The idea was a cold-turkey cure for endemic balance-of-payments problems, turning economic management on its head by floating sterling and letting the market dictate the exchange rate.
The men volunteered to be "guinea pigs" at the government research base Porton Down after being told scientists wanted to find a cure for the common cold.
Wherever governments seek to impose the social equivalent of cold-turkey abstinence austerity it generates such convulsive upheaval that the cure is worse than continued addiction.