Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten
Review from the Erowid Library
© 2006/2007
J.S. Ketchum
J.S. Ketchum
Documenting a Lost Decade of Clinical Research
While Sim’s malfeasance occurred before Ketchum’s arrival at Edgewood, this admission is hard to square with the unqualified defenses of Edgewood Arsenal that appear in this book. Some of these issues are simply not black and white, and I would have liked to have seen more shades of gray.
Ketchum rightly rejects media reports linking Edgewood to CIA experiments. Although Ketchum himself does not criticize the book, Lee and Shlain’s widely-read Acid Dreams describes Edgewood side-by-side with MKULTRA and makes little effort to distinguish between them. Those authors scarcely note that the Edgewood experiments were an Army operation investigating non-lethal incapacitants, that experiments conducted at Edgewood overwhelmingly used informed volunteers, and that the entire process was monitored by oversight. MKULTRA, on the other hand, was a CIA operation investigating mind control that circumvented oversight at every turn, and it frequently used civilian subjects without their knowledge or consent.
But again, the issue is not black and white. This book is full of mentions - sometimes laudatory - of MKULTRA personnel, including Harold Wolff, Harry Abramson, and Harry Isbell, some of whom were involved in deeply troubling research. During the 1950s and 60s, the CIA was involved in a great deal of psychoactive drug research. While MKULTRA was certainly not running the show at Edgewood, it would be going too far to say that there was no connection whatsoever.
For example, during his tenure as Director of the Addiction Research Center, and while receiving funding from the CIA through MKULTRA, Harry Isbell routinely offered morphine or heroin to patients in exchange for participating in his experiments. Most of these patients had been remanded to his facility to receive treatment for addiction. “Volunteers” for his experiments were administered experimental psychoactive chemicals including bufotenine, psilocybin, scopolamine, LSD, mescaline, and DMT. They sometimes received very high doses of a drug, as in one experiment in which Isbell’s subjects were given progressively-higher doses of LSD for 77 days in a row.
Adjacent to a photograph of the author chatting amiably with Dr. Isbell, Ketchum notes:
Some critics have cited Isbell’s seemingly cavalier experiments as an example of gross mistreatment of volunteers … The inmates, however, did not seem reluctant to take the drug every day, apparently feeling that being given generous doses of their beloved morphine after each test was sufficient compensation. Isbell found no evidence that his volunteers suffered any damage from their multiple-dose LSD experience. Of course, one might question the ethics of supporting a morphine addict’s habit in a facility established to treat addiction. (p. 123)
Ketchum’s arguments are ill-served by this characterization of Isbell’s experiments, which constitute one of the darkest chapters of the whole MKULTRA affair. Referring to these subjects as “volunteers” makes a mockery of the very idea of consent, and saying that “some critics” cite Isbell’s “seemingly cavalier experiments” strikes this reviewer as equivocation.
From the point of view of contemporary ethical standards governing human subjects experimentation, there is an intrinsic challenge posed to the idea of consent when considering volunteers over whom the experimenters have direct power, such as subordinates, prisoners, or a semi-captive group of opiate addicts. It is hard to miss that Ketchum sides with the experimenters in nearly every case - even when considering Isbell, who is frequently regarded as an icon of human subjects misconduct. In my view, this minimizes the vital importance of the opposing perspective. During those years, very serious human rights violations were occurring in the name of science and defense of country. The gravity of those abuses warrants careful scrutiny of any human subjects testing, whether conducted by the military, a hospital or another type of research context. I found this book to be too quick to disregard critics as ambulance-chasers or unscrupulous media hounds, given what we now know about what went on in those days. >more
Ketchum rightly rejects media reports linking Edgewood to CIA experiments. Although Ketchum himself does not criticize the book, Lee and Shlain’s widely-read Acid Dreams describes Edgewood side-by-side with MKULTRA and makes little effort to distinguish between them. Those authors scarcely note that the Edgewood experiments were an Army operation investigating non-lethal incapacitants, that experiments conducted at Edgewood overwhelmingly used informed volunteers, and that the entire process was monitored by oversight. MKULTRA, on the other hand, was a CIA operation investigating mind control that circumvented oversight at every turn, and it frequently used civilian subjects without their knowledge or consent.
But again, the issue is not black and white. This book is full of mentions - sometimes laudatory - of MKULTRA personnel, including Harold Wolff, Harry Abramson, and Harry Isbell, some of whom were involved in deeply troubling research. During the 1950s and 60s, the CIA was involved in a great deal of psychoactive drug research. While MKULTRA was certainly not running the show at Edgewood, it would be going too far to say that there was no connection whatsoever.
For example, during his tenure as Director of the Addiction Research Center, and while receiving funding from the CIA through MKULTRA, Harry Isbell routinely offered morphine or heroin to patients in exchange for participating in his experiments. Most of these patients had been remanded to his facility to receive treatment for addiction. “Volunteers” for his experiments were administered experimental psychoactive chemicals including bufotenine, psilocybin, scopolamine, LSD, mescaline, and DMT. They sometimes received very high doses of a drug, as in one experiment in which Isbell’s subjects were given progressively-higher doses of LSD for 77 days in a row.
Adjacent to a photograph of the author chatting amiably with Dr. Isbell, Ketchum notes:
Some critics have cited Isbell’s seemingly cavalier experiments as an example of gross mistreatment of volunteers … The inmates, however, did not seem reluctant to take the drug every day, apparently feeling that being given generous doses of their beloved morphine after each test was sufficient compensation. Isbell found no evidence that his volunteers suffered any damage from their multiple-dose LSD experience. Of course, one might question the ethics of supporting a morphine addict’s habit in a facility established to treat addiction. (p. 123)
Ketchum’s arguments are ill-served by this characterization of Isbell’s experiments, which constitute one of the darkest chapters of the whole MKULTRA affair. Referring to these subjects as “volunteers” makes a mockery of the very idea of consent, and saying that “some critics” cite Isbell’s “seemingly cavalier experiments” strikes this reviewer as equivocation.
From the point of view of contemporary ethical standards governing human subjects experimentation, there is an intrinsic challenge posed to the idea of consent when considering volunteers over whom the experimenters have direct power, such as subordinates, prisoners, or a semi-captive group of opiate addicts. It is hard to miss that Ketchum sides with the experimenters in nearly every case - even when considering Isbell, who is frequently regarded as an icon of human subjects misconduct. In my view, this minimizes the vital importance of the opposing perspective. During those years, very serious human rights violations were occurring in the name of science and defense of country. The gravity of those abuses warrants careful scrutiny of any human subjects testing, whether conducted by the military, a hospital or another type of research context. I found this book to be too quick to disregard critics as ambulance-chasers or unscrupulous media hounds, given what we now know about what went on in those days. >more