Narco Analysis

NARCOANALYSIS AND TRUTH SERUM

- M. Sivananda Reddy, SP, Cyber Crimes, CID.

Narcoanalysis: Psychotherapy conducted while the patient is in a sleeplike state induced by barbiturates or other drugs, especially as a means of r eleasing r epr essed feelings, thoughts, or memories. Its use is restricted to circumstances when there is a compelling, immediate need for a patient's responses. Truth serum: It is a barbiturate or drug administered in milder doses to make the recipient become very communicative and share his thoughts without hesitation. The recipient is likely to lose his inhibition, and therefore he is more likely to tell the truth. The search for effective aids to interrogation is probably as old as man's need to obtain information from an uncooperative source and as persistent as his impatience to shortcut any tortuous path. In the annals of police investigation, physical coercion has at times been substituted for painstaking and timeconsuming inquiry in the belief that direct methods produce quick results. Sir James Stephens, writing in 1883, rationalizes a grisly example of "third degree" practices by the police of India: "It is far pleasanter to sit comfortably in the shade, rubbing red pepper in a poor devil's eyes than, to go about in the sun hunting up evidence." More recently, police officials in India and few other countries have turned to drugs for assistance in extracting confessions from accused persons, drugs which are presumed to relax the individual's defenses to the point that he unknowingly reveals truths he has been trying to conceal. This investigative technique, however humanitarian as an alternative to physical torture, still raises serious questions of individual rights and liberties.

The use of so-called "truth" drugs in police work is similar to the accepted psychiatric practice of narcoanalysis; the difference in the two procedures lies in their different objectives. The police investigator is concerned with empirical truth...