Consensus Trance

by Paul Bondarovski et al.

  1955–1957. In order to learn how cold weather affects human physiology, researchers give a total of 200 doses of iodine-131, a radioactive tracer that concentrates almost immediately in the thyroid gland, to 85 healthy Eskimos and 17 Athapascan Indians living in Alaska. They study the tracer within the body by blood, thyroid tissue, urine and saliva samples from the test subjects. No one explains the test subjects what is being done to them.

  1955–1965. As a result of their work with the CIA’s mind control experiments in Project QKHILLTOP, Cornell neurologists Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle begin the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (later renamed the Human Ecology Fund) to study “man’s relation to his social environment as perceived by him.”

  1956–1957. U.S. Army covert biological weapons researchers release mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and dengue fever over Savannah, Georgia, and Avon Park, Florida, to test the insects’ ability to carry disease. After each test, Army agents pose as public health officials to test victims for effects and take pictures of the unwitting test subjects. These experiments result in a high incidence of fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid among the two cities’ residents, as well as several deaths.

  1957. The U.S. military conducts Operation Plumbbob at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Operation Plumbbob consists of 29 nuclear detonations, eventually creating radiation expected to result in a total 32,000 cases of thyroid cancer among civilians in the area. Around 18,000 members of the U.S. military participate in Operation Plumbbob’s Desert Rock VII and VIII, which are designed to see how the average foot soldier physiologically and mentally responds to a nuclear battlefield.

  In order to study how blood flows through children’s brains, researchers at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia perform the following experiment on healthy children, ranging in age from three to eleven. They insert needles into each child’s femoral artery (thigh) and jugular vein (neck), bringing the blood down from the brain. Then, they force each child to inhale a special gas through a face mask. In their subsequent Journal of Clinical Investigation article on this study, the researchers note that, in order to perform the experiment, they had to restrain some of the child test subjects by bandaging them to boards.

  1957–1964. As part of MKULTRA, the CIA pays McGill University Department of Psychiatry founder Dr. D. Ewen Cameron $69,000 to perform LSD studies and potentially lethal experiments on Canadians being treated for minor disorders like postpartum depression and anxiety at the Allan Memorial Institute, which houses the Psychiatry Department of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The CIA encourages Dr. Cameron to fully explore his “psychic driving” concept of correcting madness through completely erasing one’s memory and rewriting the psyche. These “driving” experiments involve putting human test subjects into drug-, electroshock- and sensory deprivation-induced vegetative states for up to three months, and then playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements for weeks or months in order to “rewrite” the “erased” psyche. Dr. Cameron also gives human test subjects paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy 30 to 40 times, as part of his experiments. Most of Dr. Cameron’s test subjects suffer permanent damage as a result of his work.

  1958. Approximately 300 members of the U.S. Navy are exposed to radiation when the Navy destroyer Mansfield detonates 30 nuclear bombs off the coasts of Pacific Islands during Operation Hardtack.

  The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) drops radioactive materials over Point Hope, Alaska, home to the Inupiats, in a field test known under the codename “Project Chariot.”

  1961. In response to the Nuremberg Trials, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram begins his famous Obedience to Authority Study in order to answer his question: “Could it be that (Adolf) Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” Male test subjects, ranging in age from 20 to 40 and coming from all education backgrounds, are told to give “learners” electric shocks for every wrong answer the learners give in response to word pair questions. In reality, the learners are actors and are not receiving electric shocks, but what matters is that the test subjects do not know that. Astoundingly, they keep on following orders and continue to administer increasingly high levels of “shocks,” even after the actor learners show obvious physical pain.

  1962. Researchers at the Laurel Children’s Center in Maryland test experimental acne antibiotics on children and continue their tests even after half of the young test subjects develop severe liver damage because of the experimental medication. The U.S. Army’s Deseret Test Center begins Project 112. This includes SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense), which exposes U.S. Navy and Army personnel to live toxins and chemical poisons in order to determine naval ships’ vulnerability to chemical and biological weapons. Military personnel are not test subjects; conducting the tests exposes them. Many of these participants complain of negative health effects at the time and, decades later, suffer from severe medical problems as a result of their exposure.

  The FDA begins requiring that a new pharmaceutical undergo three human clinical trials before it will approve it. From 1962 to 1980, pharmaceutical companies satisfy this requirement by running Phase I trials, which determine a drug’s toxicity, on prison inmates, giving them small amounts of cash for compensation.

  1963. Chester M. Southam, who injected Ohio State Prison inmates with live cancer cells in 1952, performs the same procedure on 22 senile, African-American female patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in order to watch their immunological response. Southam tells the patients that they are receiving “some cells,” but leaves out the fact that they are cancer cells. He claims he doesn’t obtain informed consent from the patients because he does not want to frighten them by telling them what he is doing, but he nevertheless temporarily loses his medical license because of it. Ironically, he eventually becomes president of the American Cancer Society.

  Researchers at the University of Washington directly irradiate the testes of 232 prison inmates in order to determine radiation’s effects on testicular function. When these inmates later leave prison and have children, at least four have babies born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown, because researchers never follow up on the men to see the long-term effects of their experiment.

  In a National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) study, a researcher transplants a chimpanzee’s kidney into a human. The experiment fails.

  Researchers inject a genetic compound called radioactive thymidine into the testicles of more than 100 Oregon State Penitentiary inmates to learn whether sperm production is affected by exposure to steroid hormones.

  In a study published in Pediatrics, researchers at the University of California’s Department of Pediatrics use 113 newborns ranging in age from one hour to three days old in a series of experiments used to study changes in blood pressure and blood flow. In one study, doctors insert a catheter through the newborns’ umbilical arteries and into their aortas and then immerse the newborns’ feet in ice water while recording aortic pressure. In another experiment, doctors strap 50 newborns to a circumcision board, tilt the table so that all the blood rushes to their heads and then measure their blood pressure.

  1963–1966. New York University researcher Saul Krugman promises parents with mentally disabled children definite enrollment into the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, NY, a resident mental institution for mentally retarded children, in exchange for their signatures on a consent form for procedures presented as “vaccinations.” In reality, the procedures involve deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients, so that Krugman can study the course of viral hepatitis as well the effectiveness of a hepatitis vaccine.

  1963–1971. Leading endocrinologist Dr. Carl Heller gives 67 prison inmates at Oregon State Prison in Salem $5 per month and $25 per testicular tissue biopsy in compensa
tion for allowing him to perform irradiation experiments on their testes. If they receive vasectomies at the end of the study, the prisoners are given an extra $100.

  1964–1968. The U.S. Army pays $386,486 (the largest sum ever paid for human experimentation) to University of Pennsylvania professors Albert Kligman and Herbert W. Copeland to run medical experiments on 320 inmates of Holmesburg Prison to determine the effectiveness of seven mind-altering drugs. The researchers’ objective is to determine the minimum effective dose of each drug needed to disable 50 percent of any given population (MED-50). Though professors Kligman and Copeland claim that they are unaware of any long-term effects the mind-altering agents might have on prisoners, documents revealed later would prove otherwise.

  1964–1967. The Dow Chemical Company pays prof. Kligman $10,000 to learn how dioxin—a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange—and other herbicides affect human skin, because workers at the chemical plant have been developing an acne-like condition called chloracne and the company would like to know whether the chemicals they are handling are to blame. As part of the study, prof. Kligman applies roughly the amount of dioxin Dow employees are exposed to on the skin 60 prisoners, and is disappointed when the prisoners show no symptoms of chloracne. In 1980 and 1981, the human guinea pigs used in this study would begin suing prof. Kligman for complications including lupus and psychological damage.

  1965. As part of a test codenamed “Big Tom,” the Department of Defense sprays Oahu, Hawaii’s most heavily populated island, with Bacillus globigii in order to simulate an attack on an island complex. Bacillus globigii causes infections in people with weakened immune systems, but this was not known to scientists at the time.

  1966. The CIA continues a limited number of MKULTRA plans by beginning Project MKSEARCH to develop and test ways of using biological, chemical and radioactive materials in intelligence operations, and also to develop and test drugs that are able to produce predictable changes in human behavior and physiology.

  U.S. Army scientists drop light bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis through ventilation gates and into the New York City subway system, exposing more than one million civilians to the bacteria.

  1967. Continuing on his Dow Chemical Company-sponsored dioxin study without the company’s knowledge or consent, University of Pennsylvania prof. Albert Kligman increases the dosage of dioxin he applies to 10 prisoners’ skin to 7,500 micrograms, 468 times the dosage Dow official Gerald K. Rowe had authorized him to administer. As a result, the prisoners experience acne lesions that develop into inflammatory pustules and papules.

  The CIA places a chemical in the drinking water supply of the FDA headquarters in Washington, D.C., to see whether it is possible to spike drinking water with LSD and other substances.

  In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers inject pregnant women with radioactive cortisol to see if the radioactive material will cross the placentas and affect the fetuses.

  The U.S. Army pays prof. Kligman to apply skin-blistering chemicals to Holmesburg Prison inmates’ faces and backs, so as to, in prof. Kligman’s words, “learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process,” information which would have both offensive and defensive applications for the U.S. military.

  The CIA and Edgewood Arsenal Research Laboratories begin an extensive program for developing drugs that can influence human behavior. This program includes Project OFTEN, which studies the toxicology, transmission and behavioral effects of drugs in animal and human subjects, and Project CHICKWIT, which gathers European and Asian drug development information.

  Prof. Kligman develops Retin-A as an acne cream (and eventually a wrinkle cream), turning him into a multimillionaire.

  Researchers paralyze 64 prison inmates in California with a neuromuscular compound called succinylcholine, which produces suppressed breathing that feels similar to drowning. When five prisoners refuse to participate in the medical experiment, the prison’s special treatment board gives researchers permission to inject the prisoners with the drug against their will.

  1968. Planned Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas and the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education begin an oral contraceptive study on 70 poverty-stricken Mexican-American women, giving only half the oral contraceptives they think they are receiving and the other half a placebo. When the results of this study are released a few years later, it stirs tremendous controversy among Mexican-Americans.

  1969. Experimental drugs are tested on mentally disabled children in Milledgeville, Georgia, without any institutional approval whatsoever.

  1970. A year after his request under HR 15090, Dr. Donald MacArthur receives funding to begin CIA-supervised mycoplasma research with Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division and hopefully create a synthetic immunosuppressive agent. Some experts believe that this research may have inadvertently created HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

  Under order from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which also sponsored the Tuskegee Experiment, the free childcare program at Johns Hopkins University collects blood samples from 7,000 African-American youth, telling their parents that they are checking for anemia but actually checking for an extra Y chromosome (XYY), believed to be a biological predisposition to crime. The program director, Digamber Borganokar, does this experiment without Johns Hopkins University’s permission.

  1971. Stanford University conducts the Stanford Prison Experiment on a group of college students in order to learn the psychology of prison life. Some students are given the role as prison guards, while the others are given the role of prisoners. After only six days, the proposed two-week study has to end because of its psychological effects on the participants. The “guards” had begun to act sadistic, while the “prisoners” started to show signs of depression and severe psychological stress.

  1972. In studies sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, Dr. Amedeo Marrazzi gives LSD to mental patients at the University of Missouri Institute of Psychiatry and the University of Minnesota Hospital to study “ego strength.”

  1978. The CDC begins experimental hepatitis B vaccine trials in New York. Its ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men. Professor Wolf Szmuness of the Columbia University School of Public Health had made the vaccine’s infective serum from the pooled blood serum of hepatitis-infected homosexuals and then developed it in chimpanzees, the only animal susceptible to hepatitis B, leading to the theory that hiv originated in chimpanzees before being transferred over to humans via this vaccine. A few months after 1,083 homosexual men receive the vaccine, New York physicians begin noticing cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, mycoplasma penetrans and a new strain of herpes virus among New York’s homosexual community—diseases not usually seen among young men, but that would later be known as common opportunistic diseases associated with aids.

  1980. A study reveals a high incidence of leukemia among the 18,000 military personnel who participated in 1957’s Operation Plumbbob.

  According to blood samples tested years later for HIV, 20% of all New York homosexual men who participated in the 1978 hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point.

  Experimental hormone shots are given to hundreds of Haitian men confined to detention camps in Miami and Puerto Rico, causing the men to develop a condition known as gynecomastia, in which men develop full-sized breasts.

  The CDC continues its 1978 hepatitis B vaccine experiment in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis and Denver, recruiting over 7,000 homosexual men in San Francisco alone.

  The first AIDS case appears in San Francisco.

  1981. A deep diving experiment at Duke University causes test subject Leonard Whitlock to suffer permanent brain damage.

  The CDC acknowledges the existence of AIDS and confirms 26 cases of the disease—all in previously healthy homosexuals living in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles—again supporting the speculation that
AIDS originated from the hepatitis B experiments from 1978 and 1980.

  1981–1993. The Seattle-based Genetic Systems Corporation begins an ongoing medical experiment called Protocol No. 126, in which patients at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle are given bone marrow transplants that contain eight experimental proteins made by Genetic Systems, rather than standard bone marrow transplants. 19 human subjects die from complications directly related to the experimental treatment.

  1982. Thirty percent of the test subjects used in the CDC’s hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point.

  1984. SFBC Phase I research clinic founded in Miami, Florida. By 2005, it would become the largest experimental drug testing center in North America with centers in Miami and Montreal, running Phase I to Phase IV clinical trials.

  1985. A former U.S. Army sergeant tries to sue the Army for using drugs on him without his consent or even his knowledge in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669. Justice Antonin Scalia writes the decision, clearing the U.S. military from any liability in past, present or future medical experiments without informed consent.

  1987. Philadelphia resident Doris Jackson discovers that researchers have removed her son’s brain post mortem for medical study. She later learns that the state of Pennsylvania has a doctrine of “implied consent,” meaning that unless a patient signs a document stating otherwise, consent for organ removal is automatically implied.

  1988. The U.S. Justice Department pays nine Canadian survivors of the CIA and Dr. Cameron’s “psychic driving” experiments (1957–1964) $750,000 in out-of-court settlements, to avoid any further investigations into MKULTRA.