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11-12-2004, 04:57 PM
http://www.freep.com/news/nw/vets-bar111e_20041111.htm
Dangerous testing went beyond vets - Orphans, prisoners among those used.
BY DAVID ZEMAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
November 11, 2004
In February 1953, the Pentagon issued tough new rules to protect people who took part in experiments. Military researchers were required to warn volunteers of the dangers involved and have them confirm in writing that they were not coerced.
The directive was blunt, uncompromising and humane.
And two months later, it was gutted.
In April 1953, the military helped the CIA launch a Cold War program known as MKULTRA, in which unsuspecting servicemen and civilians were given LSD and other psychedelic drugs to study their use as truth serums.
This cycle of government deception continued well into the 1970s, with thousands of Americans exposed to nuclear radiation, plutonium injections, chemical sprays from airplanes, open-air nerve agents and mescaline in secret tests.
The tests flouted the principle of informed consent in the Nuremberg Code, drafted after the Nazi war-crimes trials in 1947 as an ethical standard for human experimentation.
Sometimes the victims were military personnel. Often they were from society's most vulnerable populations: mentally ill people, prison inmates, poor or illiterate people, pregnant women, children who were retarded or orphaned, drug addicts or prostitutes.
"You've got to ask yourself, how did these scientists sleep at night?" said David Rothman, director of the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine at Columbia University and an expert on the history of human research.
The scientists slept, said expert Jonathan Moreno, by convincing themselves that their tests ultimately would save lives.
"They came to view their work as a patriotic thing to do," said Moreno, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia and author of "Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans." "And they came to think that the volunteers knew what was going on, even if they didn't know all the details."
The Cold War tests mimicked many of the elements of the World War II chemical experiments. The soldiers exposed to LSD, for instance, were lured with promises of liberty passes and a guarantee that they could avoid guard or kitchen duty if they remained silent.
During the Cold War, however, the CIA largely funded the tests. The spy agency was feverishly studying mind-control techniques amid reports that captured U.S. troops were being brainwashed in the Korean War and that Soviet and Chinese scientists were testing truth serums.
In the U.S. tests, Americans were surreptitiously given the hallucinogens LSD or mescaline; PCP (angel dust), a highly addictive anesthetic that can cause delusions and mood swings, or BZ, a hallucinogenic incapacitating agent. Many of the people tested suffered hallucinations, flashbacks and permanent personality changes. In one notorious case, a CIA operative slipped LSD into the after-dinner drink of Army biochemist Frank Olson in 1953. He grew increasingly agitated and paranoid. So the CIA shipped Olson to New York City to see a doctor. In the predawn hours of Nov. 19, 1953, Olson crashed through his 10th-floor hotel window onto 7th Avenue below. His death was ruled a suicide.
Olson's family did not learn that he was given LSD until 1975. Relatives eventually received a $750,000 settlement and an Oval Office apology from President Gerald Ford. They continue to assert Olson was pushed to his death, a charge the CIA has denied.
The agency destroyed its MKULTRA records in 1972.
During the Cold War, the government also exposed tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen to radiation in tests designed to gauge troop readiness during nuclear attack. Recruits were positioned within a mile or so of a nuclear detonation and told to cover their eyes. They reported that even with their eyes shut they could "see the bones in their forearms at the moment of the explosion."
They were never warned of the long-term dangers of radiation exposure. Indeed, the majority were not even classified as research volunteers; they were merely soldiers engaged in training exercises, according to Moreno.
Studies later linked the "atomic soldier" tests with inoperable cancer or leukemia.
Government research abuse was not confined to the military.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, a series of scandals in academic and government research studies on institutionalized patients with mental illness, orphaned children, and the impoverished sparked outrage, most notably in 1972 when the Tuskegee syphilis study was exposed. In that case, government scientists deliberately withheld penicillin from illiterate black men for decades to study the course of the disease.
"There was a kind of vague understanding among researchers that anyone being taken care of in a charitable institution had a moral obligation to give something back to society," Moreno said.
The scandals produced wide-ranging reforms in federally funded testing, including the requirement of independent peer review.
In 1976, Ford signed an executive order banning intelligence agencies from using humans in drug experiments without their informed, written consent. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan later expanded the order to all human tests.
"What went on back in the 1950s and '60s could not go on now," Rothman said. "Are there aberrations? Yes. Are there guys who approach or cross the line? Yes. But you cannot now infect mentally retarded children in institutions with hepatitis to study it; it can't be done. In the war against disease, the lines are much more clearly drawn."
Dangerous testing went beyond vets - Orphans, prisoners among those used.
BY DAVID ZEMAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
November 11, 2004
In February 1953, the Pentagon issued tough new rules to protect people who took part in experiments. Military researchers were required to warn volunteers of the dangers involved and have them confirm in writing that they were not coerced.
The directive was blunt, uncompromising and humane.
And two months later, it was gutted.
In April 1953, the military helped the CIA launch a Cold War program known as MKULTRA, in which unsuspecting servicemen and civilians were given LSD and other psychedelic drugs to study their use as truth serums.
This cycle of government deception continued well into the 1970s, with thousands of Americans exposed to nuclear radiation, plutonium injections, chemical sprays from airplanes, open-air nerve agents and mescaline in secret tests.
The tests flouted the principle of informed consent in the Nuremberg Code, drafted after the Nazi war-crimes trials in 1947 as an ethical standard for human experimentation.
Sometimes the victims were military personnel. Often they were from society's most vulnerable populations: mentally ill people, prison inmates, poor or illiterate people, pregnant women, children who were retarded or orphaned, drug addicts or prostitutes.
"You've got to ask yourself, how did these scientists sleep at night?" said David Rothman, director of the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine at Columbia University and an expert on the history of human research.
The scientists slept, said expert Jonathan Moreno, by convincing themselves that their tests ultimately would save lives.
"They came to view their work as a patriotic thing to do," said Moreno, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia and author of "Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans." "And they came to think that the volunteers knew what was going on, even if they didn't know all the details."
The Cold War tests mimicked many of the elements of the World War II chemical experiments. The soldiers exposed to LSD, for instance, were lured with promises of liberty passes and a guarantee that they could avoid guard or kitchen duty if they remained silent.
During the Cold War, however, the CIA largely funded the tests. The spy agency was feverishly studying mind-control techniques amid reports that captured U.S. troops were being brainwashed in the Korean War and that Soviet and Chinese scientists were testing truth serums.
In the U.S. tests, Americans were surreptitiously given the hallucinogens LSD or mescaline; PCP (angel dust), a highly addictive anesthetic that can cause delusions and mood swings, or BZ, a hallucinogenic incapacitating agent. Many of the people tested suffered hallucinations, flashbacks and permanent personality changes. In one notorious case, a CIA operative slipped LSD into the after-dinner drink of Army biochemist Frank Olson in 1953. He grew increasingly agitated and paranoid. So the CIA shipped Olson to New York City to see a doctor. In the predawn hours of Nov. 19, 1953, Olson crashed through his 10th-floor hotel window onto 7th Avenue below. His death was ruled a suicide.
Olson's family did not learn that he was given LSD until 1975. Relatives eventually received a $750,000 settlement and an Oval Office apology from President Gerald Ford. They continue to assert Olson was pushed to his death, a charge the CIA has denied.
The agency destroyed its MKULTRA records in 1972.
During the Cold War, the government also exposed tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen to radiation in tests designed to gauge troop readiness during nuclear attack. Recruits were positioned within a mile or so of a nuclear detonation and told to cover their eyes. They reported that even with their eyes shut they could "see the bones in their forearms at the moment of the explosion."
They were never warned of the long-term dangers of radiation exposure. Indeed, the majority were not even classified as research volunteers; they were merely soldiers engaged in training exercises, according to Moreno.
Studies later linked the "atomic soldier" tests with inoperable cancer or leukemia.
Government research abuse was not confined to the military.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, a series of scandals in academic and government research studies on institutionalized patients with mental illness, orphaned children, and the impoverished sparked outrage, most notably in 1972 when the Tuskegee syphilis study was exposed. In that case, government scientists deliberately withheld penicillin from illiterate black men for decades to study the course of the disease.
"There was a kind of vague understanding among researchers that anyone being taken care of in a charitable institution had a moral obligation to give something back to society," Moreno said.
The scandals produced wide-ranging reforms in federally funded testing, including the requirement of independent peer review.
In 1976, Ford signed an executive order banning intelligence agencies from using humans in drug experiments without their informed, written consent. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan later expanded the order to all human tests.
"What went on back in the 1950s and '60s could not go on now," Rothman said. "Are there aberrations? Yes. Are there guys who approach or cross the line? Yes. But you cannot now infect mentally retarded children in institutions with hepatitis to study it; it can't be done. In the war against disease, the lines are much more clearly drawn."