1947–1960: Sarin, soman and tabun, the deadly weaponized nerve gases developed by Nazi scientists and imported from Hitler’s chemical weapons arsenal, were tested on soldiers. Sarin was the focus of intense testing at Edgewood Arsenal; within one year (1947–1948) an Army study reported 10 to 14 casualties (Primary Sources, New…
Declassified Edgewood document AD351962 – LSD tests on “volunteers” states: “When this document has served its purpose, DESTROY it in accordance with AR 380-5. DO NOT return the document to U. S. Army Edgewood Arsenal Chemical Research and Development Laboratories.” (David Martin. Secret Drug Experiments, CNN, 2012; includes declassified videos)…
1943–1973: Operation Whitecoat conducted at Ft. Detrick on 2,300 Seventh Day Adventist draftees who volunteered in lieu of active duty on the battlefield. They were subjected to 157 experiments testing deadly pathogens and disease-causing agents, and experimental vaccine safety trials. Among the disease studied: Q fever, yellow fever, encephalitis, plague,…
CIA’s Project ARTICHOKE involved extreme methods of interrogation — “enhanced interrogation” — these included hypnosis, forced morphine addiction, drug withdrawal, the use of chemicals and electroshock aimed at inducing amnesia. The experiments induced paranoia and hallucinations in U.S. soldiers who were the unwitting guinea pigs. As Linda Hunt states, the…
James Stanley, a career soldier was one of these unwitting subjects who was given LSD in 1958. He suffered hallucinations, memory loss incoherence, and severe personality changes and exhibited uncontrollable violence. It destroyed his family, impeded his working ability, and he never knew why until the Army asked him to…
December, 1990: FDA issued a waiver from informed consent to permit the Department of Defense to use unapproved, experimental drugs and vaccines – e.g. anthrax vaccine on soldiers. This violated the foremost “absolutely essential” mandatory ethical principle defined by the Nuremberg Code which was promulgated by U.S. judges under the…
Following the compelling testimonies of the soldiers who had been subjected to poison gas experiments, Jay Katz, MD the distinguished Yale professor of law and medical ethics wrote a letter to the IOM Committee, strongly criticizing the IOM for severely limiting the Committee’s task to an evaluation of “cold scientific knowledge” without…
Following public hearings by the Committee of the IOM (1991) and by the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, the IOM Committee issued a seminal report, Veterans at Risk: The Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite (1993) which revealed that by the time WW II ended approximately 60,000 U.S. servicemen…
On May 6, 1994, the Senate Committee on Veterans held a hearing titled: “Is Military Research Hazardous to Veterans’ Health? Lessons from World War II, the Persian Gulf and Today.” Rudolph R. Mills had been in a gas chamber experiment when he was 18 years old. He testified: “I had…
In 2009, Gordon Erspamer, a San Francisco lawyer filed suit against the CIA and the US Army on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans of America and six former American soldiers who claim they are survivors of classified government tests conducted at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland between 1950 and…
The Veterans Affairs website demonstrates that the agency is a source for disinformation about unethical medical experiments conducted on military personnel. It states: From 1955 to 1975, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps conducted classified medical studies at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. The purpose was to evaluate the impact of low-dose chemical…
In 2012, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken in California ruled that a class action lawsuit on behalf of 100,000 veterans, who were used as guinea pigs to test hundreds of drugs, can proceed. The suit seeks to lift the oath of secrecy soldiers say they swore about what they went…
