Maybe It’s in the Water

On August 16, 1951, the quiet town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France was struck by a bizarre outbreak. Residents suddenly experienced severe symptoms: nausea, insomnia, and vivid hallucinations.

People reported seeing terrifying visions—snakes crawling out of their stomachs, fire engulfing their bodies, or blood dripping from the walls of their homes. Some cases were extreme: an 11-year-old boy attempted to strangle his grandmother, a man jumped from a window claiming he was an airplane, and others were restrained in straitjackets or chained to their beds.

By the end, at least 5 people died (some sources say 7), dozens were institutionalized, and over 300 were affected.

I remember as a 13-year-old kid reading about this in some magazine (I recall it was LIFE, but I could never find it since). For some reason, it terrified me and lived with me in my memory for 50-plus years. Recently, one of my readers turned me on to the story, and much has been written about it rather recently by other researchers.

As I remember the story, the outbreak was linked to bread from a bakery run by a local baker. Doctors and investigators concluded that the rye flour used in the bread was contaminated with ergot (claviceps purpurea), a fungus known historically for causing ergotism, or “St. Anthony’s Fire.” Ergot contains alkaloids similar to LSD, which could explain the hallucinations. This explanation was published in the British Medical Journal shortly after the event and became the prevailing theory for decades.

However, in 2009, Hank P. Albarelli Jr. reignited interest in the case with his book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, claiming the incident was not a natural occurrence but a deliberate CIA experiment. While researching the death of Frank Olson—a CIA biochemist who died in 1953 under suspicious circumstances after working on LSD-related projects—Albarelli uncovered documents suggesting the agency had spiked the town’s food with LSD as part of its Cold War mind-control program, MKULTRA (or its precursor, Project SPAN).

One key piece of evidence was a CIA memo labelled “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin – tell him to see to it that these are buried,” which implied a cover-up. Another document reportedly transcribed a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz Pharmaceutical official (Sandoz being the Swiss company that first synthesized LSD), where the official hinted that the outbreak was caused by diethylamide (the “D” in LSD), not ergot.

Albarelli argued that the CIA, in collaboration with the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, might have sprayed LSD into the air or contaminated local food to test its potential as a weapon for behavioural control. This theory aligns with known CIA activities during the 1950s, when the agency conducted numerous LSD experiments on unwitting subjects, including American servicemen and civilians.

Wouldn’t it figure, eh?

Seems the CIA has been involved in nearly every odd, mysterious, and dangerous global happening since its founding in 1947. Of course, the CIA theory has faced skepticism. But I won’t go into that. This article isn’t about that, nor is it really about the incident in France in 1951, it is about people going crazy, and how often the reason we go crazy is because of external circumstances, either natural or created by some nefarious entity like the CIA.

Jump forward to the present day. We may not yet be seeing snakes crawling out of people’s stomachs or folks jumping off the tops of buildings because they think they are airplanes, but we may be headed in that direction.

Sure, it is a bit of a copout to say that all the kookiness we are seeing these days is due to some substance-induced insanity. But it certainly would not be impossible. We have been talking and writing for years about the adverse effects of video gaming, cell phone scrolling, social media influencing, pornographic titillating, and educational brainwashing, but what if most of these things are actually symptoms rather than causes? Maybe our minds are being eaten away physically rather than only psychologically?

I cannot even begin to start naming the physical stuff we have been literally swallowing and breathing in for a century or so. Thousands upon thousands of things on that list: chemical toxins, foodstuff toxins, chemtrails, pharmaceuticals, on and on and on. There is so much stuff that it would be a miracle if the accumulation had not seriously affected our mental acumen and ability to even think at all. How could it not? It is a miracle we are not ALL walking zombies, with our entrails dribbling out and our glassy-eyed presence as symptoms of our decades of physical abuse.

Pretty picture, eh? Well, leave it to me to paint it for you.

I have spent hundreds of pages writing and pondering on the causes of the obvious mental collapse of the majority of people in the world. What could be the explanation for this acute loss of critical thinking? What could be causing the hatred and the polarization we are seeing? What could be the reason for the apparent stupidity displayed when following the fuzzy wagging tail in front of us, rather than using common sense in assessing nearly every situation we are faced with? Typically I have focused on the mental, psychological, and emotional abuses the psyche has endured for so long. These things certainly are having their impact, and maybe they are indeed the primary causal factor for the mental erosion we are seeing. But maybe not. Maybe it is the poison we have been ingesting that has rotted the human mind.

Mattias Desmet calls it mass psychosis and explains how that could be in his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Dr. Michael Nehls does focus on a physiological brain pathology but blames it more on stressors in the environment than chemical abuse. In his book The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom, he argues that humans are losing cognitive reasoning and critical thinking due to a deliberate, neurobiological attack on the brain, particularly targeting the hippocampus.

He suggests that modern stressors—such as fear-driven narratives (e.g., pandemics, climate change), social isolation, and possibly even biological factors like mRNA vaccine spike proteins—disrupt neurogenesis, the process of generating new nerve cells in the hippocampus. This region is crucial for memory, individuality, and critical thinking. He does mention here the spike protein, which is a result of the recent Covid jab. So that obviously is a chemical intervention.

Nehls posits that these external pressures shrink the hippocampus, replacing personal experiences with uniform, fear-based narratives, thus weakening our “mental immune system” and making us more susceptible to indoctrination. He frames this as a coordinated effort by technocratic elites to control populations by undermining independent thought.

As I said before, I have tended to focus more in the past on psychological and spiritual issues that could be the cause of all of this insanity. But, again, I wonder if those things are actually symptoms. Maybe we have simply been poisoned, and our cognitive function has deteriorated, thus causing all of the psychological anomalies. More than likely it is a combination of the two.

So, is the cause of this deterioration of the human condition, both physically and mentally, found in the water? Yes, quite possibly so, but not only in the water but in the air, in our food, our medicines, our schools, our media (both entertainment and news), in just about everywhere and everything we come into contact with. Maybe all of this, including the perpetrators of the Armageddon we are facing, is affected. Maybe everyone is crazy, everyone but us. For now.

And why is that? Who knows.

There are always some people immune to the poison, or immune to the disease. We have somehow escaped; maybe it will stay that way, and we will never be affected, but maybe it will eventually get us, too. Eat, drink and be merry. Row, row, row, your boat, gently down the stream.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

Todd Hayen PhD is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here

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