WHY IS IT WATCHING YOU?

 

Human experimentation is almost always done in the name of the people. MKULTRA worked to develop interrogation, brainwashing, and counterintelligence techniques. Americans were attacked and tortured, ostensibly to make America safe from Communist infiltration. For half a century, we lived under a constant existential threat; long enough that these days, if we don’t feel like someone is planning to kill us, we start to get really uncomfortable.

The government, we are told, needs to experiment on people to keep them safe. They need to know exactly how the communists/terrorists/South American drug gangs will come after us so that they can defend us. They say that the only way they can protect us from torture, brainwashing, and biological attack is to be better at it than the bad guys.

The motivations of corporations are less pure but also less perverse. There was a time when companies felt a patriotic duty to team up with the government and help fund tests like the radioactive oatmeal project, but that time is long past. These days, everything contributes to the bottom line. When millions or billions of dollars are at stake, the health and safety of individuals quickly becomes immaterial. If feeding rat poison to children will potentially open up a new profit center, those kids quickly become commodities.

Modern human trials are run primarily by pharmaceutical companies. The prescription drug industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Being the first to bring a new drug to market can mean billions more. In a room packed with that much money, there is no space for concern about the well-being of other people.

Fortunately, pharmaceutical companies operate under extremely strict testing guidelines, but the same cannot be said of tests run on substances without medical applications. When Dow wants to test a chemical on human beings, no government funding of the test means no government oversight. If the results are never submitted to the government, the test and its consequences could remain secret forever.