WHAT IS IT?

 

For nearly 100 years, the U.S. military and intelligence communities experimented on American citizens, soldiers, children, convicts, and the citizens of other countries. The populace of the United States has been attacked by chemical and biological agents deployed by the CIA, drugged by doctors on the payroll of the army, sprayed with toxic chemicals by the navy, and injected with radioactive materials by the Atomic Energy Commission.

It began in 1900 in the Philippines. Army doctors infected five prisoners with the black plague (which, you’ll recall from high school history, killed pretty much everyone in the world in the 1300s), and induced a condition called beriberi in another twenty-nine. Beriberi causes chronic pain, insanity, heart failure, and death. Good times for everyone involved.

During World War I, more than a million casualties were caused by the deployment of chemical agents like mustard gas, phosgene gas, and chlorine gas—terrible weapons that can drown your lungs in blood, destroy your ability to breathe, or sear the flesh from your bones. The widespread use of chemical weapons during the war inspired military scientists to “test” protective gear by putting it on soldiers and making them sit in rooms filled with poison gas.

In the 1930s, the U.S. government fell in love with syphilis. It’s easy to understand: Syphilis was the haute couture of neurodegenerative sex diseases. For hundreds of years, it had run rampant among all the top celebrities. Oscar Wilde, van Gogh, Tolstoy, Ivan the Terrible, Batman (okay, well, not that Batman—John Batman, an Australian pioneer), Napoleon, and Al Capone all had the pox. Even Hitler got in on the action, though he only did it because it was popular and he was a poseur.

The Public Health Service (part of what is now the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) wanted to know how syphilis worked, so for forty years, starting in 1932, they tracked 400 African-American men with the disease. These men were the poorest of the poor, the sons and grandsons of slaves. Most of them were sharecroppers scraping by on miniscule plots for a crop that barely kept them fed and clothed. Many were illiterate, and all of them had become infected with the disease through ignorance.

The PHS, which had access to enough penicillin to treat every one of these men, allowed the disease to run its course. The men infected their wives, who infected their children. For four decades, these men and their families suffered from a disease that causes painful skin lesions, weakens the bones, rots the mind, and eventually kills. In exchange for their suffering, the men received free meals and medical care for anything other than syphilis.