Weapons of Mass Delusion

Via Defense Tech:

The story starts over a year ago with a Marine blogger in Iraq. On June 2nd 2004 "The Green Side" - we’ll get back to the signficance of this source later - describes suicidal attacks by insurgents in Fallujah: “We could not understand why they kept coming but they did.” The reason, it turned out, was drugs: “…these ‘holy warriors’ are taking drugs to get high before attacks. It true, as we pushed into the town in April many Marines came across drug paraphernalia (mostly heroin). Recently, we have gotten evidence of them using another drug BZ that makes them high and very aggressive.”

BZ is not your typical substance of abuse. It’s a hallucinogenic chemical weapon. This weird concept originated in the 1950’s when “better living through chemistry” was a slogan to live by and warfare without blood was the goal. As the Washington Star noted in 1965:

New chemical weapons that win by creating confusion rather than death and destruction have proved so successful that they have been quietly added to the Army's arsenal. The latest and best, a gas called BZ by the Army, put a number of soldier guinea pigs out of action during field tests at a Utah Army base last November, and did it without harming a man.”

BZ or "Agent Buzz" is the military name for 3-quinuclidinyl benzillate, an extremely powerful hallucinogen. After experimenting with a whole stash of mind-altering substances including cocaine, heroin and LSD, the Pentagon selected BZ for weaponizing. Its major advantages are that it can easily delivered in an aerosol cloud, and it is very safe. With many substances, the effective dose can be dangerously close to the amount needed to kill - ask any anesthetist. With BZ, the tiny effective dose (maybe two milligrams) is around one-thousandth the lethal dose. It is also odorless and invisible, and there is currently no means of detecting it...

3-quinilidinl benzilate is a tropane, similar to the belladona alkaloids, very powerful anticholinergics (hence the dry mouth). Yes, you hallucinate, but a better term for this compound would be a deliriant: you have conversations with people who aren't there, feel you experience things you don't do. Auditory and sensory hallucinations are common. Very different from, say, LSD, where you know it is all drug induced- (reality was never like this)- with BZ you don't know reality from illusion.

With LSD or mescaline you have no inclination to do violence and often a hightened sense of spiritual awareness. With belladonna alkaloids there is no sense of this, only violent paranoia and fear. But fear elicits very unpredicitable responses in people. Some are quite willing to react to fear by trying to kill the source.

BZ is an incredibly stupid chemical weapon to use on a populace with a tendency for suicidal violence.

Did we use BZ on Iraqis in Fallujah, only to have it explode in our face?

Is this why we had to firebomb that city? Why we had to burn it out with white phosphorous? Because it was too violently insane to be left standing?