Editorial: 鈥�Beyond the call of duty鈥�
FOR decades, in secret military experiments, tens of thousands of US soldiers were deliberately exposed to agents such as mustard gas, sarin and weaponised LSD. It was a voluntary programme, but few soldiers had any idea what they were letting themselves in for. Now the US Department of Defense (DoD) has been ordered to reveal the consequences of what the soldiers were subjected to.
They include then-20-year-old Franklin Rochelle, who in 1968 was stationed at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. After inhaling an odourless gas, he hallucinated for three days straight. He saw insects under his skin that he tried to kill with a razor.
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Last week, a Californian district judge ruled that Rochelle, along with tens of thousands of other veterans who had taken part in experiments since 1920 must, from now on, be informed by the DoD of any new information that comes to light about the experiments or their effects.
However, the judge also ruled that veterans are not entitled to additional government-funded medical care for any . They must wait their turn for standard care from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Applying for this care, however, is a difficult and lengthy process, says Ben Patterson, a lawyer representing the veterans, and many people never receive the care they need.
Edgewood Arsenal was the largest US centre for this kind of research, where the DoD would test new chemical weapons and potential treatments. The deadly nerve agent sarin, for instance, was developed in Germany during the second world war, but its effects were unknown. 鈥淚t was important to know how to make soldiers at least aware that there鈥檚 an agent in the air,鈥� says James Ketchum, the army psychiatrist who directed human research at Edgewood during much of the 60s and 70s.
Between 1958 and 1975, 740 people at Edgewood were exposed to VX gas and 246 to sarin. These experiments, Ketchum says, yielded breakthroughs such as developing atropine as a treatment for sarin or VX gas poisoning, and a drug called pyridostigmine, which enhances atropine鈥檚 protection. 鈥淚f we wanted to help the people of Syria defend against nerve agents, we would send in medical crews with atropine and gas masks,鈥� Ketchum says. A related drug, called physostigmine, later ended up in the emergency room as a treatment for drug overdoses, he adds.
The DoD and the Central Intelligence Agency 鈥� who funded many of the experiments at Edgewood 鈥� were also interested in developing non-lethal chemical weapons and 鈥渃almative agents鈥� that would incapacitate an enemy. Researchers found, for instance, that a hallucinogenic drug known as BZ would knock a person out for three days, and small doses of LSD effectively destroyed a soldier鈥檚 ability to carry out simple drills.
In 1975, the Edgewood experiments were shut down. Related documents were declassified in the 1990s, but one of the plaintiffs in the recent lawsuit, Eric Muth, says he still doesn鈥檛 know all of the gases he was exposed to, because some of the information was redacted in his records. 鈥淭oday I鈥檓 a 100-per-cent-disabled veteran as a result of my foolishness,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 thought I was omnipotent. I wanted to be a hero.鈥�
鈥淭oday I鈥檓 a disabled veteran as a result of my foolishness. I wanted to be a hero鈥�
A states that Muth has post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), among other mental and physical health problems. Other plaintiffs have similar stories, blaming the experiments for a wide range of conditions that include Parkinson鈥檚 disease, stroke and cancer.
Research has since linked sarin exposure to anxiety and PTSD, and pyridostigmine to brain damage in some people, yet very little is known about the long-term effects of many of the chemicals tested. Expert witnesses for the plaintiffs concluded that the veterans鈥� symptoms could be related to the testing, yet it is virtually impossible to tie any condition definitively to a test performed decades previously.
In the 1980s, the US National Research Council (NRC) surveyed a group of former test subjects provided to them by the army. The resulting found that these veterans had no significant differences in mortality rates or medical conditions compared with their non-tested peers. But Peter Spencer of Oregon 91色情片 and Science University in Portland, who co-chaired the NRC study, says that the study was severely limited.
For instance, the NRC had no records from the army on whether the subjects鈥� brains were ever deprived of oxygen, which could have caused brain damage. And because many people were exposed to multiple agents, it was difficult to separate the effects. It is also not clear whether the sample of test subjects was truly random, Spencer says, and no follow-up research has been done. 鈥淲e know virtually nothing about the long-term effects of short-term exposures,鈥� he says.
Many of the soldiers might not have volunteered had they known what they would be exposed to. Yet the DoD says it had to keep its experiments secret as a matter of national security, making it impossible for volunteers to give informed consent. 鈥淎 lot of things you do in the armed forces don鈥檛 require specific consent,鈥� says bioethicist Jonathan Moreno at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Ketchum claims that for the time, the army was as good as, if not better than, most clinical researchers in informing subjects. That could well be true, Moreno says; it wasn鈥檛 until the 1960s that the US National Institutes of 91色情片 began to establish a consistent method of informing test subjects.
Today, DoD researchers follow standard informed consent procedures. As for Edgewood Arsenal, now called , a spokesman says it no longer does any experiments with human subjects.
But is it ethical to use the knowledge gained to improve medical treatments today, considering how many people may have suffered and, in some cases, died as a result of experimentation? Data from such tests should be used and published, says Moreno. 鈥淏ut it should say explicitly that what was done is wrong and that the results will be used as a memorial to the sacrifice of the original subjects.鈥�
Behind closed doors
In 1968, at the peak of the cold war, soldiers were lining up to volunteer for experiments at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland to help ward off the Soviet threat (see main story).
Franklin Rochelle volunteered to breathe odourless gas through a mask. He hallucinated for three days about being 1-metre tall and running from a giant rabbit, and was convinced he had bugs under his skin. Years later, he discovered that he had been treated with a chemical variant of tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in cannabis. It is one of hundreds of non-lethal chemicals that the US Department of Defense tested on 7800 soldier volunteers at Edgewood between 1955 and 1975.
Another volunteer, David Dufrane, described 鈥渟wallowing entire cities鈥� and feeling concrete in his mouth after receiving a hallucinogen. He still has flashbacks and headaches that he believes are related to the test.
At Fort Detrick in Maryland, researchers were using soldiers in biological weapons testing. Here, dozens of people were exposed to pathogens that cause diseases such as tularemia, which attacks the nervous system. The CIA also funded several human experiments in an attempt to develop truth serums, drugs that cause temporary memory loss and drugs that make you age faster.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淕overnment vs guinea pig鈥�
