Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson and members of the excellent witness history team as we present first-hand accounts of moments that have shaped our world.

Coming up, apartheid South Africa's chemical weapons program...

The most frequent instruction was to develop something with which you could kill an

individual which would make his death resemble a natural death.

Plus a pro-democracy pioneer in 1970s China.

I was prepared to have my head cut off for it. That's why it comes across as being very bold, because it was effectively my last statement.

Iraqi Jews escaping from Barthist repression and the campaign to legalize contraception in Ireland.

We were denounced from the pulpit. I mean they spoke about the legalization of contraception

as being something that would utterly change and destroy the

fabric of Irish society.

That's all coming up in the podcast, but we start with the story of a jaw-dropping broadcast experiment.

In 1955, a British member of parliament agreed to be filmed taking the hallucinogenic drug

Mescalin.

This tale comes from the twisted mind of Alex Last from the witness history team. So Alex, why this story?

Well Max, I was actually reading in the news about renewed medical research into the properties of psychedelic drugs

which are being investigated at the moment as possible treatments for depression and

things like that. So I thought I would look back at the history of experiments with hallucinogens and there of course

lots of experiments. Actually we'd previously done a witness episode on the CIA's experiments

with LSD for example.

But there was this one story that really caught the eye,

and it was this unusual experiment done way back in the socially conservative 1950s,

which involved a sitting British MP taking

...