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Adrenochrome: The Chemical, The Scientists, and The Blood-Harvesting Legend · The Occult Rejects

0:02
Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What? What's going to happen?
0:12
Speaker 1: Something wonderful. What? I understand how you feel. You see,
0:16
Speaker 1: it's all very clear to me now. Welcome to the
0:20
Speaker 1: Occult Rejects. There is a scene in the 1998 film
0:22
Speaker 1: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas... that has outlived almost
0:32
Speaker 1: everything surrounding it. The character produces a vial of adrenochrome
0:36
Speaker 1: and describes a drug so powerful that familiar psychedelics supposedly
0:40
Speaker 1: look tame by comparison. Then comes the part everybody remembers,
0:45
Speaker 1: the claim that the substance has to be taken from
0:47
Speaker 1: a living human being. It's a grotesque moment in a
0:50
Speaker 1: film built around exaggeration, drugs, and unreliable narrations. Yet the
0:55
Speaker 1: fictional exchange has spent years circulating as though somebody in
0:59
Speaker 1: Hollywood had accidentally confessed to a real procedure. The vial
1:03
Speaker 1: becomes a black market product. The living gland becomes a
1:07
Speaker 1: terrified child. Before long, we're hearing about celebrities, secret societies,
1:12
Speaker 1: human trafficking, satanic ceremonies, and a chemical that allegedly keeps
1:16
Speaker 1: powerful people young. And at the center of this increasingly
1:20
Speaker 1: monstrous story is something that does exist. Adrenochrome. That is
1:25
Speaker 1: where this investigation gets interesting, because the real history is stranger, older,
1:29
Speaker 1: and far better documented than most of the people spreading
1:32
Speaker 1: the legend seem to realize. The paper trail takes us
1:35
Speaker 1: back through 20th century chemistry, psychiatric experiments involving actual human subjects,
1:41
Speaker 1: a research committee sponsored by the Scottish Rite, foundation money
1:45
Speaker 1: in Saskatchewan, correspondence involving Aldous Huxley, and a 1955 intelligence
1:49
Speaker 1: file whose surviving index passage has generated a great deal
1:54
Speaker 1: of speculation. We're not going to wave all that away
1:57
Speaker 1: because it sounds inconvenient. We're also not going to connect
2:00
Speaker 1: every name with a line on a corkboard and then
2:03
Speaker 1: call the result proof of a crime. We want to
2:06
Speaker 1: know exactly what was researched, who supported it, what the
2:09
Speaker 1: researchers believed they were seeing, and when a disturbing story
2:12
Speaker 1: from fiction became an accusation about real people. Most importantly,
2:17
Speaker 1: when someone claims a hidden operation existed, We want to
2:20
Speaker 1: know what records should exist, if they're right, and whether
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Speaker 1: anyone can actually produce it. There are three histories tangled
2:28
Speaker 1: together here. One belongs to a chemical compound and the
2:31
Speaker 1: scientists who learn how to make and study it. Another
2:34
Speaker 1: belongs to psychiatry, where a group of researchers propose that
2:38
Speaker 1: a product of adrenaline might have something to do with schizophrenia.
2:41
Speaker 1: The third belongs to literature, film, and a much older
2:44
Speaker 1: folklore of blood, terror, and stolen youth. These histories occasionally
2:49
Speaker 1: cross paths, and those crossings are worth examining. But placing
2:53
Speaker 1: two documents next to each other does not magically create
2:56
Speaker 1: the missing connection between them. Keep that distinction in mind,
3:00
Speaker 1: because we're about to find some genuine connections that are
3:03
Speaker 1: unusual enough without inventing another one. Adrenochrome is not a
3:08
Speaker 1: newly discovered substance hidden from ordinary laboratories, but a chemical
3:12
Speaker 1: produced when adrenaline, also called epinephrine, undergoes oxidation. Its molecular
3:18
Speaker 1: formula is C9H9NO3, which establishes the chemical identity without telling
3:24
Speaker 1: us what physiological or psychological effects a preparation might produce
3:29
Speaker 1: in a human subject. Adrenaline itself is famous because it's
3:33
Speaker 1: involved in the body's response to stress and danger. Your
3:36
Speaker 1: sympathetic nervous system can help prepare you to react. Heart
3:39
Speaker 1: rate changes, blood flow shifts, fuel becomes available. People hear
3:44
Speaker 1: that and immediately picture terror. But adrenaline has normal physiological roles,
3:49
Speaker 1: and the word adrenaline covers much more than a horror
3:51
Speaker 1: movie fear response. Scientists have been studying adrenal secretions and
3:56
Speaker 1: their unusual color reactions long before anybody on the internet
4:00
Speaker 1: talked about adrenochrome. Alfred Volpian described adrenal color reactions in
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Speaker 1: the 19th century, and researchers isolated and characterized adrenaline around
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Speaker 1: the turn of the 20th century. But observing a color
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Speaker 1: reaction is not the same thing as identifying and isolating
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Speaker 1: the compound we now call adrenochrome. An important landmark appears
4:20
Speaker 1: in 1937, when David Ezra Green and Derek Richter published
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Speaker 1: Adrenaline and Adrenochrome in the Biochemical Journal. Their paper reports
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Speaker 1: the isolation of crystalline adrenochrome and investigation of its properties.
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Speaker 1: It also acknowledges earlier work. Green and Richter noted a
4:38
Speaker 1: 1935 report by Weinstein and Manning of a crystalline red
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Speaker 1: product obtained by oxidizing adrenaline, which might have been the
4:47
Speaker 1: same substance. So the story is not that a lone
4:50
Speaker 1: genius suddenly invented adrenochrome in 1937. It is a developing
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Speaker 1: chemical literature with dates, competing preparations, and papers we can
4:59
Speaker 1: actually identify. That already creates a problem for the harvesting legend.
5:04
Speaker 1: If a molecule can be produced by oxidizing adrenaline in
5:07
Speaker 1: a laboratory, A story insisting that the same molecule can
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Speaker 1: only come from a terrified person has some explaining to do.
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Speaker 1: Different preparations may contain different impurities, and those differences can
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Speaker 1: matter experimentally. But the chemical identity of adrenochrome does not
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Speaker 1: change according to how sinister its alleged origin sounds. The
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Speaker 1: existence of the compound is real. The necessity of extracting
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Speaker 1: it from a victim is a completely separate claim. There
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Speaker 1: is an anatomical distinction worth making because the fictional version
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Speaker 1: blurs it. The adrenal medulla, the inner region of the
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Speaker 1: adrenal glands, produces and releases adrenaline into the bloodstream. The
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Speaker 1: molecule travels as a chemical messenger. The gland is not
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Speaker 1: a sealed storage bottle full of adrenochrome. Adrenochrome is formed
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Speaker 1: when adrenaline undergoes an oxidation reaction. Making it in a
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Speaker 1: flask does not require a human gland, and the same
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Speaker 1: molecular identity cannot reveal whether the starting adrenaline came from
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Speaker 1: a frightened person an ordinary biological source, or a laboratory supply.
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Speaker 1: If somebody wants to claim that the terrifying manner of
6:14
Speaker 1: extraction creates a unique, potent product, they need to demonstrate
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Speaker 1: an actual chemical difference and reproducible biological effect. The patents
6:24
Speaker 1: and the psychiatric research do not establish that claim. This
6:28
Speaker 1: is why the chemistry matters before we ever reach Thompson's vial.
6:32
Speaker 1: The premise of the harvesting story is a claim about
6:35
Speaker 1: sourcing that the basic chemical literature is does not support.
6:39
Speaker 1: The laboratory side is not merely theoretical, as two identifiable
6:43
Speaker 1: American patents make clear. U.S. Patent 2581850, Adrenochrome Compositions, was
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Speaker 1: filed on August 10, 1948, and granted January 8, 1952.
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Speaker 1: Its description explains ways of oxidizing adrenaline and discusses the
7:02
Speaker 1: greatest ability of certain derivatives. U.S. patent 4501923, Process for
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Speaker 1: Preparing Adrenochrome, was issued February 26, 1985. It describes oxidizing
7:16
Speaker 1: adrenaline in an aqueous chemical process. The later patent even
7:21
Speaker 1: refers to existing commercial preparation methods and to adrenochrome as
7:25
Speaker 1: an intermediate used to make hemostatic derivatives. That's about as
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Speaker 1: far away from only obtainable from a human sacrifice as
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Speaker 1: chemistry gets. Now, don't misunderstand patents. They establish what was
7:38
Speaker 1: described and claimed by inventors, not that every proposed medical
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Speaker 1: use worked or that there was a secret market for
7:45
Speaker 1: immortality drugs. But they thoroughly undermine the claim that nobody
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Speaker 1: knew how to produce this chemical outside a living body.
7:53
Speaker 1: A further source of confusion is that popular accounts regularly
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Speaker 1: jump among three different substances. The first is adrenochrome, the
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Speaker 1: oxidation product we're talking about. The second is adrenochrome semicarbazone,
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Speaker 1: often called carbazochrome, a related but different chemical investigated and
8:10
Speaker 1: used as a hemostatic, that is, in connection with control
8:13
Speaker 1: of bleeding in some countries. The third is adrenolutin, another
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Speaker 1: related compound that comes up in the psychiatric story. Those
8:22
Speaker 1: are different names for compounds with different chemical identities, so
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Speaker 1: we cannot transfer a reported medical use or alleged psychoactive
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Speaker 1: effect from one to another just because the names share
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Speaker 1: a recognizable root. We'll run into that confusion again in
8:36
Speaker 1: a 1970s underground drug book, where a reference to a
8:40
Speaker 1: dreamochrome semi-carbazone gets folded into the larger drug folklore. A
8:46
Speaker 1: derivative with a related name is not interchangeable with the
8:49
Speaker 1: parent compound, and an alleged effect of one should not
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Speaker 1: be quietly handed to the other. With the chemistry established,
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Speaker 1: The genuinely surprising part of the story is not where
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Speaker 1: adrenochrome can be made. It's why researchers once thought it
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Speaker 1: might help explain the human mind and how an organization
9:06
Speaker 1: better known for Masonic rites became part of that psychiatric history.
9:11
Speaker 1: Here is where a piece of this story that sounds
9:13
Speaker 1: like conspiracy bait turns out to have a real archival address.
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Speaker 1: The Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic jurisdiction, supported a committee researching
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Speaker 1: what was then called Dementia Praecox, a historical diagnostic term
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Speaker 1: closely associated with what later came to be called schizophrenia.
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Speaker 1: That's not a rumor about a secret lodge experimenting in
9:35
Speaker 1: a basement. It's part of a documented administrative history of
9:40
Speaker 1: a particular Masonic jurisdiction. And we need that qualifier. A
9:44
Speaker 1: committee with one jurisdiction does not speak for Freemasonry everywhere,
9:49
Speaker 1: and sponsorship of psychiatric research is not proof of ritual activity.
9:54
Speaker 1: but it's also not the kind of institutional connection we
9:57
Speaker 1: should dismiss simply because it makes the story. uncomfortable. An
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Speaker 1: archive maintained by the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library
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Speaker 1: catalogs correspondence, advisory committee lists, and proceedings over a period
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Speaker 1: of years. There's a 1934 file with lists of advisors
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Speaker 1: and research partners. The 1935 file includes correspondence with the
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Speaker 1: National Committee for Mental Hygiene. In records of Sovereign Grand
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Speaker 1: Commander Melvin M. Johnson are proceedings for the 1951 meetings
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Speaker 1: and significantly files for meetings in 1952. Here are two
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Speaker 1: exact locations because I want the audience to understand how
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Speaker 1: research actually works. Box 64, Folder 15 is cataloged as
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Speaker 1: containing the June 1952 proceedings Box 72, Folder 4 is
10:50
Speaker 1: cataloged as containing September 1952 proceedings along with later meeting material.
10:56
Speaker 1: Those are not vague rumors about files in a basement.
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Speaker 1: They are archival finding aid descriptions. Now put those archival
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Speaker 1: descriptions next to something the psychiatrist Abram Hoffer wrote in 1980.
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Speaker 1: In an editorial titled Mega-Amino Acid Therapy, he recalled that
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Speaker 1: he and Humphrey Osmond first presented their adrenochrome hypothesis to
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Speaker 1: the Scottish Rights Dementia Precox Committee at New York's Waldorf
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Speaker 1: Astoria Hotel in 1952. Hoffa also associated the committee's founding
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Speaker 1: with psychiatrist Nolan D.C. Lewis. That is not an anonymous
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Speaker 1: internet allegation. It is an identified researcher describing his own participation,
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Speaker 1: although he was writing almost 30 years after the meeting.
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Speaker 1: The archival finding aid independently establishes that meeting records survived.
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Speaker 1: It does not reproduce what the people in the room said.
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Speaker 1: Hoffer's retrospective account supports the claim that he recalled presenting
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Speaker 1: the hypothesis while the archived proceedings established that the committee met.
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Speaker 1: Those are valuable separate pieces of evidence. Neither is a
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Speaker 1: license to event a grant vote or an experiment authorized
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Speaker 1: by the committee. Hoffer also described visiting Lewis in New
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Speaker 1: York in early 1951 and becoming interested in hallucinogen research
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Speaker 1: and the work of Heinrich Kluver. It is a plausible
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Speaker 1: route into the professional circle around the committee, and it
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Speaker 1: shows there were scientists and patrons who could actually encounter
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Speaker 1: one another, not names randomly dragged together by a conspiracy video.
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Speaker 1: But that visit, too, comes to us through a retrospective account.
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Speaker 1: What makes the Scottish Rite connection substantial is the combination
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Speaker 1: of an independently catalogued research program and a participant-specific recollection.
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Speaker 1: Any claim that the presentation produced a specific decision would
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Speaker 1: require the meeting record itself. The committee has been sponsoring
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Speaker 1: mental health inquiry long before 1952. The 1930s correspondence and
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Speaker 1: advisory records make that clear. And they raise fair questions
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Speaker 1: about who funded the program, how researchers were chosen, what
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Speaker 1: its priorities were, and what influenced the committee exercised. Those
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Speaker 1: are interesting questions even if nobody even utters the word adrenochrome.
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Speaker 1: An accusation of human harvesting, however, needs evidence of identifiable victims, acts,
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Speaker 1: and perpetrators. Nothing we've described supplies that. What it supplies
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Speaker 1: is a real connection between a Masonic research initiative and
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Speaker 1: a particular period of biological psychiatry. And that period matters.
13:28
Speaker 1: Psychiatry was wrestling with schizophrenia at a time when biological
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Speaker 1: explanations competed with psychoanalytic ones. Effective treatments were limited and
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Speaker 1: researchers were trying to connect abnormal experiences to measurable processes
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Speaker 1: in the body. A donor-supported committee suggested Funding biological research
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Speaker 1: fits that landscape. It's unusual in its sponsorship, not supernatural
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Speaker 1: in its subject matter. To see what happened around Hoffer
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Speaker 1: and Osman's work, we need to leave the meeting room
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Speaker 1: and follow in other institutions whose records are much more
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Speaker 1: explicit about the money. The Rockefeller Foundation didn't merely appear
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Speaker 1: in somebody's modern diagram of influential names. Its own annual
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Speaker 1: reports document support for schizophrenia research in Saskatchewan. The 1954
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Speaker 1: annual report identifies $ 115, 000 Canadian dollar grant over three years,
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Speaker 1: valued in the report at approximately $ 121, 275 to a University
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Speaker 1: of Saskatchewan schizophrenia study. It names D.G. McCarricker and describes
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Speaker 1: a team investigating biological responses to stress, possible problems in
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Speaker 1: adrenal metabolism, and an unidentified substance observed in urine. The
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Speaker 1: program had been based in a special psychiatric wing of
14:47
Speaker 1: Regina General Hospital and was moving into university facilities. The
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Speaker 1: mysterious substance in the report is exactly the sort of
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Speaker 1: detail that could fuel a dramatic theory. The discipline is
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Speaker 1: not to rename it adrenochrome when the report itself doesn't
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Speaker 1: make that identification. The 1954 annual report also identifies a
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Speaker 1: separate 2,700 travel award for Abram Hoffer. then Director of
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Speaker 1: Psychiatric Research in Saskatchewan's Department of Health. That was for
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Speaker 1: visiting psychiatric centers in Britain, Scandinavia, and other parts of Europe.
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Speaker 1: It wasn't the same award as the University of Saskatchewan's
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Speaker 1: three-year research grant. Then the 1957 Annual Report, on pages
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Speaker 1: 107 to 108, names Hoffer as directing the Saskatchewan Schizophrenia
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Speaker 1: Project and identifies a further grant of $ 75, 000 Canadian dollars.
15:38
Speaker 1: stated as approximately $ 78, 750 for the next three years. The
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Speaker 1: report describes hospital follow-up studies as well as attempts to
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Speaker 1: identify metabolic intermediates and body fluids. This gives us two
15:54
Speaker 1: distinct university research awards and a separate travel award with
15:58
Speaker 1: their own dates, receipts, and stated purposes. Those amounts matter
16:02
Speaker 1: because they can be checked against identifiable reports. The first
16:06
Speaker 1: report names a university project in D.G. McCarricker. The later
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Speaker 1: report describes continued schizophrenia work under Hoffer. Each award has
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Speaker 1: its own dates, purpose, and receipt. Treating every dollar given
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Speaker 1: to related psychiatric research as a single secret adrenochrome budget
16:23
Speaker 1: would be an accounting trick, not an investigation. What the
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Speaker 1: reports genuinely document is a sustained and publicly described research
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Speaker 1: effort with institutional support, travel funding, and an extension of
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Speaker 1: the Saskatchewan program. To understand why anyone paid for that work,
16:41
Speaker 1: we need to understand the hypothesis that made the adrenaline
16:44
Speaker 1: seem so important. The researchers were asking whether abnormal transformations
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Speaker 1: of adrenaline might produce chemicals capable of disturbing thought and perception.
16:54
Speaker 1: It sounds eccentric now, but they were working at a
16:56
Speaker 1: time when psychiatry was urgently looking for biological clues. The
17:01
Speaker 1: same circle also crossed paths with Aldous Huxley. whose writing
17:04
Speaker 1: would introduce some of these speculative ideas to an audience
17:08
Speaker 1: far beyond the laboratory. The next part of the story
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Speaker 1: isn't a ceremonial chamber or a billionaire's clinic. It's a
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Speaker 1: cluster of psychiatrists taking a very strange biochemical possibility seriously
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Speaker 1: enough to investigate it. To understand what the researchers were
17:23
Speaker 1: actually pursuing, begin with Humphrey Osmond and John Smythe's 1952 paper, Schizophrenia,
17:30
Speaker 1: A New Approach, published in the Journal of Mental Science.
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Speaker 1: The authors drew attention to the structural similarities between adrenaline
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Speaker 1: and mescaline and asked whether abnormal adrenaline metabolism might produce
17:42
Speaker 1: something that disrupted perception and thought. In the early formulation,
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Speaker 1: the suspected agent was an M-substance, a hypothetical molecule, not
17:52
Speaker 1: a proven identification of adrenochrome in a patient's brain. Hoffer
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Speaker 1: and Osmond subsequently focused their experimental work on adrenochrome, and
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Speaker 1: in 1954, Osmond, Hoffer, and Smythe's published Schizophrenia, a new
18:06
Speaker 1: approach to results of a year's research. The proposed mechanism
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Speaker 1: became known as the adrenochrome hypothesis. This was an evidence
18:15
Speaker 1: that people with schizophrenia were secretly ingesting the chemical. It
18:19
Speaker 1: wasn't proof that one molecule causes an extraordinary complex illness.
18:24
Speaker 1: It was a hypothesis that could, at least in principle,
18:27
Speaker 1: be tested. The error's interest in mescaline, LSD, and other
18:32
Speaker 1: mind-altering substances is gave those researchers a provocative comparison. If
18:37
Speaker 1: a chemical could temporarily disturb perception, could some naturally occurring
18:41
Speaker 1: chemical be involved in psychiatric symptoms? The analogy was tempting
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Speaker 1: and often too simple. Huxley knew Osmond personally, corresponded with him,
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Speaker 1: and in 1953 underwent a supervised mescaline session that helped
18:55
Speaker 1: shape his 1954 book, The Doors of Perception. This matters
18:59
Speaker 1: because Huxley's famous experience was with mescaline, not adrenochrome. The
19:05
Speaker 1: connection to the adrenochrome research was his relationship with Osman
19:09
Speaker 1: and his discussion of the hypothesis, not a secret adrenochrome
19:13
Speaker 1: trip hidden inside the book. In The Doors of Perception,
19:16
Speaker 1: Huxley actually named adrenochrome and discussed the possibility, controversial even then,
19:22
Speaker 1: that it might cause effects resembling mescaline intoxication. He did
19:26
Speaker 1: not present the schizophrenia theory as settled. Their correspondence, preserved
19:30
Speaker 1: in the scholarly edition Psychedelic Prophets, take us closer to
19:34
Speaker 1: the researchers themselves. In a November 1954 exchange, Osmond described
19:40
Speaker 1: experiences that he and Hoffer had with a substance he
19:43
Speaker 1: called iachimichrome, identified in the edited correspondence as adrenaline. They
19:48
Speaker 1: described subjective change and inconsistent responses to different preparations. Those
19:53
Speaker 1: are intriguing reports, but adrenolutin is not adrenochrome. The distinction
19:58
Speaker 1: matters especially in a story where a similar sounding name
20:01
Speaker 1: is sometimes treated as permission to combine entirely different experiments.
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Speaker 1: The researchers' larger theory that a particular adrenum-related chemical might
20:11
Speaker 1: help explain schizophrenia never became an established account of that
20:15
Speaker 1: complex illness. Nor did their associated claims for high-dose niacin
20:20
Speaker 1: and vitamin C become broadly accepted schizophrenia treatments on the
20:24
Speaker 1: strength of robust modern evidence. That doesn't mean that the
20:28
Speaker 1: early experiments vanished or that nobody observed anything unusual. It
20:32
Speaker 1: means we need to look at what those experiments actually measured.
20:36
Speaker 1: Were investigators recording hallucinations, electrical charges in the brain, a
20:40
Speaker 1: substance in blood? These aren't interchangeable findings, and separating them
20:44
Speaker 1: is how the most interesting argument in the scientific literature
20:48
Speaker 1: finally comes into view. In February 11, 1963, issue of
20:54
Speaker 1: Chemical and Engineering News, Abram Hoffer published a letter titled
20:58
Speaker 1: The Role of Adrenochrome in Schizophrenia. He confronted three tests
21:02
Speaker 1: on which his hypothesis depended. Could the compound alter psychological experience?
21:08
Speaker 1: Was it naturally present in the body? And did people
21:10
Speaker 1: with schizophrenia produce more of it? By then, researchers had
21:14
Speaker 1: already spent years experimenting with adrenochrome on human subjects. The
21:18
Speaker 1: disagreement wasn't whether the molecule existed. It was what, if anything,
21:22
Speaker 1: those experiments proved about the illness. In February 1955, A. Satterbury, Hoffer,
21:29
Speaker 1: and R. Schneider published The Effect of Adrenochrome and Niacin
21:34
Speaker 1: on the electroencephalogram of epileptics in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
21:39
Speaker 1: The researchers administered adrenochrome intravenously and measured electrical activity using electroencephalography,
21:47
Speaker 1: or EEG. According to their published findings, a dose of
21:51
Speaker 1: 10 mg produced no significant EEG changes in normal volunteers.
21:56
Speaker 1: But among patients with epilepsy, doses of 10, 25, and
21:59
Speaker 1: 50 mg increased certain abnormal electrical discharges. Hoffer's more extensive
22:07
Speaker 1: 1962 review gives additional details. In five patients who already
22:12
Speaker 1: exhibited diffuse electrical abnormalities, adrenochrome increased the disturbances and their
22:17
Speaker 1: sensitivity to hyperventilation. In another group of 15 patients with
22:22
Speaker 1: localized epileptic activity, the investigators described changes in abnormal wave patterns.
22:28
Speaker 1: Hoffa also reported that the threshold for convulsions appeared to
22:31
Speaker 1: decrease in two cases. The researchers also investigated niacin or
22:36
Speaker 1: nicotinic acid and reported different EEG responses. They were asking
22:42
Speaker 1: whether a vitamin could modify the physiological effects of an
22:45
Speaker 1: adrenaline derivative, an idea that would later feed Hoffman's vitamin-based
22:50
Speaker 1: treatment theory. But an altered electrical recording in someone who
22:54
Speaker 1: already had epilepsy indicated is not a demonstration of the
22:57
Speaker 1: cause of schizophrenia. The next experiment moved from scalp recordings
23:01
Speaker 1: to electrodes implanted deeper inside the brain. In June 1956,
23:05
Speaker 1: Bert Schwartz, Carl Sem Jacobson, and Magnus Peterson published Effects
23:12
Speaker 1: of Mescaline, LSD-25, and Adrenochrome on Depth Electrograms in Man.
23:19
Speaker 1: Unlike the earlier work, which focused on scalp EEG recordings,
23:23
Speaker 1: This investigation involved electrodes capable of measuring electrical activity from
23:28
Speaker 1: deeper brain structures. Its small clinical sample included patients with
23:33
Speaker 1: epilepsy and chronic schizophrenia. The researchers administered freshly prepared adrenochrome
23:39
Speaker 1: intravenously to three patients, using doses between 50 and 75 milligrams.
23:45
Speaker 1: Hoffa later summarized the individual findings in considerable detail. One
23:50
Speaker 1: patient with chronic paranoid schizophrenia received 50, 60, and 75
23:55
Speaker 1: milligrams on three separate occasions. The researchers reported increased abnormal
24:01
Speaker 1: electrical discharges involving the temporal regions of the brain. The
24:05
Speaker 1: patient also experienced disturbances in body perception and the organization
24:10
Speaker 1: of thought. A second psychiatric patient received 50 and 60
24:14
Speaker 1: milligrams on separate occasions. Alongside changes in electrical activity, the
24:19
Speaker 1: investigators described a striking episode of catalepsy. The patient became
24:24
Speaker 1: unusually relaxed, smiled, and maintained unnatural positions of his arms
24:29
Speaker 1: for extended periods. The behavior reportedly lasted more than 30
24:33
Speaker 1: minutes and had not been reproduced when the same patient
24:36
Speaker 1: received mescaline or LSD. The third patient, who had epilepsy
24:41
Speaker 1: and psychosis, became relaxed and drowsy after receiving 50 mg.
24:46
Speaker 1: The electrical recordings showed additional slow-wave activity. Only three patients
24:51
Speaker 1: received adrenochrome in this particular study, and their underlying illness
24:55
Speaker 1: made the psychological findings difficult to interpret. The researchers did
25:00
Speaker 1: not find that adrenochrome reproduced LSD or mescaline in any
25:03
Speaker 1: simple or consistent fashion. This small trial also has an
25:07
Speaker 1: institutional history that turns out to matter. A 2025 peer-reviewed
25:12
Speaker 1: investigation of psychedelic research at the Mayo Clinic by Kazimir, Klim,
25:17
Speaker 1: and colleagues It traces the work of Bert Schwartz, Reginald Bickford,
25:22
Speaker 1: and Howard Rome, who were pursuing the biological mechanisms of
25:26
Speaker 1: hallucination and schizophrenia. It places the death electrode research at
25:31
Speaker 1: Rochester State Hospital, where electrodes had been inserted through openings
25:35
Speaker 1: in patients' skulls, sometimes in anticipation of neurosurgical treatment. The
25:41
Speaker 1: historians found that Mayo administrators had expressed concern about consent
25:45
Speaker 1: and legal issues surrounding invasive death electrode work. Their archival
25:49
Speaker 1: research also documented earlier episodes in which clinicians began psychedelic
25:54
Speaker 1: investigations without first notifying the relevant Oversight Committee. The records
25:59
Speaker 1: show that Schwartz and Bickford were reprimanded in 1955 for
26:01
Speaker 1: trying hypnosis on patients without prior consent. In a separate
26:19
Speaker 1: depth electrode case, a patient developed a fatal brain abscess
26:23
Speaker 1: after being unable to care for the electrode entry sites.
26:27
Speaker 1: That death was not an outcome of a three-person adrenochrome
26:31
Speaker 1: dosing experiment, but it demonstrates why the invasive research environment
26:35
Speaker 1: deserves scrutiny. These were not risk-free experiments performed under the
26:40
Speaker 1: consent protections we would expect today. The historical significance of
26:44
Speaker 1: that 2025 investigation is is not confined to the question
26:48
Speaker 1: of whether the CIA ever called a particular doctor. It
26:52
Speaker 1: reconstructs the everyday institutional conditions in which medical knowledge about
26:56
Speaker 1: altered perception was being produced. Researchers moving between a prestigious
27:01
Speaker 1: medical center and a state hospital, patients with serious psychiatric
27:05
Speaker 1: or neurological conditions becoming experimental subjects, and administrators attempting to
27:11
Speaker 1: draw lines around consent after some projects were already underway.
27:15
Speaker 1: When the older paper reports an implanted electrode and a
27:18
Speaker 1: changed brain tracing, the equipment and the result are only
27:21
Speaker 1: part of the history. Someone had to decide who would
27:25
Speaker 1: undergo the procedure, how the risks would be explained, and
27:28
Speaker 1: what therapeutic benefit, if any, the procedure offered. Those questions
27:33
Speaker 1: deserve investigation on their own merits, independently of the modern
27:37
Speaker 1: blood harvesting legend. While physicians were measuring brain activity, other
27:41
Speaker 1: laboratories were investigating what the chemicals did to animals and tissues.
27:46
Speaker 1: In a substantial 1962 review, published in International Review of Neurobiology,
27:52
Speaker 1: Hoffer brought together work involving spiders, fish, pigeons, rats, rabbits, cats, dogs, monkeys,
27:59
Speaker 1: and humans. The experiments examined everything from animal behavior and
28:04
Speaker 1: learned responses to brain electrical activity and the effects of
28:07
Speaker 1: the compound on cells. Some animal studies reported altered movement,
28:12
Speaker 1: conditioned responses, and electrical activity. Others found little or no
28:17
Speaker 1: response under particular conditions. Hoffer also discussed laboratory findings suggesting
28:22
Speaker 1: that adrenochrome could interfere with aspects of cellular metabolism, including
28:27
Speaker 1: reactions associated with brain tissue. Hoffer explained that early adrenochrome
28:32
Speaker 1: preparations were unstable. Some were red or black powders that
28:36
Speaker 1: deteriorated rapidly, especially in aqueous solution. Under certain conditions, the
28:41
Speaker 1: material could undergo further chemical transformations and form dark, melanin-like products.
28:47
Speaker 1: In 1958, Richard Heacock and colleagues developed methods for obtaining
28:51
Speaker 1: more stable crystalline preparations, including removing traces of silver left
28:56
Speaker 1: from earlier preparation methods. The purity problem directly affected attempts
29:01
Speaker 1: to compare the experiments that followed, including work by psychiatrist
29:05
Speaker 1: Stanislav Grof and his colleagues. In October 1963, Grof and
29:11
Speaker 1: colleagues published clinical and experimental study The Central Effects of
29:16
Speaker 1: Adrenochrome in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry. Their research had already
29:21
Speaker 1: been discussed in earlier reports and was summarized by Hoffa
29:24
Speaker 1: in 1962. The investigators studied 18 rats and 15 human participants.
29:30
Speaker 1: The human group consisted of 11 healthy individuals and four
29:34
Speaker 1: non-psychotic psychiatric patients. Adrenochrome was administered beneath the tongue in
29:39
Speaker 1: doses of 15 or 30 milligrams. The researchers compared different
29:44
Speaker 1: chemical preparations and nine participants underwent comparative testing under double-blind
29:49
Speaker 1: conditions using a red controlled dye. Across 24 adrenochrome experiments,
29:54
Speaker 1: the investigators classified nine responses as psychotic-like 4 as neurasthenic-like,
30:00
Speaker 1: 6 as uncertain, and 5 as producing no observable clinical reaction.
30:05
Speaker 1: 7 of the 9 psychotic-like responses occurred after the higher
30:09
Speaker 1: 30 mg dose. Those were 24 experimental sessions involving 15 people,
30:16
Speaker 1: not 24 separate patients diagnosed with psychosis. The responses had
30:20
Speaker 1: specific features. Hoffer's contemporaneous account describes participants who experienced changes
30:26
Speaker 1: in visual perception, altered sensitivity to colors, distortions of time
30:31
Speaker 1: and space, changes in body image, derealization, unusual auditory experiences,
30:37
Speaker 1: and disrupted patterns of thought. The investigators also employed word
30:41
Speaker 1: association tests and reported measurable disturbances in the organization of
30:46
Speaker 1: verbal responses. Their findings suggested that some of the effects
30:50
Speaker 1: could be detected through structured psychological testing rather than relying
30:54
Speaker 1: exclusively on participants describing how they felt. The two adrenochrome
30:59
Speaker 1: preparations did not always produce equivalent reactions. Their effects differed
31:04
Speaker 1: both in intensity and character, raising questions about chemical composition, purity, stability,
31:11
Speaker 1: and the reproducibility of the results. The group also conducted
31:15
Speaker 1: further EEG testing. Six participants received an additional 20 mg dose,
31:20
Speaker 1: and five subsequently showed changes involving alpha activity, theta waves,
31:25
Speaker 1: or intermittent spikes. The electrical changes did not correlate with
31:29
Speaker 1: the intensity of the psychological reactions. Groff's findings were an
31:33
Speaker 1: argument that certain preparations might cause transient disturbances under experimental conditions,
31:40
Speaker 1: not evidence that a psychiatric illness had been traced to
31:43
Speaker 1: this chemical. The next test was more basic. Could anyone
31:47
Speaker 1: reliably detect adrenochrome in living human blood? In February 1958,
31:52
Speaker 1: Hoffa published Adrenochrome in Blood Plasma, in the American Journal
31:56
Speaker 1: of Psychiatry, presenting findings that he interpreted as supporting the
32:00
Speaker 1: presence of the compound. But only six months later, Stephen, Sarah,
32:05
Speaker 1: Julius Axelrod, and Seymour Perlin published Is Adrenochrome Present in
32:09
Speaker 1: the Blood? in the same journal, using a method designed
32:12
Speaker 1: to detect small quantities of adrenochrome and plasma. They reported
32:16
Speaker 1: being unable to identify the compound in samples from either
32:20
Speaker 1: healthy individuals or patients with schizophrenia. Other scientists were investigated
32:25
Speaker 1: related questions. In October 1958, Gerald Cohen, Bernard Holland, and
32:30
Speaker 1: Marcel Goldenberg published research examining the stability of adrenaline and
32:35
Speaker 1: noradrenaline in plasma and serum from people with and without schizophrenia.
32:41
Speaker 1: Their work followed earlier claims that blood from patients with
32:44
Speaker 1: schizophrenia converted added adrenaline into oxidation products more rapidly than
32:49
Speaker 1: blood from healthy controls. Researchers were also measuring circulating adrenaline
32:54
Speaker 1: and noradrenaline, trying to establish whether an abnormal precursor pattern
32:59
Speaker 1: would support the larger theory. In a 1957 experiment subsequently
33:04
Speaker 1: examined by historians of the Mayo work, investigators administered hallucinogens
33:09
Speaker 1: to patients with psychosis and healthy volunteers, but found no
33:14
Speaker 1: clear difference in their measured plasma pressor levels. Their proposed
33:18
Speaker 1: metabolic distinction was proving difficult to establish, even before researchers
33:22
Speaker 1: argued over adrenochrome itself. Those studies tested different questions. How
33:28
Speaker 1: added adrenaline reacted inside a blood sample? And what levels
33:31
Speaker 1: of related stress hormones were measurable in patients? Neither directly
33:35
Speaker 1: established that adrenochrome was already accumulating in their circulation. In
33:40
Speaker 1: January 1960, the disagreement between Hoffer's group and the researchers
33:44
Speaker 1: at the National Institute of Mental Health became a direct
33:48
Speaker 1: published exchange. Hoffer and A.N. Peiser published The Presence of
33:53
Speaker 1: Adrenochrome in Blood. Immediately afterward, Zara and Axelrod published Reply
33:59
Speaker 1: to the Foregoing. The underlying problem was methodological. Researchers were
34:04
Speaker 1: dealing with a chemically reactive substance that could be altered
34:07
Speaker 1: during sample preparation. Some measurements relied on color change or fluorescence.
34:12
Speaker 1: Properties could also be influenced by other substances and reaction products.
34:17
Speaker 1: Zara later described developing a method that could recover as
34:20
Speaker 1: little as 0.02 micrograms of adrenochrome deliberately added to plasma.
34:26
Speaker 1: He recalled testing approximately six or seven patients with schizophrenia
34:30
Speaker 1: and obtaining negative findings. After objections that ordinary patient samples
34:35
Speaker 1: might miss the relevant stage of illness, his team reportedly
34:39
Speaker 1: tested patients undergoing acute hallucinations and again obtained negative results.
34:45
Speaker 1: Hoffer and Osmond continued to argue that adrenochrome or related
34:48
Speaker 1: oxidation products might occur transiently, transform rapidly, or escape detection
34:53
Speaker 1: because of their instability. And in their 1967 book, The Hallucinogens,
34:59
Speaker 1: they documented something particularly revealing. They acknowledged that the definitive
35:05
Speaker 1: isolation of adrenochrome or related products from living tissues had
35:08
Speaker 1: not yet been achieved to their satisfaction. They discussed reports
35:13
Speaker 1: of positive findings from other researchers, including claims involving blood, urine,
35:18
Speaker 1: and chemically related aminocromes, but also acknowledged the important observations
35:22
Speaker 1: had not been independently corroborated. They described another problem involving
35:27
Speaker 1: the fluorescence-based measurements associated with PISA and Mahon. A researcher
35:32
Speaker 1: named Feldstein had suggested that some fluorescent signals might be
35:36
Speaker 1: artifacts caused by ascorbic acid. Hoffer and Osmond disputed the
35:40
Speaker 1: relevance of that explanation to plasma, but conceded that a
35:43
Speaker 1: modified method still lacked independent laboratory validation. Their group also
35:49
Speaker 1: developed what they called adrenochrome tolerance curves. The procedure involved
35:54
Speaker 1: taking a blood sample, injecting 10 mg of crystalline adrenochrome,
35:58
Speaker 1: and drawing additional blood samples 15, 30, and 60 minutes
36:02
Speaker 1: later to examine how the material disappeared from plasma. Hoffer
36:06
Speaker 1: and Osmond reported differences in the apparent clearance patterns between
36:10
Speaker 1: normal subjects, depressed patients, and patients with schizophrenia. But they
36:15
Speaker 1: acknowledged that researchers disputed whether the analytical method could accurately
36:19
Speaker 1: measure adrenochrome that was naturally present before the injection. The
36:23
Speaker 1: disagreement concerned the proper laboratory blank. The reference measurement needed
36:28
Speaker 1: to separate a genuine chemical signal from background. Because of
36:32
Speaker 1: uncertainty about those initial measurements, the authors excluded the baseline
36:36
Speaker 1: values from the results they presented. That single methodological decision
36:41
Speaker 1: tells us more than a dozen arguments about whether the
36:43
Speaker 1: substance was real. Their graphs were principally about the disappearance
36:48
Speaker 1: of injected adrenochrome, while the initial, naturally occurring concentration, the
36:53
Speaker 1: crucial question for the disease hypothesis, remained uncertain. The theory
36:58
Speaker 1: also influenced attempts to treat schizophrenia with large doses of
37:02
Speaker 1: niacin and related vitamins. Hoffer and Osmond proposed that alterating
37:06
Speaker 1: aspects of adrenaline metabolism might reduce the formation or effects
37:11
Speaker 1: of the suspected compound. In 1973, an American Psychiatric Association
37:17
Speaker 1: task force examined the biochemical rationale and clinical evidence for
37:21
Speaker 1: megavitamin and orthomolecular approaches to psychiatric treatment. The report judged
37:27
Speaker 1: the adrenochrome rationale unproved. It found that the claimed psychosis-producing
37:31
Speaker 1: properties had not been independently established to a satisfactory standard
37:36
Speaker 1: and that the proposed metabolic explanation was unsupported by convincing
37:41
Speaker 1: evidence of adrenochrome formation in living people. It also reviewed
37:45
Speaker 1: treatment studies and challenged the clinical claims surrounding large-dose vitamin therapy.
37:50
Speaker 1: Hoffer and Osmond disputed the task force assessment, later criticizing
37:54
Speaker 1: what they saw as a panel predisposed against their approach.
37:58
Speaker 1: Their disagreement over the panel's fairness did not settle the
38:01
Speaker 1: biochemical questions. became another part of the medical dispute. The
38:05
Speaker 1: story did not end with the psychiatric dispute. In March 1976,
38:10
Speaker 1: Bernard Babiore and Ruby Kipnis published Oxidation of an Epinephrine
38:14
Speaker 1: by a Cell-Free System from Human Granulocytes in the journal Blood.
38:19
Speaker 1: Working with the preparations made from human granulocytes, a category
38:23
Speaker 1: of white blood cell, they demonstrated a reaction that converted
38:26
Speaker 1: an epinephrine into adrenochrome under controlled laboratory conditions. The reaction
38:31
Speaker 1: depended on reactive oxygen chemistry. When the researchers added superoxide
38:35
Speaker 1: dismutase and catalase, enzymes that interfere with superoxide and hydrogen peroxide,
38:45
Speaker 1: the production of adrenochrome was abolished. It was a genuine
38:49
Speaker 1: formation mechanism involving material derived from human white blood cells.
38:53
Speaker 1: The researchers demonstrated a reaction in controlled cell-free preparations. They
38:58
Speaker 1: were not measuring adrenochrome in a living patient's circulation or
39:01
Speaker 1: establishing its accumulation in the brain. Decades later, the hypothesis
39:05
Speaker 1: remained sufficiently interesting to attract another scientific review. In 2002,
39:11
Speaker 1: researcher John Smythes published The Adrenochrome Hypothesis of Schizophrenia Revisited
39:17
Speaker 1: in Neurotoxicity Research. Smythes revisited the early human experiments and
39:22
Speaker 1: explored whether adrenochrome might form as a metabolite of adrenaline
39:26
Speaker 1: in certain brain neurons. He also considered mechanisms involved glutathione, S-transferase,
39:32
Speaker 1: enzymes involved in the handling and detoxification of reactive chemical substances.
39:38
Speaker 1: The 2002 review revived questions about possible biochemical pathways. It
39:43
Speaker 1: did not establish the original theory. We are left with
39:46
Speaker 1: genuine human dosing experiments, conflicting effects, disputed blood assays, later
39:51
Speaker 1: laboratory evidence about oxidation chemistry, and no demonstrated pathway from
39:56
Speaker 1: adrenochrome to schizophrenia. Those findings are worth far more than
40:00
Speaker 1: the fantasy of a miraculous recreational drug. There is another
40:04
Speaker 1: record from the same era that needs to be brought
40:06
Speaker 1: into the story. While psychiatrists debated brain chemistry, the CIA
40:11
Speaker 1: was looking for chemicals and techniques that might make people
40:14
Speaker 1: easier to interrogate or control. On December 3, 1955, CIA
40:19
Speaker 1: Director Alan Dulles sent Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson a
40:24
Speaker 1: memorandum titled Research on Psychochemicals. The agency described its longstanding
40:29
Speaker 1: interest in chemicals capable of altering mental function and offered
40:33
Speaker 1: help on related military research. The document is preserved in
40:37
Speaker 1: the State Department's official historical collection. CIA programs such as
40:41
Speaker 1: Artichoke and MKUltra are not inventions. Investigations established that U.S.
40:46
Speaker 1: intelligence personnel explored interrogation drugs, hypnosis, isolation, and in some projects,
40:52
Speaker 1: experiments on people who did not know they were being
40:55
Speaker 1: used as subjects. But the much more interesting document for
40:58
Speaker 1: this story is a surviving report of a trip made
41:01
Speaker 1: between April 6th and April 11th in 1955, followed by
41:06
Speaker 1: a July 12th, 1955 memorandum summarizing the meetings. The CIA
41:11
Speaker 1: release copy is preserved in the Internet Archives MKUltra files
41:15
Speaker 1: under Document Identifier DOC 000184434, and a second release version
41:24
Speaker 1: has also been identified. The text is heavily redacted, but
41:28
Speaker 1: it is not a non-existent document that we have to
41:31
Speaker 1: reconstruct from a stray online sentence. The writer describes visiting
41:35
Speaker 1: a medical institution whose name was obscured, meeting physicians, touring facilities,
41:40
Speaker 1: and discussing matters of interest to Artichoke. In 2024, physician-historian
41:45
Speaker 1: Kazimir Klim, who had spent years examining the relevant institutional records,
41:53
Speaker 1: reported that the unredacted clues lined up with the Mayo
41:56
Speaker 1: Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The document referred to the institution's
42:01
Speaker 1: building layouts, its pneumatic tube system, a psychiatrist interested in
42:05
Speaker 1: intoxicating mushrooms, and an anesthesiologist with expertise in barbiturate anesthesia.
42:11
Speaker 1: Klim treated the identification as strongly supported by the details,
42:15
Speaker 1: while recognizing that the official document still redacts the institution's name.
42:19
Speaker 1: The content of those meetings was disturbing. The visitors discussed LSD, mescaline, hypnosis, barbiturates,
42:26
Speaker 1: poisonous mushrooms, combination of drugs, and sensory isolation. Adrenochrome appears
42:32
Speaker 1: by name in the released account. It is one item
42:35
Speaker 1: on a much longer list, not the centerpiece of the trip.
42:39
Speaker 1: The broader conversations ranged from amnesia to ways of influencing
42:43
Speaker 1: subjects who would be unwilling or even violently resistant. The
42:47
Speaker 1: report records an interest in combining sensory deprivation with drugs
42:51
Speaker 1: and exploring whether this could be an intelligence tool. On
42:55
Speaker 1: adrenochrome specifically, the released report says the visitor raised it
42:59
Speaker 1: and related substances as possible agents capable of producing psychotic effects.
43:04
Speaker 1: The physician agreed the idea could be interesting but was
43:07
Speaker 1: unsure what practical use the agency would have for it.
43:10
Speaker 1: That is the critical sentence, a recorded discussion of a possibility,
43:14
Speaker 1: not evidence that anyone was dosed with adrenochrome on the
43:17
Speaker 1: CIA's behalf. The July 12 cover memorandum also noted that
43:22
Speaker 1: the exploitation of the various offers discussed during the trip
43:25
Speaker 1: had not been implemented as of that date. It does
43:28
Speaker 1: not answer every question about later contact's, but it rules
43:31
Speaker 1: out treating this particular report as a completed operational plan.
43:35
Speaker 1: Then it gets more complicated. In 2025, Clem, Brian Vandrees,
43:41
Speaker 1: Terrence Meyerhofer, and Scott Breitinger published their peer-reviewed history of
43:45
Speaker 1: psychedelic research at the Mayo Clinic. They showed that the
43:49
Speaker 1: same scientific environment studying LSD, mescaline, and schizophrenia had been
43:54
Speaker 1: influenced by the adrenochrome hypothesis. Bert Schwartz, one of the
43:58
Speaker 1: physicians behind the 1956 experiment, depth electrode adrenochrome experiment belonged
44:03
Speaker 1: to that research milieu. Their investigation used contemporary manuscripts and
44:08
Speaker 1: committee records to reconstruct how invasive studies could proceed amid
44:12
Speaker 1: weak or uneven oversight. Those are substantial overlaps in people, ideas,
44:17
Speaker 1: and historical setting. They are not interchangeable with proof of
44:21
Speaker 1: an agency-sponsored adrenochrome trial. A conversation about a chemical, a
44:25
Speaker 1: published clinical experiment, and a secret interrogation program are three
44:29
Speaker 1: different kinds of records. The available material places them in
44:33
Speaker 1: the same Cold War scientific world. It does not supply
44:36
Speaker 1: a procurement record, operational dosing report, or victim evidence connecting
44:41
Speaker 1: adrenochrome to an artichoke extraction operation. The more interesting point
44:46
Speaker 1: is that we don't have to exaggerate the record to
44:48
Speaker 1: find something troubling. Actual intelligence officers discussed manipulating vulnerable or
44:53
Speaker 1: unwilling people, and actual physicians were willing to consider the
44:57
Speaker 1: scientific possibilities. Adrenochrome was one name in a much larger
45:01
Speaker 1: inventory of substances. To understand how it became the star
45:04
Speaker 1: of a story about living human glands, we have to
45:07
Speaker 1: follow the writers, not the agents. The scientific language was
45:11
Speaker 1: already entering popular culture while the experiments were underway. Huxley's
45:15
Speaker 1: The Doors of Perception had put Osman's idea before non-specialist
45:19
Speaker 1: readers in 1954. Once that notion was circulating, that ordinary
45:24
Speaker 1: human chemistry might yield a compound capable of changing perception,
45:28
Speaker 1: Novelists had a powerful fictional device. From here, the sequence
45:32
Speaker 1: becomes traceable through specific works and dates, but we have
45:35
Speaker 1: to distinguish a writer borrowing scientific language from a writer
45:39
Speaker 1: reporting an actual medical procedure. The next important fictional example
45:43
Speaker 1: appears in 1962, when Anthony Burgess published A Clockwork Orange.
45:49
Speaker 1: In the Cova Milk Bar, Alex and his friends order
45:52
Speaker 1: milk drinks adulterated with fictional substances. One of the words
45:55
Speaker 1: Burgess used is drenchrome. recognizably close to adrenochrome. Kubrick's 1971
46:02
Speaker 1: film carried that imagined drug culture to an enormous audience.
46:06
Speaker 1: That is a direct fictional use of the name, but
46:09
Speaker 1: it is not a description of secret harvesting. The decisive
46:12
Speaker 1: change in the familiar fictional narrative comes with Hunter S. Thompson,
46:17
Speaker 1: who supplied the disturbing living gland origin story that later
46:21
Speaker 1: retellings would treat as something more than literature. In November 1971,
46:26
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone printed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in
46:29
Speaker 1: two installments, including the second installment dated November 25th. A
46:34
Speaker 1: year later, the work appeared as a hardcover book. The
46:37
Speaker 1: adrenochrome passage is associated with the second Rolling Stone installment.
46:42
Speaker 1: Textual scholar John Francis Brick, who compared the magazine publication
46:46
Speaker 1: against the later book, connects the passage with issue 96
46:50
Speaker 1: around page 42. Brick's published comparison says, helps locate the
46:55
Speaker 1: passage in the periodical, while the familiar book text establishes
46:59
Speaker 1: the scene that later readers and moviegoers encountered. That brings
47:02
Speaker 1: us much closer to the actual literary history than the
47:05
Speaker 1: vague claim that the legend started somewhere in Hollywood. The
47:09
Speaker 1: source story is grotesque. The fictional drug is claimed to
47:13
Speaker 1: require material from a living person's adrenal gland. There are
47:16
Speaker 1: references to a sinister cellar and a jumble of lurid motifs. Satanism,
47:21
Speaker 1: sexual predation, and a separate nod toward the pineal gland.
47:25
Speaker 1: These are not scientists presenting a laboratory protocol, but characters
47:29
Speaker 1: moving through Thompson's surreal, satirical, and deliberately exaggerated nightmare. Thompson's
47:35
Speaker 1: method makes the confusion easier to understand. Fear and Loathing
47:39
Speaker 1: mixes real locations, recognizable people, satire, hallucination, and widely unreliable
47:45
Speaker 1: storytelling until the reader is never quite allowed to stand
47:48
Speaker 1: on solid ground. When the adrenochrome scene is clipped out
47:52
Speaker 1: and presented as an independent fact, its invented providence starts
47:55
Speaker 1: to look like a confession. There's still an open literary
47:59
Speaker 1: history question. Where did Thompson get the precise living adrenal
48:03
Speaker 1: gland idea? It could be his own invention, an earlier joke,
48:06
Speaker 1: a conversation, or a mangled version of scientific material. We
48:10
Speaker 1: don't have a verified chain of transmission. A later recollection
48:14
Speaker 1: attributed to Terry Gilliam, suggests Thompson regarded the portrayal as invented,
48:19
Speaker 1: but we would need the original recording before presenting Gilliam's
48:22
Speaker 1: recollection as a direct statement by Thompson. In the early 1970s,
48:27
Speaker 1: Adam Gottlieb's underground book, Legal Highs, also mentioned adrenochrome semicarbazone,
48:33
Speaker 1: the derivative rather than adrenochrome itself. That's one more route
48:37
Speaker 1: by which similar names could become tangled in drug folklore.
48:41
Speaker 1: The sequence, as far as we can document it, is
48:44
Speaker 1: not a scientist describing blood harvesting and Hollywood obediently repeating it.
48:49
Speaker 1: It's a scientific hypothesis circulating in public, an altered version
48:53
Speaker 1: of the name appearing in fiction, and Thompson supplying the
48:56
Speaker 1: especially grotesque claim about a living human gland. The 1998
49:01
Speaker 1: film then gave that scene an entirely different afterlife, because
49:05
Speaker 1: people who had never read the book can now encounter
49:07
Speaker 1: The Vial and its origin story as a dramatic clip.
49:11
Speaker 1: In 1998, Terry Gilliam released his film adaptation of Fear
49:14
Speaker 1: and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio
49:18
Speaker 1: Del Toro. The adrenochromatic scene was no longer something readers
49:21
Speaker 1: imagined privately. It became a full theatrical performance built around
49:25
Speaker 1: the vile, the ominous story about a human source, the
49:29
Speaker 1: grotesque comedy, and the character's apparent overwhelming intoxication. That gave
49:33
Speaker 1: the narrative a new route into popular culture. because although
49:36
Speaker 1: the film did not invent either the compound or Thompson's
49:39
Speaker 1: fictional gland extraction story, moving images can be remembered and
49:43
Speaker 1: recirculated in ways that printed passages or often not. The
49:48
Speaker 1: scene can be clipped, forwarded, and reposted without the surrounding narrative.
49:52
Speaker 1: Over time, a person can encounter the clip on its own,
49:55
Speaker 1: never read Thompson's book, and remember only the shocking line
49:58
Speaker 1: about a living human body. Once somebody starts from the
50:01
Speaker 1: assumption that Hollywood hides confessions in plain sight, fiction becomes
50:05
Speaker 1: nearly impossible to disprove. The movie includes a disturbing claim,
50:10
Speaker 1: therefore it must be revealing something. If the writer says
50:12
Speaker 1: it's fiction, that becomes part of the alleged cover-up. But
50:16
Speaker 1: a scene in a movie cannot identify a real victim
50:19
Speaker 1: or establish a real crime. For that, we'd need independently
50:22
Speaker 1: corroborated testimony, records, or evidence from outside the performance. A
50:27
Speaker 1: particularly revealing fictional appearance shows how these elements were already
50:31
Speaker 1: being assembled long before QAnon. The British television series Lewis
50:36
Speaker 1: aired Whom the Gods Would Destroy on February 18, 2007,
50:41
Speaker 1: with an American PBS broadcast on June 22, 2008. The
50:46
Speaker 1: episode features an Oxford-associated secret society called the Sons of
50:49
Speaker 1: the Twice-Born, an old killing, and a discussion of adrenochrome.
50:54
Speaker 1: In the episode's fictional murder plot, characters describe the belief
50:58
Speaker 1: that an exceptional version of the drug requires removing a
51:01
Speaker 1: human adrenal gland, killing the donor. The PBS-hosted episode transcript
51:06
Speaker 1: preserves that discussion and explicitly presents the alleged extraordinary drug
51:10
Speaker 1: effect as myth. Let that sink in. An Oxford secret society,
51:16
Speaker 1: a death, and an alleged human-sourced drug on mainstream television
51:20
Speaker 1: before QAnon existed. The episode is evidence that this cluster
51:24
Speaker 1: of idea was circulating as fiction by 2007. It is
51:28
Speaker 1: not a leaked confession about a real Oxford group. There
51:31
Speaker 1: are older and broader fictional motifs in the backgrounds as well.
51:35
Speaker 1: The Dark Crystal has harvested essence, Monsters, Inc. turns children's
51:39
Speaker 1: screams into energy, Dr. Sleep imagines predators consuming a human essence,
51:44
Speaker 1: and Jupiter Ascending connects exploitation to rejuvenation. None of those
51:49
Speaker 1: stories is automatically about adrenochrome. What links them is a
51:52
Speaker 1: durable fantasy that someone powerful might literally feed on another
51:56
Speaker 1: person's vitality. When people blur direct references together with thematic resemblance,
52:02
Speaker 1: every story about vampires, immortality, or stolen life becomes another
52:06
Speaker 1: supposed clue. That isn't how you establish a historical connection.
52:11
Speaker 1: It's how an accusation becomes so elastic that any movie
52:14
Speaker 1: can be made to fit it. Long before anyone named Adrenochrome,
52:18
Speaker 1: European history included the accusation that Jews were secretly murdering
52:23
Speaker 1: Christian children to obtain their blood for ritual purposes. Historians
52:27
Speaker 1: call that false accusation blood libel, and its repetition over
52:31
Speaker 1: centuries helped justify persecution and violence against Jewish communities. The
52:36
Speaker 1: William of Norwich narrative in the 12th century is one
52:39
Speaker 1: notorious example of the tradition's emergence in medieval England. The
52:43
Speaker 1: modern adrenochrome story isn't simply identical in every detail. The
52:47
Speaker 1: groups accused, the supposed chemical, and the alleged purpose have changed.
52:52
Speaker 1: But the resemblance is important when a theory alleges secret
52:54
Speaker 1: groups torturing children and to extract a life-giving substance. Similarity
53:00
Speaker 1: is not proof that every contemporary believer intended to repeat
53:03
Speaker 1: an anti-Semitic myth. It is a reason to examine how
53:07
Speaker 1: all the accusations are recycled, including versions that use coded
53:10
Speaker 1: language about globalists or hidden cabals. Another historical figure who
53:15
Speaker 1: gets pulled into these discussions is Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian
53:19
Speaker 1: noblewoman associated with accusations of murderous cruelty. The later legend
53:23
Speaker 1: of bathing in blood to preserve youth has a complicated
53:26
Speaker 1: and substantially later textual history. We should not treat the
53:30
Speaker 1: familiar bloodbath image as a verified medical practice or a
53:34
Speaker 1: precursor to a discovered chemical extraction technique. Those older themes,
53:38
Speaker 1: powerful people consuming the lives of vulnerable people, secret groups
53:42
Speaker 1: accused of ritual murder and blood as means of preserving youth,
53:46
Speaker 1: provide recognizable storytelling patterns without establishing any single continuous criminal
53:51
Speaker 1: operation stretching across centuries. The resemblance matters for understanding folklore,
53:57
Speaker 1: but the continuity of a story is not evidence that
53:59
Speaker 1: a continuous criminal operation existed across those centuries. In the
54:04
Speaker 1: 20th century, the satanic panic added another layer. Sensational allegations
54:09
Speaker 1: of vast ritual abuse networks circulated during the 1980s and 1990s,
54:14
Speaker 1: sometimes supported by methods of investigation that produced unreliable accusations.
54:20
Speaker 1: We should approach that history with two truths at once.
54:23
Speaker 1: Abusive and exploitative crimes against children are very real, and
54:27
Speaker 1: victims deserve serious investigation and help. That does not make
54:31
Speaker 1: every claim of an organized supernatural ritual network true. Responsible
54:36
Speaker 1: investigation still requires evidence identifying actual acts and perpetrators, rather
54:41
Speaker 1: than assuming a worldwide network from the similarity of different allegations.
54:45
Speaker 1: There is also an entirely different scientific story that gets
54:49
Speaker 1: combined with adrenochrome, the study of aging in blood. In
54:53
Speaker 1: laboratory research, scientists have studied what happens when the circulatory
54:57
Speaker 1: systems of young and old animals are linked. This work,
55:01
Speaker 1: called heterochronic parabiosis, raised interesting questions about aging-related factors in circulation.
55:07
Speaker 1: Later commercial businesses offered infusions of plasma obtained from young
55:11
Speaker 1: donors as a proposed anti-aging treatment. This market was real
55:16
Speaker 1: enough for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to warn
55:18
Speaker 1: the public. On February 19, 2019, and again on December 6, 2024,
55:25
Speaker 1: the FDA cautioned that plasma collected from young donors was
55:28
Speaker 1: being marketed for anti-aging and other health claims without established
55:32
Speaker 1: clinical benefit for those uses, and it warned of transfusion risks.
55:37
Speaker 1: The agency emphasized that the existence of a clinical trial listing,
55:41
Speaker 1: or the fact that a business is FDA-registered, does not
55:45
Speaker 1: make such an intervention approved. And the category still cannot
55:49
Speaker 1: be collapsed. A mouse parabiosis experiment is not a human
55:53
Speaker 1: anti-aging treatment. A plasma transfusion is not an adrenal gland extraction.
55:58
Speaker 1: A questionable longevity business does not prove ritual homicide, and
56:01
Speaker 1: none of those subjects establish a connection to adrenochrome. Young
56:05
Speaker 1: plasma businesses, animal studies of aging, a fictional scene about
56:09
Speaker 1: a living gland, and an ordinary chemical catalog can all
56:12
Speaker 1: appear on the same screen. they are still different things.
56:15
Speaker 1: When these images are presented in quick succession, viewers may
56:18
Speaker 1: feel that a case has been built even when the
56:20
Speaker 1: supposed links are missing. The visual shortcut became especially powerful online,
56:26
Speaker 1: where an accusation could move farther and faster than the
56:28
Speaker 1: documents needed to check it. The internet phase is sometimes
56:32
Speaker 1: presented as the beginning of the adrenochrome story, when in
56:35
Speaker 1: fact it was the period in which older scientific language,
56:38
Speaker 1: sensational fiction, and much older blood and ritual accusations were
56:42
Speaker 1: assembled into a new narrative. Researcher Brian Freiberg, writing in
56:47
Speaker 1: Wired in July 2020, traced known adrenochrome harvesting posts to
56:53
Speaker 1: 2013 and 2014 on 4chan boards. Those early discussions referenced
56:58
Speaker 1: the older Thompson material and attached increasingly conspiratorial interpretations. That
57:04
Speaker 1: is a documented secondary reconstruction, not definite proof of the
57:08
Speaker 1: very first posts in all of internet history. For that,
57:11
Speaker 1: we'd need complete archives, preserved timestamps, and authenticated original captures.
57:17
Speaker 1: The motif circulated through communities involved with Pizzagate and then
57:21
Speaker 1: entered QAnon-adjacent narratives beginning in 2017. By 2020, it had
57:27
Speaker 1: become a sprawling mythology involving claims about celebrities, elite parties,
57:32
Speaker 1: supposedly secret supply chains, stage photos, and allegations that powerful
57:36
Speaker 1: individuals needed the substance to stay young. The shifting premises
57:40
Speaker 1: are revealing in themselves, because one version promises intoxication, another
57:44
Speaker 1: promises extended youth, and others invoke addiction, blood, adrenal tissue,
57:49
Speaker 1: or the pineal gland as if all these substances and
57:51
Speaker 1: body parts were interchangeable. The fact the story keeps changing
57:55
Speaker 1: is itself something worth investigating, because competing versions often require
58:00
Speaker 1: entirely different mechanisms and motives. If the origin of the
58:04
Speaker 1: drug requires a living adrenal gland, why do other versions
58:07
Speaker 1: insist on blood collected in the instant of fear? If
58:10
Speaker 1: its purpose is intoxication, where does the immortality effect enter?
58:14
Speaker 1: If a laboratory can produce the same molecule, why would
58:18
Speaker 1: a clandestine group adopt a violent and inefficient extraction process?
58:23
Speaker 1: The answers offered by modern conspiracy videos typically introduce another
58:26
Speaker 1: assertion rather than evidence. Beyond those shifting explanations, Viral accounts
58:32
Speaker 1: add theatrical details about $ 10, 000 vials, unusual glows, coded medical
58:38
Speaker 1: waste shipments on traceable donors in secret clinics. Those are
58:42
Speaker 1: specific claims that should be led to specific records. An
58:46
Speaker 1: authenticated shipment, chemical analysis, a court docket, named witnesses whose
58:51
Speaker 1: statements can be corroborated, or credible contemporaneous reporting. We've also
58:56
Speaker 1: encountered horror-style stories involving alleged hospital basements, missing children, in
59:01
Speaker 1: secret containers, offered without a verifiable institution, criminal case, or
59:06
Speaker 1: contemporary report. In the absence of that basic information, we
59:10
Speaker 1: cannot turn them into documented cases simply by repeating the
59:14
Speaker 1: setting and the date. Real historical abuses are serious enough
59:18
Speaker 1: without attaching an unsupported adrenochrome tail to them. So after
59:23
Speaker 1: the chemistry papers, the meeting records, the grants, the human experiments,
59:28
Speaker 1: The fiction and the internet history, what are we actually
59:31
Speaker 1: left with? First, a chemical that exists and can be
59:34
Speaker 1: made without taking it from a human being. Then a
59:37
Speaker 1: psychiatric hypothesis that real scientists investigated, sometimes by administering adrenochrome
59:42
Speaker 1: to human subjects and recording what followed. A real Scottish
59:46
Speaker 1: rights-sponsored research committee appears in that history, and Hoffa later
59:50
Speaker 1: recalled presenting the hypothesis to it in 1952. Rockefeller reports
59:55
Speaker 1: documented substantial funding for schizophrenia research in Saskatchewan, Huxley discussed
1:00:00
Speaker 1: the science, researchers challenged one another in print, and the
1:00:03
Speaker 1: classified 1955 intelligence report directly records adrenochrome being raised as
1:00:09
Speaker 1: a possible psychotogenic agent. Its surrounding discussion can now be
1:00:13
Speaker 1: examined alongside later medical history rather than inferred from a
1:00:17
Speaker 1: stray search result. None of those things need a secret
1:00:20
Speaker 1: murder narrative to be true. The CIA record now gives
1:00:23
Speaker 1: us something concrete. A visitor raised adrenochrome and related compounds
1:00:28
Speaker 1: during discussions of possible psychochemical tools, while his interlocutor questioned
1:00:32
Speaker 1: their usefulness. A separate line of research involved physicians administering
1:00:36
Speaker 1: the compound to patients and measuring electrical and psychological changes.
1:00:41
Speaker 1: These facts can occupy the same timeline without being the
1:00:44
Speaker 1: same program. The released papers document scientific inquiry, philanthropic support,
1:00:49
Speaker 1: government interest in psychochemicals, and troubling medical ethics questions. They
1:00:54
Speaker 1: do not document a human harvesting operation or anti-aging effect
1:00:58
Speaker 1: or a secret adrenochrome supply chain joining these institutions. The
1:01:02
Speaker 1: evidence is meaningful precisely because we can say what each
1:01:05
Speaker 1: document records, rather than asking one source to carry conclusions
1:01:09
Speaker 1: it never reached. And to me, the strangest part isn't
1:01:12
Speaker 1: the vial in the movie. It's how much real history
1:01:15
Speaker 1: a story can absorb without becoming any more true. Take
1:01:19
Speaker 1: a chemical with a disturbing name. Add a group of
1:01:21
Speaker 1: psychiatrists who thought it might explain madness. Add the Scottish Rite,
1:01:25
Speaker 1: Rockefeller money, CIA files, and an author with a talent
1:01:28
Speaker 1: for making fiction feel like a bad memory. Each piece
1:01:32
Speaker 1: brings its own atmosphere. Put them in the wrong order,
1:01:35
Speaker 1: leave out the qualifiers, and suddenly the audience thinks those
1:01:38
Speaker 1: pieces are chapters of the same criminal conspiracy. The trick
1:01:42
Speaker 1: isn't that somebody invented every detail. It's that the details
1:01:45
Speaker 1: don't prove the relationship the storyteller insists they have. That's
1:01:49
Speaker 1: why this history is worth following all the way back,
1:01:52
Speaker 1: instead of just starting with the most outrageous claim and
1:01:54
Speaker 1: picking a side. There were legitimate scientific arguments, experiments that
1:01:59
Speaker 1: deserve scrutiny, institutional connections that deserve to be named, and
1:02:03
Speaker 1: real abuses in the broader history of intelligence research. There
1:02:07
Speaker 1: was also a fictional living gland story that made its
1:02:09
Speaker 1: way into popular culture and eventually became an allegation about
1:02:13
Speaker 1: real people. The transformation from one to the other is
1:02:16
Speaker 1: the part nobody should be allowed to skip. because a
1:02:19
Speaker 1: theory doesn't become evidence just by surrounding itself with facts,
1:02:23
Speaker 1: and an interesting fact doesn't become less real because somebody
1:02:26
Speaker 1: used it to tell a lie. That's how you investigate
1:02:29
Speaker 1: the weird stuff without getting played by it. And that's
1:02:33
Speaker 1: the end of another Occult Rejects. Hope you all enjoyed,
1:02:35
Speaker 1: and until the next one.