Effects of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) on Troops Marching."

[Doug C]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2010/12/01/131724898/lsd-testing

 

Archival footage from 1958. When the narrator said "... the second drill sergeant returns. He too had received LSD. He was no longer an effective leader", I had a healthy laugh.

[Lammycat]

The name "Monsanto" comes up in this. Using humans as guinea pigs is not cool. Those soldiers were likely waaay over-dosed and likely unwilling participants. Pretty frightening, actually.

[Doug C]

That was my intent, to scare people. Oy vey.

[Lammycat]

?

 

Just commenting on the article you linked. Oy vey?

[Lammycat]

I'm sure it was clean and all but the dosages were likely off the charts and the participants likely unprepared/unwilling. Not a good combination for someone and essentially cruel, imo. must've been frightening for a lot of the guys, too.

[Doug C]

I found it hilarious. The guys are all smiling and laughing. I didn't think about it on a deeper level. I can understand that the participants may have been unwilling or ill-informed and could have had bad trips but it still made me laugh. I am not frightened that it happening. I was just passing along something that I found humorous. I meant no offense.

[Lammycat]

No offense taken at all. There's humor in it, for sure. The human lab rat aspect is a little disturbing, is all.

[Ghost of Electricity]

i watched it earlier before any other posts had been made, and i can't watch it now, but i do remember the narrator saying they were all volunteers. my memory is highly fallible, however, possibly due to similar experiments that were carried out on me by myself.

[Lammycat]

Self-inflicted I have no problem. Lab/field experiments ain't cool.

[Guest Speed Racer]

Yeah, I have a huge problem with anyone doing testing on subjects without their consent; frankly I don't find it funny at all.

[Ghost of Electricity]

so, did he or did he not say they had volunteered?

[bjorn_skurj]

I doubt very much these troops were told, or even given a hint, of what would happen to them.

[Guest Speed Racer]

so, did he or did he not say they had volunteered?

 

From this article:

 

Project Bluebird researchers dosed over 7,000 U.S. military personnel with LSD, without their knowledge or consent, at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. More than 1,000 of these soldiers suffered from several psychiatric illnesses, including depression and epilepsy, as a result of the tests. Many of them tried to commit suicide.

[bjorn_skurj]

This is what that movie

 

 

Jacob's Ladder

 

 

is centered on.

[Mr. Heartbreak]

"You want a drill? You drill 'em."

[Golden Smoghead]

The video did in fact claim they were volunteers.

[gogo]

I wouldn't be surprised if they did in fact "volunteer" for this (maybe in exchange for getting out of some other assignment), but it seems unlikely to me that they had enough information to have given truly informed consent.

[Guest Speed Racer]

Yeah, volunteering to march for a day v. informed consent to participate in a drug trial are two very different things.

 

Yeah, volunteering to march for a day v. informed consent to participate in a drug trial are two very different things.

[caliber66]

Do we have any idea if these soldiers are part of Project Bluebird?

[Tweedling]

I know those face cramping grins oh too well. I would love to hear what the soldiers were saying.

[Ghost of Electricity]

I wouldn't be surprised if they did in fact "volunteer" for this (maybe in exchange for getting out of some other assignment), but it seems unlikely to me that they had enough information to have given truly informed consent.

Which is precisely the nature of an experiment. when a cancer patient volunteers to try a new drug as a part of a medical study, they don't have enough information to give truly informed consent either. After all, there's the possibility the drug might kill them quicker than the cancer.

 

If they were duped into it, there's no question that it is, at best, distasteful. However, there's no evidence that the soldiers in this video were a part of project bluebird, you're all just assuming (as someone has already pointed out).

 

Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Wait till you have all the information you need so if you participate in stone-throwing, you can participate in truly informed stone-throwing.

[Guest Speed Racer]

Which is precisely the nature of an experiment. when a cancer patient volunteers to try a new drug as a part of a medical study, they don't have enough information to give truly informed consent either. After all, there's the possibility the drug might kill them quicker than the cancer.

 

I worked for several years with an institutional review board at a major research university. If you think cancer patients don't have "informed consent," you are grossly wrong.

 

You cannot give consent if you do not know the nature of the substance you are being exposed to, which is what happened to these soliders. Before a drug or treatment reaches the stage of human trials, it is 99% percent done and the results are usually not surprising to the researchers. People don't just throw shit in a test tube and then give it to people. Volunteers know more about the drug or treatment before trials start than they do about any other drug or treatment they have been given throughout the course of their illness. Before a study can even be approved for human research it is reviewed by a hand-picked group of peers within the medical, scientific and/or behavioral community, professional compliance personnel, and communtiy members (lay people). The study is presented in all of its complex glory, and whittled down to a lay summary that the average potential participant will be presented with; both are scrutinized for accuracy and possible instances of deceit, and the lay summary is examined to ensure that it didn't leave out any gaping holes from the study.

 

The review process itself - not even the research leading up to it, just the review process for human subject research - usually takes about 2 months and take take up to (or probably more than) a year if the study does not mean a strict set of federal criteria.

 

Even studies that involve deceit must be reviewed and approved, and subjects must be informed of the nature of the study they are participating in, i.e., you may or may not be exposed to a hallucinagin. The hallucinagin carries with it the potential short-term side effects of xyz, and the possible long-term effects of abc.

 

Studies involving straight-up deceit have been illegal for about forty years, and unethical since forever. Doesn't meant the military doesn't engage in them, but the fact that you're comparing the average cancer study to this is outright wrong.

[Sweet Papa Crimbo]

I worked for several years with an institutional review board at a major research university. If you think cancer patients don't have "informed consent," you are grossly wrong.

 

You cannot give consent if you do not know the nature of the substance you are being exposed to, which is what happened to these soliders. Before a drug or treatment reaches the stage of human trials, it is 99% percent done and the results are usually not surprising to the researchers. People don't just throw shit in a test tube and then give it to people. Volunteers know more about the drug or treatment before trials start than they do about any other drug or treatment they have been given throughout the course of their illness. Before a study can even be approved for human research it is reviewed by a hand-picked group of peers within the medical, scientific and/or behavioral community, professional compliance personnel, and communtiy members (lay people). The study is presented in all of its complex glory, and whittled down to a lay summary that the average potential participant will be presented with; both are scrutinized for accuracy and possible instances of deceit, and the lay summary is examined to ensure that it didn't leave out any gaping holes from the study.

 

The review process itself - not even the research leading up to it, just the review process for human subject research - usually takes about 2 months and take take up to (or probably more than) a year if the study does not mean a strict set of federal criteria.

 

Even studies that involve deceit must be reviewed and approved, and subjects must be informed of the nature of the study they are participating in, i.e., you may or may not be exposed to a hallucinagin. The hallucinagin carries with it the potential short-term side effects of xyz, and the possible long-term effects of abc.

 

Studies involving straight-up deceit have been illegal for about forty years, and unethical since forever. Doesn't meant the military doesn't engage in them, but the fact that you're comparing the average cancer study to this is outright laughable.

 

All very valid points. But this study occurred 52 years ago. Things have change very dramatically since these experiments were conducted.

[Guest Speed Racer]

All very valid points. But this study occurred 52 years ago. Things have change very dramatically since these experiments were conducted.

 

Yes, but my point was that he was comparing this to the average cancer drug trial, which is laughable.

 

And...this is why things have changed.

[Ghost of Electricity]

I worked for several years with an institutional review board at a major research university. If you think cancer patients don't have "informed consent," you are grossly wrong.

 

You cannot give consent if you do not know the nature of the substance you are being exposed to, which is what happened to these soliders. Before a drug or treatment reaches the stage of human trials, it is 99% percent done and the results are usually not surprising to the researchers. People don't just throw shit in a test tube and then give it to people. Volunteers know more about the drug or treatment before trials start than they do about any other drug or treatment they have been given throughout the course of their illness. Before a study can even be approved for human research it is reviewed by a hand-picked group of peers within the medical, scientific and/or behavioral community, professional compliance personnel, and communtiy members (lay people). The study is presented in all of its complex glory, and whittled down to a lay summary that the average potential participant will be presented with; both are scrutinized for accuracy and possible instances of deceit, and the lay summary is examined to ensure that it didn't leave out any gaping holes from the study.

 

The review process itself - not even the research leading up to it, just the review process for human subject research - usually takes about 2 months and take take up to (or probably more than) a year if the study does not mean a strict set of federal criteria.

 

Even studies that involve deceit must be reviewed and approved, and subjects must be informed of the nature of the study they are participating in, i.e., you may or may not be exposed to a hallucinagin. The hallucinagin carries with it the potential short-term side effects of xyz, and the possible long-term effects of abc.

 

Studies involving straight-up deceit have been illegal for about forty years, and unethical since forever. Doesn't meant the military doesn't engage in them, but the fact that you're comparing the average cancer study to this is outright wrong.

 

 

My point was that medicinal drugs before FDA approval and after can be highly unpredictable. Admittedly, I pulled the word cancer out of thin air. But if you think that researches know everything about the drugs commercially available then you're taking a potentially dangerous leap of faith.

 

Chantix, for example, is an anti-smoking drug which has been commercially available with a prescription since 2006. At some point there was a sufferer of Ataxia who took it to quit smoking and reported that his balance improved (Ataxia affects balance amog a plethora of other things). The doctor's took note and clinical trial began using a drug, originally designed to help the user quit smoking, to treat a completely different and unrelated condition.

 

I'm relaying this to make the point that even after it's on the market there is a high degree of unpredictability, and implying that the results of a clinical drug trial are a foregone conclusion is ludicrous.

 

The example above is slightly incongruent with the discussion because a positive side effect was being studied. Side-effects are more often negative.

 

Another example closer to the original topic is mental illness. Very little is known about many of the drugs currently on the market, like how or why they work. They can in clinical testing come up with fairly good predictors of who it will work on and how long it will work before another treatment is needed, but the reality is that mentally ill patients are human chemistry sets, experiments in progress.

 

Which is to say nothing of the integrity of the FDA. You need to look no further than your the list of ingredients on your can of diet coke to question that.

 

I'm no apologist for the nasty shit the military has done/is doing, but the same issues play themselves out in many people's daily lives, albeit in a much more subtle manner, and noone bats an eyelash at it.