granted, that any drug can be a poison in its own right, does not enter the primitive African mind. There are few traces among the world settlers who came from Africa by way of the slave trade of ordeal practices involving drugs. For example, Haiti, where homicidal poisoning has been far from rare, only provides one example of a relic of the ordeal poison belief in its balai plant, a tiliaceous species (Corchorus). The plant is sprinkled with water and ashes hung round the neck of a suspect. If it locks its branches into a tight tangle that is taken as a sign of guilt of the suspected crime. Curiously enough, a suspect undergoing the test of balai is often prompted to confess from fear of strangling.

Finding truth in the West

In the West it was long ago recognised that the consumption of alcohol, particularly in its more concentrated forms, offered a way of loosening the tongue and enabling an interrogator to gain information that might otherwise be kept secret — “A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow man,” wrote the French poet Charles Baudelaire.

Under totalitarian regimes in Europe searching for evidence made use of far more sophisticated drugs. So called “truth drugs” were injected, the newly synthesised thiobarbiturates, narcotics and amphetamine derivatives being popular among interrogators who had no concern for the laws of evidence. Often used in combination with torture, these measures would overcome the most determined victim. Moreover, highly sophisticated polygraphic measurements involving pulse and respiration rates, muscle tensions and body rhythms added their quota towards determining the truth.

We are prompt enough to pour scorn on primitive methods of interrogating people suspected of trying to dodge responsibility for their antisocial actions, but some of our contemporary aids to determining the truth fall far short of being infallible. We may rely on measuring physiological reactions, but there are numerous examples of occasions where effects on pulse, respiration or temperature have been misleading or negative, despite sophisticated equipment. And bluff has its role in the process. Sooner or later the evaluation must depend on a personal judgement as to whether a person is innocent or guilty.