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by Eustace Mullins
from "Murder
by Injection - The Story of the Medical Conspiracy Against America"
In 1987, the eighteen largest drug firms were ranked as follows:
Thus we find that the United States still maintains an overwhelming lead in the production and sale of drugs. In the United States, the sale of prescription drugs rose in 1987 by 12.5% to $27 billion.
Eleven of the eighteen leading firms are located in the United States; three in Switzerland; two in Germany; and two in the United Kingdom. Nutritionist T. J. Frye notes that the Drug Trust in the United States is controlled by the Rockefeller group in a cartel relationship with I. G. Farben of Germany.
In fact, I. G. Farben was the largest chemical concern in Germany during the 1930s, when it engaged in an active cartel agreement with Standard Oil of New Jersey.
The Allied Military Government split it up into three companies after World War II, as part of the "anti-cartel" goals of that period, which was not unlike the famed splitting up of Standard Oil itself by court order, while the Rockefellers maintained controlling interest in each of the new companies. In Germany, General William Draper, of Dillon Read investment bankers, unveiled the new decree from his office in the I. G. Farben building.
Henceforth, I. G. Farben would exist no more; instead, three companies would emerge—Bayer, of Leverkusen; BASF at Ludwigshafen; and Hoescht, near Frankfort. Each of the three spawns is now larger than the old I. G. Farben; only ICI of England is larger. These firms export more than half of their product. BASF is represented in the United States by Shearman and Sterling, the Rockefeller law firm of which William Rockefeller is a partner.
Each of the major drug firms in the United States has at least one director with close Rockefeller connections, or with a Rothschild bank. Another director of Merck is John K. McKinley, chief operating officer of Texaco; he is also a director of Manufacturers Hanover Bank, which Congressional records identify as a major Rothschild bank.
The grand daddy of all nostrums is Goddard's drops, a bone distillate which was sold as a cure for gout in England in 1673. In 1711, Tuscarora rice was sold there as a cure for consumption. During some four thousand years of the practice of pharmaceutical prescriptions, many "cures" have been found to be worse than the disease. William Shakespeare warned, "In Physic there is Poison."
Dr. R. R. Dracke, well known blood specialist in Atlanta, also issued a warning that,
Physicians have warned that no acetanilid is safe, because all coal tar derivatives are powerful heart depressants.
Rorer Pharmaceuticals makes Ascriptin, and television advertisements have been urging men to take an aspirin or aspirin product daily "to protect their heart." The attorneys general of Texas and New York have requested drug firms to halt the claim that aspirin may prevent heart attacks in men; it also reduces fever and makes it difficult for a physician to correctly diagnose pneumonia.
The program showed the astounding courage of the victims, who tried to carry on daily life, while the reporters seemed hard put to keep from bursting into laughter at the strange beings who rolled around like human eggs, maneuvering frantically to stay right side up. CBS also avoided any mention of the names of the manufacturers or distributors of thalidomide, although a typical operation of their brand of "adversary journalism" would have been to thrust a microphone into the face of the firm's chairman, and demand to know why they didn't realize this was a dangerous drug.
CBS depends heavily on advertising revenues from the pharmaceutical manufacturers, and they are not about to offend their best customers.
In 1949, Parke-Davis' chloromycetin was hailed as the new wonder drug. Several doctors were persuaded to give it to their children, who then died of leukemia. 75% of the cases of aplastic anemia resulting from the administration of chloromycetin were fatal. Dr. H. A. Hooks of El Paso lost his seven and a half year old son, after he had been assured by a Parke-Davis representative that the drug was safe.
In December 1963, a Washington grand jury indicted Richard Merrell and chairman William S. Merrell for falsifying date to the FDA on MER/29. They filed a "no contest" plea and on June 4, 1964 were fined the maximum fine, $80,000. Parke-Davis defense counsel was a former federal judge from 1957 to 1960, Lawrence Walsh, who is now much in the news as the White Knight who is prosecuting political figures on vague charges of malfeasance.
The pill was then found to cause fatal blood clotting, heart attack and cancer. The behavior of the AMA in this instance contrasted strangely with its violent attacks for many years on "quacks," who it protested were the real dangers to the public.
Velsicol exported it to thirty countries. It causes extensive damage to the nervous system. In Egypt, it killed one hundred water buffalo and poisoned dozens of farmers. Velsicol is a subsidiary of Northwest Industries, a three billion dollars a year operation in Chicago whose chairman is longtime rail magnate, Ben Heinemann, a trustee of the University of Chicago, and the First Chicago Corporation.
Directors of Northwest Industries are James E. Dovitt, director of Hart, Schaffner and Marx, president of Mutual of New York, and director of MONY; he is also a director of National Can. Other directors of Northwest are William B. Graham, chairman of Baxter Travenol Drug Company, also a trustee of the University of Chicago, director of Deere, Field Enterprises, Bell & Howell and Borg-Warner; National Council of U.S. China Trade; Thomas S. Hyland, vice president of Standard & Poor's; Gaylord Freeman, director of Baxter Travenol and Atlantic Richfield; James F. Bere, chairman of Borg-Warner, director of Abbott Laboratories, Time, Inc., Hughes Tool Company and Continental Illinois Bank.
Ciba-Geigy then paid a settlement to some 1500 victims and survivors. Hoechst marketed an analgesic said to be like aspirin, aminopyrein and dipyrene. It was found to cause anemia and was banned in the United States, but continued to be sold in Latin America and Asia. Chlorophenicol (chloromycetin) also is still sold in Latin America and Asia. Travellers are warned to beware of drugs in foreign countries which have long been banned in the United States.
Meanwhile, Burroughs Wellcome hopes to make millions with its new drug for AIDS, AZT. It is said to prolong the life of AIDS victims from six months to two years. This firm is owned by the Wellcome Trust, of which Lord Franks, a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, is director.
If an alternative health care practitioner ever dared to offer such a drug to the public, he would be incarcerated for life. We all know how dangerous "quacks" are to your health.
Roche's medical director, Dr. Bruce Medd, hails these drugs as boons to mankind. Listen to his rhapsodizing,
Despite Dr. Medd's assurances, the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Government states that 95% of the drugs on the market have not been proven to work. Indeed, this writer has never heard of any "quack" remedy producing even a fraction of the harmful side effects as those listed above as caused by Matulane, Dr. Medd's pride and joy.
Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, in his Health Letter, July, 1986 noted that Eli Lilly of Indiana and Smith Kline Corporation of Philadelphia pled guilty to criminal charges of failing to notify promptly the FDA of deaths and serious injuries to people using their drugs. Lilly's Oraflex, an arthritis drug, was on the market three months and used by 600,000 Americans before it was withdrawn due to its side effects. Smith Kline's high blood pressure, Selacryn, sold 300,000 prescriptions in eight months.
Pfizer withheld information from the FDA about Feldene (pyroxicam, an arthritis drug), despite deaths and harmful side effects in other countries. McNeil's Suprol, approved in 1985 as an oral analgesic was found to cause kidney damage. Orudis (jetoprofen), Wyeth's arthritis drug, increased the incidence of ulcers. Merital (nomigensine), an antidepressant produced by Hoechst, was approved by the FDA in December 1984, but had to be taken off the market in January 1986, because of fatal reactions, including hemolytic anemia. Wellbutrin (buproprion) was found to cause convulsions in women and was removed from the market in March 1986.
Social workers had coined a new term ADD (attention defect disorder), which could be "controlled" by 20 mg tablets of Ritalin in sustained release capsules. Aided by the education establishment, which has a propensity for any drug or chemical addition to the educational process, Ritalin has had a 97% increase in use since 1985. Students are forced to take the drug, or to face immediate expulsion from school.
The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 1988, noted that a number of suits have been filed against schools by anxious parents concerning the forced use of Ritalin. The Georgia Board of Medical Examiners is now looking into the skyrocketing use of Ritalin in the schools in Atlanta's affluent suburbs. A student now on trial for murder has entered the defense that he was on Ritalin.
These strips and other vaporizers continuously emit lindane, and are widely used in restaurants, even though it had been established that lindane not only contaminates any food substance, but also any container for food which is not metal. Although these tests were concluded in 1953, the Pesticides Regulator continued to allow their use for another sixteen years!
FDA reports showed that Shell Chemical Company's No Pest Strips continually release Vapone 3, the lindane formulation.
The Agriculture Department strictly forbade their use in meat processing plants, but the enterprising manufacturer then peddled them to restaurants. From 1965 to 1970, the U.S. Public Health Service released warnings that Shell No Pest Strips were dangerous to use in sleeping rooms of the elderly or of small children.
Dr. Roy T. Hansberry, executive of Shell Chemical, which subsidized Shell Development, served on the special Agricultural Department seven member task force to study pesticide registration procedures.
Shell had registered 250 pesticide products.
Hansberry's personal clearance to serve on this task force carried the unsigned note,
Dr. Mitchell A. Zaron, assistant health commissioner, also served as a consultant to Shell Chemical, and owned Shell Oil stock. He issued reports which purportedly showed Vapona as so safe that it required no warnings for infants, or for old or sick persons. At a meeting of the Public Health Service, he endorsed the use of Vapona strips.
John S. Leary, Jr., research division chief staff officer for Pharmacology, overruled the department's objection to the original Shell registration of Vapona, in 1963, and continued to support the use of Vapona, until in 1966, when he resigned to join Shell Oil Company. It is estimated there have been thousands of victims each year suffering from exposure to Shell No Pest Strips.
A Consumers Protective Message, issued from Washington March 15, 1962, noted that since 1938, manufacturers had to demonstrate the efficacy of a medicine to the government before marketing it. However, the regulation contained a significant loophole—there was no stated requirement for a demonstration of its efficacy, or to furnish evidence that the drug "will live up to its claim of its labeling."
The Message stated,
In 1962, Congress enacted the Kefauver-Harris amendments requiring evidence of efficacy. The evidence was to be judged by the Food and Drug Administration Bureau of Medicine, but the post of chief of that bureau was vacant because Bois-feuillet Jones, special assistant for medical affairs at HEW, blocked the appointment of Dr. Charles D. May, a distinguished physician who had testified at the Kefauver hearings on the methods of the pharmaceutical manufacturers in promoting prescription drugs.
Dr. May had testified that the payola and other promotions amounted to three and a half times as much as the cost of all the educational programs in our medical schools. Jones "won the confidence of the pharmaceutical industry by blocking the appointment of Dr. May" according to a report in Drug Research Reports, June, 1964. Instead of Dr. May, Jones chose Dr. Joseph F. Sadusk, Jr. who did everything he could to thwart the efficacy legislation, according to testimony before the Senate Committee on Government Operations.
Sadusk later became a vice-president of Parke-Davis. Sadusk had prevented the recall of Parke-Davis' antibiotic drug Chloramphenicaol, which had resulted in blood toxicity and leukopenia, before he was offered the vice-presidency of Parke-Davis. He was succeeded as medical director of the FDA by Dr. Joseph M. Pisani at the Bureau of Medicine. Pisani left to work for the Proprietary Association of Drug Manufacturers.
The next head of the Bureau of Medicine later became a top executive at Hoffman LaRoche.
Dr. Howard Cohn, former head of the FDA medical evaluation board, was offered a job at Ciba-Geigy which he accepted. Dr. Harold Anderson, chief of the FDA drug division, was given a job with Winthrop Drug Company. Morris Yakowitz found that his experience at FDA made him eligible for a job at Smith Kline and French drug firm. Allan E. Rayfield, who had been director of Regulatory Compliance, accepted a position with Richardson-Merrell, Inc.
Its chairman, Wesley Howe, is founding chairman of the Health Industry Manufacturers Association. FDA Commissioner James L. Goddard became chairman of the board at Ormont Drug and Chemical Company, whose president is George Goldenberg. The previously mentioned Joseph Sadusk, the top physician at FDA, after accepting a position as vice-president of Parke-Davis, later was named its president.
Dr. Richard Crout, test director at the FDA Bureau of Drugs, addressed the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association in 1976 as follows:
One may ask why a government department composed of professionally educated scientists and physicians would tolerate such working conditions.
The answer is that that Medical Monopoly wanted these conditions and saw to it that they prevailed at the FDA, so as to drive away sincere, dedicated government servants who wanted only to do their job, who desired to protect the public from dangerous drugs. It seems that the most dangerous drugs are also the most profitable, because they produce dramatic, easily seen results. Unfortunately, they also tend to produce such dramatic side effects as kidney and brain damage, or sudden death.
They are able to minimize and weaken the frequent attempts by Congressmen to expose the dangers of many of these additives. It is all part of the game of public relations.
He even called his Subcommittee, the Senate Anti-Monopoly Subcommittee. These hearings, held during 1959 and 1960, revealed that Schering had markups of 1,118% on its drug, predisone and that other drug manufacturers routinely showed profits of from 10,000% to 20,000% on their drugs. The outcome of these hearings was the government recommendations for the promotion of "generic," or cheaper non-brand-name, drugs for mass sales of the same drugs at cheaper prices.
Ostensibly a move to curb the excessive profits of the drug companies, the net result was that these companies showed vast increases in their volume of sales, with corresponding increase in profits. A more tragic result was that these hearings proved to be Senator Kefauver's political Waterloo.
Stung by the publicity and the criticism which resulted from the hearings, the word went out from the Medical Monopoly, which we have shown, is not merely the officers and employees visible to the public, but the shadowy figures in the background, (many of them aliens, who control millions of shares in these companies through the practice of "street names," concealing their power), that "Kefauver is through."
When he inaugurated his campaign for the presidency, he found that funds had mysteriously dried up. Without money, his candidacy was doomed. Disconsolate, he abandoned his campaign for the White House and later died, some said of a broken heart. Political figures got the message; there have been no repeats of the Kefauver hearings on the abuses of the drug industry.
Individual products, such as the current furore over aspartame, may come under Congressional scrutiny, but the overall operations of the Drug Trust remain immune from Congressional investigation.
Merck expects Vesoten, another hypertension drug, to reach $720 million in sales this year. In 1987, Merck had thirteen products in eight therapeutic classes which reached sales of more than $100 million each. Because of this high volume, the cost of production had dropped steadily for the major drug firms, an average of a 15% drop since 1980. In effect, this has meant an increase in profits of 15% from this single factor.
The Medical Monopoly's weak link is that it is almost totally dependent on doctors and hospital personnel to promote its profitable items. The $18 to $20 million expenditure required to get a new drug through the testing period of from three to twelve years is not intended to protect the public from "dangerous" new drugs. It is needed to protect the Drug Trust as long as possible, affording them the necessary time to milk their present drugs for as much sales as possible before they are replaced by newer competing drugs. It is called "protecting market share" in the business world.
It would be called a violation of the anti-trust laws were the drug firms not immune from prosecution under these statutes.
This organization was set up under the close supervision of the British Secret Intelligence Service and was later disbanded by President Truman, who was highly suspicious of its operations. The OSS then went underground at the State Department as a "research group" working on "behavioral theory." It was led by one Evron Kirkpatrick, whose wife, Jeane Kirkpatrick, is a director of the Rockefeller financed Trotskyite group, League for Industrial Democracy and who is frequently touted as "a great anti-Communist," the catch being that all good Trotskyites are vehemently opposed to the Moscow branch of the Communist Party.
They still mourn the passing of their leader, Leon Trotsky, who was murdered by a Stalinist agent in Mexico City in 1940. The Kirkpatrick group then resurfaced as "the Central Intelligence Agency," headed by Allen Dulles, a partner in the Schroder Bank, the bank which had handled Adolf Hitler's personal bank account.
Dulles' brother, John Foster Dulles, was then Secretary of State under President Eisenhower.
It later became known by the inside sobriquet, "the Company," meaning, of course, an enterprise in which one became engaged for profit. The excuse advanced to justify going into this business was that a "stingy" Congress refused to advance enough money to the CIA to finance its covert operations; therefore a loyal CIA agent would do whatever possible to aid "the Company" to raise funds needed for this work. In fact, some of its most active agents, such as Edwin Wilson, suddenly wound up owning six million dollar estates in the developing area off the Washington Beltway, a certain indication that there was indeed a lot of money coming in from somewhere.
What is the present magnitude of the CIA world drug operation?
Lt. Col. Bo Gritz, who has thirty years of distinguished service with the United States Army Special Forces, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee International Narcotic Task Force that 900 tons of heroin and opium would enter the free world in 1987, the source being Southeast Asia and the Golden Triangle. Col. Gritz had been to Asia a number of times to confer with one of Asia's largest drug producers, Khun Sa. Khun Sa then laid the blame for the world drug operation squarely at the door of some well known CIA operatives, including Theodore Shackley, who served as chief of station for the CIA in Laos from 1965 to 1975.
Khun Sa stated that Shackley had worked closely with Mao Se Hung, who was then the leading drug smuggler in Southeast Asia. Another colleague of Shackley was a "civilian" named Santos Trafficante. Trafficante had long been a leading figure in the Mafia, and had been called before Congress to testify about a possible attempt on the life of Castro in Cuba. When the Communist regime took over, the Mafia lost an empire of gambling and prostitution in Havana and other cities. They sought revenge.
Trafficante was commissioned by Meyer Lansky, the Moneybags of the Syndicate, to get rid of Castro. Whether the attempt failed, or as is more likely, the Mafia came to an understanding with Castro about the dope traffic, is not yet known. Trafficante then became heavily involved in the Pacific area of the drug traffic, becoming a go-between for the Nugan Hand operation, the drug bank in Australia and the Golden Triangle.
He then left that post, establishing the Far East Trading Corporation in Bangkok. Armitage was later appointed by President Reagan as Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of International Security Affairs, reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger. Business tycoon Ross Perot then learned of Armitage's history. He went to the White House, demanding that Armitage be fired. He talked to George Bush, former head of the CIA, who gave him the brush-off by sending him to FBI Director William Webster (shortly afterwards, Webster was quietly appointed head of the CIA).
Webster refused to act on Perot's complaints, which opened the door for his appointment to the CIA post. Meanwhile, Weinberger, fearful that the role of the Defense Department in the drug scandal was about to unfold, hastily resigned. He was succeeded by Frank Carlucci, who was then serving as National Security Advisor, and who was well versed in the entire operation.
Carlucci personally ordered Perot to drop his crusade against Armitage. Because Perot's fortune had been built on huge government contracts, he had no choice but to back off. Other personages involved were General Richard Secord, who surfaced as a figure in the Iran-Contra affair, who had boasted of flying plane loads of gold to Southeast Asia to pay off the drug smugglers.
In fact, the Iran Contra affair was the logical culmination of the longtime involvement of the Rockefeller interests and the Drug Trust in pro-Communist activity. John D. Rockefeller himself had tucked the sum of $10,000 in cash into Leon Trotsky's pocket before seeing him off to start the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
The Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party which was left behind to subvert the United States, was operating under the name of the Socialist Workers Party.
It was then given the cover name of League for Industrial Democracy. Thus the Drug Trust, while maintaining the Stalinist Communist government in Russia, simultaneously maintained a Communist backup regime in the United States, the Trotskyite movement, in case the Stalinist regime should fall. Noticeably irked by this competition, Stalin sent an agent Mexico to eliminate his rival, whom he had previously exiled, realizing that Trotsky was still too popular in Russia to be murdered there.
During the 1950s, it quietly placed its members in power in the media, the universities and the government, replacing, in most instances, the incumbent Stalinist hardliners. The Stalinists in Washington who had surrounded Roosevelt and Truman were gradually replaced with "neoconservatives," that is, hard-line anti-Moscow ideologues, who later added to their masquerade by additional and impressive noms de plume, such as "the Hard Right," "the New Right," "the Religious Right," or, in some instances, merely as "conservatives."
None other than the Hollywood man on the white horse, Ronald Reagan, rode into power in 1980 on a tide of "neoconservatism." His principal backing came from the CIA, which by then was only a mouthpiece for the neoconservatives, and its house organ, the National Review, whose editor, William Buckley, boasted that the only job he had ever had was with the CIA.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, of the Rockefeller financed League for Industrial Democracy, became the spokesman for the new policy, while Reagan's entire team was dominated by the Hoover Institution, whose two senior fellows, Sydney Hook and Seymour Martin Lipset, were on the board of LID. Thus David Rockefeller maintained close liaison with the Stalinist Communists in Moscow, while other Rockefeller interests directed the "anti-Communist" stance of the Reagan regime.
It was a classic Hegelian operation of thesis and antithesis, with the still unresolved synthesis yet to come. The power of the LID lay in its domination of the CIA and its total commitment to the State of Israel as the world headquarters of the Trotskyite Communist movement. Thus Elliott Abrams, son-in-law of the Israeli propagandist Norman Podhoretz, who was editor of the American Jewish Committee organ, Commentary, was appointed by Reagan to direct the Contra operation in Nicaragua, a classic standoff between the Stalinist regime in Managua and Trotskyite directed rebels in the hills.
The danger was averted by astute maneuvering of the docile congressmen, and by adroit manipulation of the media to focus on Col. Oliver North and Admiral Poindexter, to the exclusion of their controllers.
Thus a "crusade against Communism," a noble effort to contain the Communists a la George Kennan, to be financed with "dirty" money from the sale of drugs, was at last revealed to be the same old crew of CIA agents peddling their drugs and laundering their money in various parts of the world. (The present writer is now researching a book which will document all of these operations.)
Thus Bowart states,
The present writer has described some of these secret rites in "The Curse of Canaan."
This had been typified by Dr. J. Marion Sims, the "mad doctor" responsible for setting up what is now the Rockefeller controlled Memorial Hospital Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. This total commitment to "Science" also guided and inspired the CIA drug programs, Projects Bluebird, Artichoke, MK Ultra, and MK Delta, in which some 139 drugs were used on unsuspecting victims, the substances abused including cannabis, LSD, Scopolamine, Sodium Amytal, Chloral Hydrate (the knockout drops of the Old West), ergot, cocaine, morphine and heroin.
A later form of this substance, LSD-25, produced amazing psychotropic effects, as Dr. Hoffmann accidentally discovered, when he absorbed a small quantity of rye fungus, the base for the drug, while he was working. This happened during August of 1943, at the height of the Second World War.
Dr. Hoffmann later reported,
This was the first "trip," the precursor of millions of such experiences by drug cultists. By 1958, Dr. Hoffmann had expanded his interests to Mexican mushrooms and mescaline, both of which then became very popular among leading bankers in New York, and among prominent Hollywood personalities.
The most likely assumption is that he was trying to preserve it to a point, lest the war end too soon for the profit-minded munitions makers, but at the same time to prevent any sort of victorious ending for his Nazi cohorts. The notes of Gotterdammerung had already been sounded. Dulles' association with the Hitler regime went back to a fateful meeting in Cologne in 1933, when he and his brother, John Foster Dulles, assured Hitler the money would be forthcoming to guarantee the fruition of his goals as he had set them forth in "Mein Kampf."
Allen Dulles later became a director of the Schroder Bank, which handled Hitler's personal bank account. Interestingly, enough, no one has ever been able to trace one cent of Hitler's considerable personal fortune, which he had received from the sale of his books and other income. Unlike his opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hitler had no trust fund from his mother (the proceeds from the China opium trade).
As there are some 10,000 doses per gram, this meant that Dulles ordered one hundred million doses of LSD. Meanwhile, a Dr. Timothy Leary had been hired by the National Institute of Health to experiment with psychedelic drugs, including LSD. Leary had already been forced to resign from West Point, and was later fired from the faculty at Harvard, perhaps the only person who could say this.
Leary's NIH study was financed by a grant from the Uris Foundation of New York City. It continued from 1953 to 1956, when it was moved to the U.S. Public Health Service, the experiments going on until 1958, and also at HEW from 1956 to 1963. A CIA Memo dated November 1, 1963 featured glowing accounts of the work of Dr. Leary and his associate, Dr. Richard Alpert (who also was later fired from the staff at Harvard).
They invented the turn on, tune in, drop out movement which incapacitated the youth of America for an entire generation. The movement, in which the CIA always had a proprietary interest, was given academic status when it was launched from the ivy-covered halls of Harvard by Leary and his group.
After their forced departure from Harvard, they
were ensconced in a million dollar estate in New York by the wealthy
Mellon heir, Tommy Hitchcock. Their movement swept over the campuses
of American universities and destroyed the educational opportunities
for thousands of American youths. A later governmental investigation of the CIA, which was chaired, naturally enough, by Nelson Rockefeller, made this comment in its Rockefeller Report to the President on CIA activities,
The above referred to several unfortunate incidents, in which CIA employees, who had been given doses of LSD without their knowledge, committed suicide under its malign influence.
The families of these victims learned many years later of the true circumstances of these "suicides" and successfully sued the government to obtain financial settlements.
Despite the havoc wrought by his activities, Dr. Gottlieb was never brought to trial. Indeed, the then director of the CIA, Richard Helms, made certain that all records of the MK Ultra operation were destroyed during his last days in office, leaving Dr. Gottlieb immune to prosecution.
Many of them suffered severe psychological damage, the most terrifying symptoms appearing years later. The Army then moved on to testing a more powerful chemical hallucinogen, which it called B.Z This drug was tested at Edgewood Arsenal between 1959 and 1975. About 2,800 soldiers were exposed to B.Z. Some of them have since lodged complaints that they suffered irreparable damage from the experiment.
The basis for these charges was that all of them were deeply involved. To cover up the trail, some forty people later died by violence. Some of them were media writers, the most prominent being the late Dorothy Kilgallen, a widely known columnist. In 1965 she used her connections to get permission to interview Jack Ruby in his prison cell.
She later told friends that she had been able to obtain evidence that would "blow the J. F. Kennedy case sky high." Shortly afterwards, she was found in her apartment, dead of what was later diagnosed as an "overdose" of barbiturates and alcohol. The apartment was a shambles, and all of her notes of her conversations with Ruby had disappeared.
To this day, no one has ever admitted seeing them. The Medical Monopoly then used Kilgallen's death as an excuse to issue pious warning about "the dangers of mixing barbiturates and alcohol" but said nothing about the dangers of visiting Jack Ruby. Early in 1967, Ruby repeatedly complained that he was being poisoned. He was then diagnosed as having cancer, but he died of a "stroke," as did one of his accomplices, David Ferrie.
The basis for the two-country operation may have been a desire to avoid lawsuits. In 1943, Dr. Cameron received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up a new psychiatric institute, the Allen Memorial Institute, as a wing of the Royal Victorian Hospital, the teaching hospital of McGill University in Montreal.
This Rockefeller connection later resulted in some $10 million of CIA money being channeled to Cameron through Dr. Gottlieb as part of the MK Ultra project.
This money was transferred to Dr. Cameron, beginning in 1953, because he had already demonstrated his commitment to mind-altering experiments. The CIA funds were therefore marked for mind control.
"Depatterning" began with heavy drug dosages, combined with electric shock, the then popular Electro Convulsive Therapy, or ECT, as it was usually known.
It was later discredited for years because of the damage to the patients, but, incredibly, has now been revived and is in constant use in some circles. ECT has been described by its victims as the most terrifying ordeal which can be imagined. Basically, it was simply the electrocution process which was shut off just before it became fatal. The patient was strapped into a chair and electrocuted two or three times a day.
Later in the sleep therapy treatment, the patient was awakened two or three times a day to receive the electric shock treatments. Dr. Cameron ignored the recommended voltage for shock treatments, increasing them twenty to forty times higher than any other doctor had ever dared. He watched approvingly as the helpless patients screamed constantly during the electro-shock "therapy."
It was his fond belief that the screams also were an essential part of the treatment, although it is likely that it represented his personal gratification.
Satisfied that he had purged the patient of all previous images and ideas, Dr. Cameron moved into the next phase, which he called "psychic driving."
This consisted of forcing the patient to listen to tape-recorded messages, repeated over and over, thousands of times. This "treatment" was administered through pillow speakers or headphones. Every intelligence agency in the world was green with envy when they heard of the new Cameron techniques. Luckily, the CIA had been the first on the scene, and provided him with ample funds for his lunatic obsessions.
He became chairman of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, chairman of the American Psychiatric Association, and founding chairman of the World Psychiatric Association.
Another victim was Velma Orlikon, wife of a Democratic Party Member of the Canadian Parliament. Despite these pedigrees, the victims found themselves up against a stone wall. The Washington Post noted in January, 1988, that the CIA was still fighting the action of nine elderly Canadians who had been drugged during the 1950s and who were asking $175,000 each in damages, later increased to $1,000,000 each. The case was then ordered to trial, after nine years of delaying tactics by the CIA, but no one is predicting a speedy solution.
The CIA money had transformed the seedy apartment into an espionage apparatus complete with two-way mirrors, surveillance and recording equipment and other tools of the trade. White dosed his visitors with LSD, while the CIA equipment meticulously recorded their reactions. These frequently consisted of "bad trips" in which the victims went temporarily insane, tried to commit suicide or murder and gave other evidences of the "mind control" which the CIA wished to learn.
Despite the excesses to which doctors such as Dr. Cameron and Dr. Sims went in their scientific enthusiasm, there are horror stories equally disturbing from the clinical experiments conducted by the ethical drug companies.
With hundreds of millions in dollars of potential profits riding on each new drug product, the Medical Monopoly must comply with the regulations which they themselves have drafted and put into place. The purpose of the regulations is to protect the market share of a new wonder drug until it can be replaced by a newer wonder drug.
As one alternative health care practitioner, who had been sent to prison for selling herbal teas, remarked,
The restrictions on new drugs are usually complied with if the manufacturer believes it may be a big money maker. He is not about to release a new drug to the market, have it meet with success and then be forced to recall it because he has not complied with all of the regulations.
From 1948 to 1958, pharmaceutical companies introduced 4,829 new products, 3,686 new compounds and 1,143 new dosages.
All of these products had to go through the process. New drugs are reported to take an average time of from seven to ten years to receive final FDA approval, a process which costs from ten to twelve million dollars, frequently as much as eighteen to twenty million.
Clinical testing goes through three clearly defined phases.
This means that doctors and hospitals administer the drug only because the Phase II testing has established its toxicity and other possible side effects.
These are generally patients who are in a position to sue or generate unfavorable publicity if the drug proves to be dangerous, which means that those who prescribe the drug are relying on the Phase II testing to recommend it as reliable.
Even inmates of mental institutions have been known to complain, after their release, that they were subjected to illegal drug testing. Prisoners who have been convicted of crimes are less likely to complain. Since the turn of the century, the United States has led the world in the number of medical experiments carried on in prisons.
These political prisoners run the same risks in medical experiments as do the most hardened criminals. Each year, a larger number of sentences are handed down by American courts as punishment for banking problems, mortgage problems or tax problems.
The American Medical Association is still the leading advocate of using prisoners for drug testing.
The columnist, Pertinax, writing in the British Medical Journal, January 1963 commented,
The scientist was not making a bad joke—chimpanzees cost as much as $4500 each, while American prisoners can be had for as little as one dollar a day. Pertinax was commenting on the proposal made by the World Medical Association in 1961, and offered for adoption, that "prisoners, being captive groups, should not be used as the subjects of experiments."
The proposal was vociferously objected to by delegates from the American Medical Association and it was finally tabled.
They entered evidence in their defense that in 1906, American doctors in Philadelphia had used convicts for medical experiments, injecting them with plague and beri beri germs; in 1915, pellagra was injected into convicts in Massachusetts; in 1944, hundreds of prisoners in the United States were injected with malaria under the excuse of wartime necessity, to aid our soldiers in the Pacific.
Despite this defense, the German doctors were convicted and some of them were executed.
Bruno Bettelheim had originally reviewed the book, asserting that the effort to understand the Nazi doctors was wrong,
Christians, of course, offer forgiveness as a basic religious precept.
Paul Ramsey wrote to include an excerpt from an advertisement,
Mr. Ramsey noted that this advertisement appeared in an American publication in 1946, while the German doctors were on trial.
Telford Taylor, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, wrote to the Times to correct errors which had already appeared, including the statement that one of those sentenced was,
Taylor stated that no one by the name of Kazenellenbogen had ever been tried at Nuremberg.
Indeed, the name seems to have been included as an elaborate practical joke, the name having surfaced in previous practical jokes. The Times made no apology. Telford Taylor further pointed out that twenty physicians had been tried at Nuremberg in the instance mentioned, not nineteen as stated in the review, and that four were hanged, five sentenced to life in prison, three received lesser sentences and seven were acquitted on all charges.
Large scale medical experimentation, similar to that which was condemned as a crime at Nuremberg at the same time that it was still being practiced in American prisons, takes undue advantage of the "volunteers." Some are illiterate; most are young and healthy and have never had any serious illness. They have little concept of what it may be like to come down with a serious illness as a result of being injected with experimental drugs, or the lifelong complications which may result.
Several doctors in Oklahoma were grossing three hundred thousand dollars a year from drug manufacturers in these deals; these doctors also regularly collected blood from prisoners, paying them $7 a quart; they then sold the blood for $15.
Fishbein elaborated his enthusiasm by pointing out that the program rendered a genuine service to the entire public because of the "reformation value in serving as a subject in a medical experiment." One might have expected Fishbein to appear at Nuremberg, to defend the German doctors with the same argument, that they had offered this same "reformation value" to the inmates of the concentration camps.
A public relations spokesman for Wyeth laboratories was puzzled by the indignation in some quarters, releasing a statement that "Almost all of our Phase II testing is done on prisoners."
In fact, there was fierce and ongoing competition among the major drug firms to line up prisoners who could be used as "subjects" in medical experiments. Upjohn and Parke-Davis adhered to established principles of monopoly when they acquired "exclusive rights" to the inmates of Jackson State Prison in Mississippi. These firms subsequently were able to enroll 1,200 of the 4,000 convicts there in the testing program.
Business Week offered a somewhat critical comment on the program, pointing out that,
In plainer English, the dosage was increased until it made the prisoner so ill or caused serious damage.
The results often were crippling or death. However, the prisoners were paid thirty cents a day for submitting to these experiments. Business Week touched upon the fact that it was precisely the life-threatening aspect of Phase II testing for which the prisoners were needed.
The pharmaceutical companies needed to know how many people might be injured by the drug, or how many lawsuits they might expect from angry customers.
Of the budgeted $17 a day per prisoner, less than a dollar a day went for his physical maintenance. This was an essential part of a prison system which had been set up the Boss Tweed and which still offered many golden opportunities to those who were alert.
The victims reported an alarming list of results, such as heart damage, loss of hair, joint pains, swelling of the legs, shortness of breath and hemorrhages of the skin. One testing outfit, under the name of the Solano Institute for Medical and Physical Research, actually was able to set up its headquarters at the prison. Established as a nonprofit corporation under the California charitable trust law, the "Institute" subjected 1,500 prisoners to various types of injections. One prisoner who had been sent to Vacaville for "treatment" later sued the doctor, a leading dermatologist who was head of his professional association.
The prisoner had been forced to take muscular injections of Lederle's Caridase drug. This drug contained fibrinolytic enzymes which were intended for use as an anti-inflammatory agent. The patient testified that he had been seized by trustees and held while he was forcibly injected in both arms. He subsequently developed a near-fatal disease of the muscles and chronic stomach ulcers, while his weight dropped from 140 pounds to a mere 75 pounds. He received four dollars in compensation.
The program, to test blood plasma, at its peak involved 137 prisons from 1963 to 1970 and was paid for by 37 drug companies, including such leading firms as Upjohn, Wyeth, Lederle, Squibb and Merck. Although the financial rewards were impressive, the results of the program proved inconclusive. The program was later criticized as operating under "gross mismanagement, sloppy handling and contamination" of test samples, criticism which put an end to the program. Hundreds of prisoners suffered from its after effects for years.
Stough had set up a prison monopoly which brought in good returns until his methods were exposed as being worthless.
The first, a heart warming story in Coronet, November 1950, was titled "Prison Heroes Conquer Malaria," a glowing account of experiments conducted at the Illinois State Prison at Joliet, where Dr. Fishbein himself had been overwhelmed by the "ethical" nature of the drug testing program.
The second story, in the Saturday Evening Post, March 2, 1963, was titled "Convict Volunteers." It too was an uncritical account of the drug experimenters, describing the prisoners as "human guinea pigs." The journalist quoted one convict, who was deliberately burned on both arms, "The pain was pretty bad," and mentioned other prisoners who had been injected with live cancer cells.
Despite the fact that this story, written about inmates at the Ohio State Prison in Columbus, mentioned that these convicts did not receive any pay for submitting to these experiments (Ohio statutes piously forbid such payments, saving the drug companies even more money), the writer ends his article with a glowing tribute to the program, pointing out that it caused "the volunteers to feel self-respect."
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