6 Unbelievably Appalling Experiments The US Government Has Carried Out On Its Own People
It should be no secret that the government has had its hand in some very disgraceful dealings, notably, even when it comes to its own citizens.
So, let's take a look back at some human experiment atrocities the US government has admitted to committing against its own people:
1.Project MK-Ultra:
In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA was adamant that the communists had discovered some way to control the human mind. So, in response, they created Project MK-Ultra in the hopes of secretly creating a mind-control drug to use against enemies. Chemist Sidney Gottlieb created and ran the decade-long operation during its 1953–1964 lifespan. During this time, he and the CIA partnered with over 30 universities and institutions to run some of these tests and experiments on completely unknowing civilians.
The things they were doing were downright obscene, like dosing people with LSD without their consent to see how they'd react. The lead of the program, Sidney Gottlieb, is literally credited for introducing the US to LSD from these experiments. During the program's early years, it was their primary focus. They were (unbeknownst to subjects) administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, government agents, people with mental illnesses, and members of the general public just to study their reactions. Some participants consented, but that meant they received even more extreme treatment. Some volunteers were even given LSD for 77 days straight.
Other experimentation included hooking up patients to an IV barbiturate in one arm and amphetamine in the other. So, when the barbiturate was administered and caused the patient to fall asleep, the amphetamine would wake them up, causing them to ramble incoherently. Asking questions and getting something useful only proved itself part of the time. Drugs like heroin, psilocybin, and morphine were also used in experiments. Hypnosis was used on these poor people, and to make matters worse, they took the nonsense to Canada, enlisted, and funded a scientist to continue additional experiments on people there.
In 1973, CIA director Richard Helms ordered that all MK-Ultra files be destroyed. After a New York Times exposé and a congressional investigation, in the summer of 1975, the US admitted to conducting human mind-control experiments on unknowing citizens and that one person had died as a result.
2.Biological Weapons tested on American soil:
Between 1949 and 1974, the US government carried out a disturbing amount of biological weapons tests to determine America's vulnerabilities to biological warfare. In the 20 years between 1949 and 1969, the US conducted hundreds and hundreds of biological warfare tests on unknowing and unsuspecting populations. Cities were sprayed with bacterial tracers or stimulants that the Army thought were "harmless at the time," but no matter how "harmless" they thought they were, they weren't using it on themselves.
They were spraying entire cities like St. Louis and San Francisco and even focusing on more concentrated areas, like spraying the New York City subway system or Washington National Airport. They also released deadly nerve agents (chemicals that affect your nervous system) in Alaska and sprayed bacteria over Hawaii. They even tested the idea in different countries; in conjunction with Canada and Britain, the US was able to test even more nerve agents on unsuspecting populations. The government has also noted that the long-term effects of these experiments were often hard to determine. Sometimes, people were harmed directly after, and sometimes, the effects would take years. Regardless, these actions clearly hurt a massive amount of people in known and unknown ways.
3.The "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male":
In 1932, the United States Public Health Service launched a study with the Tuskegee Institute to "record the natural history of syphilis." The study started with 600 Black men, 399 who were confirmed to have syphilis, 201 who did not (the control group), and not one of them gave their informed consent. Researchers on the project told these men they were being treated for "bad blood," (which, back then, could mean several different ailments) in exchange for free medical exams, meals, and burial insurance. Mind you, we're talking about primarily poor, Black, illiterate sharecroppers who, of course, were happy to hear they would be getting benefits they could only dream of.
By 1943, off the backs of these unknowing Black men, no doubt, penicillin became the drug of choice to help treat syphilis; however, none of the men in this trial were given, nor were they offered, the medicine to cure their syphilis. In 1972, Associated Press journalist Jean Heller broke the story that a 40-year study had been done on unknowing Black men in the rural south on their ability to handle untreated syphilis. Dozens of men died, and to top it all off, they never told anyone how syphilis could be contracted and spread, so many of these men's wives, girlfriends, and children had also been infected.
The study was promptly shut down in 1972 after word got out; 40 years after its start. In 1973, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of all participants, resulting in an (in my opinion, not nearly substantial enough) $10 million out-of-court settlement. By 1975, participants and their wives, widows, and children were a part of the Tuskegee Health Benefit Program, which provided all necessary medical care to those involved with the experiment. In 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a formal presidential apology for the "study."
The last "participant" of the experiment died in January 2004, and the last widow receiving benefits died in 2009. Participants' children continue to receive health and medical benefits.
4.The Manhattan Project:
The Manhattan Project was a top-secret government program run during World War II that "ran" from 1942–46. The program was created in a rush effort for America to develop and deploy the first atomic weapons before the Nazis could. "Health and safety," especially for workers, was a big deal for the project, so they created an entire team of medical professionals dedicated to researching the effects of these hazardous materials on humans and improving safety techniques.
Over the next 30 years, (yes, you read correctly: 30 years), thousands of unsuspecting Americans (and non-Americans) were experimented on with chemicals like plutonium, radioactive iron, and Lord knows what else in the doctors', scientists', and government's effort to win the eternal arms race. In Tennessee, 829 pregnant women were served "vitamin cocktails" containing radioactive iron...regularly. At a school in Massachusetts, 73 children with disabilities were given oatmeal laced with radioactive isotopes. In 1993, journalist Eileen Welsome published her findings in an article titled "The Plutonium Experiment" that exposed how federal government scientists in the 1940s had injected 18 unsuspecting people from hospitals around the nation with plutonium. There are even documents that suggest J. Robert Oppenheimer approved these injections during his time working on the atomic bomb because the workers of Los Alamos labs were fighting severe contamination and health risks.
One of them was a 4-year-old Australian boy the US government brought back to the US in 1946 just to experiment on. He suffered from terminal bone cancer and died eight months after they injected him and released him from the hospital with no follow-ups. Another was a man named Elmer Allen, whose story seems to boil down to "wrong place, wrong time." After a train accident left his leg in bad shape, he headed to the hospital for help. He even had his suspicions the government was experimenting on him due to the high traffic coming in and out of his room, telling his friend as he lay in the hospital, "They guinea-pigged me."
5.Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study:
In 1949, in conjunction with the University of Chicago and the US Army, about 4,000 inmates over 29 years at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois participated in a study to find a malaria cure under director Dr. Paul Carson. Similar research was also being done at two other prisons in the nation.
Prisoners who voluntarily signed up to participate were paid $30–$50 per month and were told that the time served in the study would also take time off their prison sentence. Here's the catch: Dr. Carson stated that the inmates were told in "layman's terms" what the study would entail. Yeah, that could mean anything. Most volunteers were bitten by malaria-carrying mosquitos and assured they would be cured of the disease and could leave whenever they'd like.
I don't know about you, but not only is it unethical to run experiments on people period, but to do it under the guise of "here's a healthy sum of money and time off of your jail sentence" for people locked in a cement block with bars for months on end, seems quite shoddy. I would do a lot to get myself out of that situation, too. There's also no way to confirm what the inmates were actually told to agree to this. While Carson claims no one died from the thousands of malaria patients he created, it doesn't make the whole project any less immoral. That was made clear when the Illinois Department of Corrections finally shut down testing in 1974. No matter how you want to spin it, it's clear why they chose a prison to find "volunteers" to infect.
6.Infecting Children with Hepatitis at the Willowbrook State School for Children:
The Willowbrook State School was a school for children with intellectual disabilities in Staten Island. From 1956 until 1971, residents, aka the children, were being infected with live strains of hepatitis or made to drink chocolate milk that was mixed with the feces of already infected children. It was a research study conducted by Dr. Saul Krugman, who set out to distinguish between the strains of hepatitis and to develop a vaccine. Dr. Krugman was a respected pediatrician who carried out his study on more than 50 children ages 5 to 10.
Finding a vaccine was vital for the US during World War II. More than 50,000 troops had been affected by the disease, so the Surgeon General's Office created the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board to fight hepatitis along with other common diseases. Well, Krugman rushed and let them know he wanted to develop a vaccine for hepatitis and knew the "perfect" place to do it. Willowbrook was already overcrowded and ravaged by disease.
While I want to point out that parents volunteered their children for the experiment, I also want to clarify that Willowbrook was one of the only places in the area for children with severe disabilities. Because of that, there was a very long waitlist, and Krugman played toward that. He told parents their child could skip the line and be housed in a much nicer wing if they enrolled in the study. He coerced people who were already in a highly vulnerable circumstance and made it seem that because Willowbrook was already ridden with hepatitis, he was doing their child a favor by potentially giving them a vaccine.
In 1972, journalist Geraldo Rivera snuck onto the grounds to expose the inhumane conditions at Willowbrook after being tipped off by one of the school's doctors. That same year, Dr. Krugman became the president of the American Pediatric Society.
Do you know any other experiments the US has conducted that blew your mind?
