Debunked: Did the CIA poison a French town? The 1951 Pont-Saint-Esprit mass poisoning.
- John Zek
- May 19, 2025
- 3 min read
For more than a week in late August 1951 an entire French town went mad.
Postman Leon Armunier was one of the first to suffer bizarre symptoms, he was doing his rounds on August 16 when he began to become overwhelmed with hallucinations and nausea. He recounted in 2010:
"It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms” he was taken to a mental facility and placed in a strait jacket along with three other teenagers who shared his room, they were chained to their beds. "Some of my friends tried to get out of the window. They were thrashing wildly... screaming, and the sound of the metal beds and the jumping up and down... the noise was terrible.”
He was just one of many: an 11-year-old boy tried to strangle his mother, a farmer wrote pages of poetry while having urges to jump out of a window, a butchers wife wept as she had visions of her children strung up like sausages, some were struck by insomnia, others heard heavenly choruses or saw brilliant colours spread across the sky. Victims complained of nausea, vomiting, chills, hot flashes.
Other accounts are more fantastical, the result of the wildfire of rumour: newspapers reported ducks that stood vertically and marched like penguins until they fell down dead or a dog that bit at stones until its teeth splintered. The 24th of August saw the worst effects in the town, which the treating physician Gabbai described it as the "night of apocalypse" as dozens of people suffered terrifying delirium, the wailing of ambulances and screams of residents still haunts him.
By the end of it ten people had died many of whom were young children or elderly, hundreds had fallen ill and around sixty remained in psychiatric hospitals. Armunier’s daughter described what happened to him after the events:
“After being hospitalized for 10 days in a nearby city, during which he was in a coma, he spent another four months in a hospice, and even afterward wasn’t able to go on working and felt ill in closed spaces.”
An investigation led to the arrest of a town baker. It was presumed that he had mixed rye flour that was contaminated with the ergot fungus which causes ergotism, a disease described in Medieval times as "Saint Anthony's fire" which produces hallucinations, convulsions, high fever and other effects. Ergot is in the same family as the artificial hallucinogen LSD which had been synthesised only a decade before in 1943; in fact Albert Hoffmann the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD was invited to investigate the epidemic.
For decades after the incident has been subject to speculation. It is not often that a medieval disease springs up out of nowhere. In 2010 journalist Hank Albarelli sparked headlines when he claimed the epidemic was linked to the MK-NAOMI program and Frank Olson’s death. He Frank Olson was murdered as he had divulged secrets after being dosed with LSD of a top-secret ‘Project SPAN’, which an unnamed source claimed was
“the aerosol spraying of a potent LSD mixture as well as ‘the contamination of local food product’”.
His sources and interpretation are dubious at best, he points to one undated draft Whitehouse memorandum which wrote: “11.Pont Saint Esprit incident (Olsonjn)”, Albarelli claims this is evidence of a cover up, the name SPAN writes Alberelli “presumably because the French word pont means bridge” . He claims another anonymous CIA source had spoken with a drunken Sandoz employee in 1953 (Sandoz the company that produced LSD-25 at the time) who blurted out “The Pont Saint Esprit ‘secret’ is not bread at all” admitting that it was some sort of LSD experiment.
How true are these claims?
For one, the CIA did test aerosolized LSD in 1959 on unsuspecting party goers at their safehouse in San Fransisco (late 50's California parties must have been wild) but even inside an enclosed space it did not work effectively.
Stephen Kaplan who has written extensively on the incident and the history of bread in France easily rebuts the claims:
“clinically incoherent: LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments, or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople.”
Kaplan puts forward another theory that a certain chemical used to bleach flour at the time might have caused the mass poisoning pointing to similar smaller occurrences that happened in France after WWII.
Sometimes conspiracy theories are just more fun.
[1] Yes, you read that right. Multiple books on the history of bread!
[ii]https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/09/08/90037999.html?pageNumber=184 It Blew Their Minds, JONATHAN N. LEONARD September 8, 1968
[iii] https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/1951-trip-sous-acide-a-pont-saint-esprit-09-07-2012-1482979_3.php#11
[v] A terrible mistake Page 690
[vi] Ibid 687
[vii] Ibid 152
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