Serum of truth is a term used to describe the use of certain medications, most commonly barbiturates such as sodium amital and sodium pental, to get people to give true statements about their past experiences. To put it simply, the truth serum is an interrogation using drugs such as sodium pental.
Sodium amytal is no longer used as a truth serum because people sometimes have false memories after the fact. Like all truth serum preparations, sodium amytal is a powerful sedative, and this side effect, combined with the incoordination and cognitive impairment it causes, is why soldiers no longer use it. Sodium amytal is sometimes used to treat insomnia and is often given intravenously, although it may come as a powder to take by mouth. Sodium pentothal (sodium pentothal is used as a general anesthetic in short-term procedures, to induce anesthesia before other anesthetics, as an adjunct to regional anesthesia (eg, spinal block), as an anticonvulsant, and for drug analysis.
Perhaps the most well-known barbiturate is sodium pental (also known as sodium thiopental), which is used not only as a general anesthetic, but also as a truth serum because of its marked reduction in inhibition and increased compliance Ability. The first barbiturates were used during treatment, but since the well-known chemical pental did not incapacitate the patient as they did, pental was an ideal drug to use in the program as Anti-anxiety medication to allow soldiers to talk and get well. In their experience, as long as the addiction is under control and their psychiatrist is serious about it. Just as Dr. Robert House in Dallas used scopolamine to relieve depression (for women in childbirth or unjustly incarcerated men with nothing to hide), pental sodium was found to be the perfect anxiolytic for depressed soldiers. Popular obstetric anesthetics are no longer used only as surgical anesthetics, and although this is their most common use, they are also sometimes used in such psychiatric subjects to get people talking.
Doctors have found that using a popular obstetric anesthetic makes it easier for people to talk about what happened, and it helps them feel better. One complaint raised by io9 is that the noblest origins of what has come to be known as “truth serum” have been lost in the noise of history and public opinion. In the early twentieth century, Dr. Robert House of Dallas focused on scopolamine, to women in labor, to induce sedation and drowsiness to better help women in labor during childbirth. In the first half of the twentieth century, thiopental was used by some psychiatrists to reveal hidden truths that patients were unable or unwilling to reveal. Numerous scientific reports suggest that you are more likely to tell the truth while under the influence of truth serum drugs, but drugs have other side effects that may cause you to say something to please someone else that is not necessarily the truth.
In fact, the use of such drugs does not guarantee authenticity; while a person may become chatty under the influence of a truth serum, or may relax inhibitions or even hallucinate, there is still a good chance that he will lie. Hopefully the idea is for them to babble out whatever you want to know before their brains catch up again. Not only is truth serum not very useful, it is also illegal in some situations, including interrogation. The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies oppose the use of truth drugs, preferring instead to use psychological methods to extract information from suspects or prisoners. A drug of truth (or serum of truth) is a drug used to obtain accurate information about prisoners from objects of resistance (most commonly police, intelligence or military organizations).
The generic term “truth serum” refers to any number of sedative/hypnotic drugs used to induce honesty in the subject. Although truth-inducing drugs have not been officially proven to be fully effective, they are widely used in various parts of the world. When such drugs were used in civil and criminal cases, they were not accepted by Western legal systems and jurists as genuine investigative tools. Some have accused the CIA of using truth drugs against them, most recently the suspicion of José Padilla’s al-Qaeda, the organization itself seems to doubt the usefulness of sodium thiopental as an interrogation tool.
There are rumors about the most powerful truth drug, codenamed SP-17, which the KGB uses during interrogations and to periodically confirm the loyalty of their agents to their KGB. A defector from the 12th Biological Weapons Division of the “Illegal” KGB Directorate (now part of the Russian SVR service) said that the truth drug, codenamed SP-17, was highly effective and widely used. In 2004, Novaya Gazeta, citing KGB General Oleg Kalugin, published an article stating that since the late 1980s, the First and Second Directorates of the KGB have used, in exceptional cases and mainly against foreign citizens, a soluble, odorless, color and taste, codenamed SP-117, an improved successor to similar drugs previously used by the KGB, which effectively pissed the subject off within 15 minutes of ingestion. Second, the WHO report suggests that while mind-altering drugs not permitted under the federal torture law are LSD, the legal status of the more traditional “truth sera” was not clear, other than the inadmissibility of information obtained under their influence in court.