Drug Induced Statements

No serious attempt appears to have been made to check the opinions of scientific authorities in regard to drug-induced statements, beyond a cursory survey in 1941, and the courts have gone their way without much information, often, as has been charged in other areas involving forensic psychiatry, substituting the claims of the more articulate and aggressive members of the profession for the consensus of knowledgeable opinion within the entire group. This paper, therefore, is an attempt to learn from a sample of psychiatrists the present state of professional belief about the legal value and reliability of barbiturate drugs in forensic matters.