Tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth, Conium. Conium was slated to become America's next top vice. As a part of Project MK-Ultra, helmed by the CIA, the government set out to harness human emotions. Given that emotion is just a complex series of neurons in the brain firing it should be theoretically possible for us to synthetically induce these emotions. The power to control emotions was invaluable to the government and testing on the theory began immediately. The project first saw success in lab rats. The scientists would hook up each rat to one of two machines and send electrochemical signals directly to its brain. One machine would send signals that induce fear and agony and the other would induce complete euphoria. It didn’t take long for the rats to associate each machine with their respective emotions. Rats hid and cowered at the mere sight of the fear machine and whined and begged for their next hit of the euphoria machine.

After the experimentation on the rats was concluded, the CIA was ready to introduce this newly acquired power to the small town of Lincoln County, Nevada. Lincoln was exactly what they were looking for, having a population of just over a thousand and several hours from the nearest town, it was perfect for covering up if things went south. By the time it was introduced to Lincoln the CIA shrunk the machines down to just a patch that was placed on the temple. The first shipment of Conium arrived in the town on January 19, 1972, and continued weekly for about a year.

After a crash course on how to use Conium, the citizens of Lincoln were left largely to their own devices. Aside from bimonthly check-ins to see how they were holding up, the CIA kept intervention to a minimum. Although some people in town were skeptical at first, those who were brave enough to try it were hooked instantly. With just a single patch a person could be left in a state of dreamlike euphoria for hours. The subjects waited eagerly each week for the CIA delivery truck to return to the town. Each shipment came with enough patches for each person to get one a day for the week. Those who remained skeptical sold their patches to the rest of the town. Those using would give up anything for a couple of extra patches. Eventually, the one-a-day supply of Conium wasn’t enough to hold over the citizens’ insatiable desire for the week. The addicts took to any measure they had to in order to get some extra patches. During their check-ins, the users reported that the patches effectiveness was beginning to wear off and asked for more and larger doses of Conium. Families stopped reporting deaths and took the patches of the recently deceased as their own. Lincoln County couldn’t get enough of those little patches.

Project MK-Ultra was halted in 1973 along with Lincoln’s steady supply of Conium. What the CIA didn’t tell the people of Lincoln before they began the experiment was that after the lab rats stopped receiving a regular dosage of Conium they became frenzied, psychotic, and suicidal. Stripped from their daily jolt of euphoria the citizens of Lincoln had similar effects from the Conium withdrawals. The small town had erupted into complete anarchy. Some previous users were left in a vegetative state of psychosis while others began doing anything in their power to replicate the euphoria of Conium. The quiet town had always been a friendly neighborhood environment, Lincoln degraded into a crime-ridden drug sanctuary. Heroin and cocaine were the main substitutes used by Lincoln’s citizens. Because the Conium use was so widespread, the town was completely crippled by the withdrawal symptoms. Ninety percent of people in Lincoln were daily users of the Conium and as a result, the town’s infrastructure began to crumble. With almost nobody to protect or maintain the town, it began to wither away into a husk of its former self. The roads were empty and decrepit, shops and services began to shut down and the local police stopped responding to calls. Before the effects got out of hand and the American public could learn about what happened in Lincoln, the entire town “succumbed to an isolated outbreak of a terminal illness” and their story died with them.

Though Project MK-Ultra had come to a close, experimentation with Conium was not yet over. Desperate for an advantage in the Vietnam War, Nixon ordered that Conium be used as an interrogation technique against captured Vietnamese soldiers. The moment it was introduced it became the most powerful torture technique in human history, far surpassing any physical or psychological torture techniques. Victims of Conium torture were completely helpless. It didn’t take long after a soldier was connected to one of the fear-inducing machines to start singing. Soldiers reported having nightmarish hallucinations, seeing visions of their family and friends being brutally assaulted, disturbing and indescribable creatures, and visions of themselves being killed or tortured in hell. Without fail, all of the soldiers that were unfortunate enough to have fallen victim to the torture said anything they could to stop the overwhelming fear. However, the torture didn’t end with the machine turning off. Most of the soldiers that were tortured experienced some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Several recounted that they frequently experienced the visions in flashbacks and nightmares, with a few soldiers saying the hallucinations were persistent, invading their personal life and never fading. However, the conium was not enough to win Nixon’s war, and if anything contributed to the many reasons it was a failure. It’s not known whether or not the CIA continues to use Conium as a form of torture, however, given how dire the war on terrorism has become it would not too farfetched.

When the atomic bomb was first discovered and used in war it was a firecracker in comparison to modern weapons. Little Boy, the first nuclear bomb ever dropped in war, was devastating, killing an estimated 90,000-146,000 people from either the initial blast or the resulting nuclear fallout. The Tsar Bomba was the most powerful weapon ever detonated and it was tested by the Soviet Union just 16 years after the detonation of Fat Man and Little Boy in Japan. The explosion from Little Boy was equivalent to about 15 kilotons of TNT. The Tsar Bomba was equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT, about 3,300 times stronger, and the resulting mushroom cloud rose to over 4 times the height of Mount Everest. Much like the atomic bomb, Conium will cement itself in history as one of man’s most damning weapons, never to be used again because of the implications and threat to global welfare that it carries with it. The ability to induce emotions is far too dangerous for man.  If Conium fell into the wrong hands, global enslavement would be inevitable. Conium should have never been discovered. Hopefully, the power and influence attainable through the use of Conium is not tantalizing enough to lure someone into the end of the world.