Dangerous testing went beyond vets. Orphans, prisoners among those used.

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Dangerous testing went beyond vets

 

Orphans, prisoners among those used

 

November 11, 2004

 

BY DAVID ZEMAN

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

 

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. "