pentagon's new drug weapons

from wired: They’ve got Skunk, they’ve got Special K, they’ve got Angel Dust, they’ve got Aceeeeed... and they’ve also got a whole pharmacy of extra special stuff that they’re not going to tell anyone about. They’re heavily armed, and the law can’t touch them. Because they’re the Pentagon’s own nonlethal chemical weapons developers.

While the CIA and military drug experiments of the 50s and 60s might be written off as just a phase they were going through, a new report from the Bradford Nonlethal Weapons Research Project shows that the interest in psychoactive substances has continued right up until the present day. It’s called ‘Off the Rocker’ and ‘On the Floor’: The Continued Development of Biochemical Incapacitating Weapons ...

In fact, it looks like the military are all set to start deploying a new generation of – well, as the report points out, they carefully avoid calling them chemical weapons. The preferred terms are nonlethal techniques, riot control agents, or, more commonly, calmatives.

How’s that? Calmative originally meant something quite specific, but researchers at the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center have started using their own definition:

A calmative agent can be defined as an antipersonnel chemical that leaves the victim awake and mobile but without the will or ability to meet military objectives or carry out criminal activity.