Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: “Wanted: FIFTY NEGROES” for involuntary experimentation

Before the Civil War there was no need to pretend to develop ethical guidelines when using black people for research or to worry about infringing on their rights, since they didn't think they had any.

Now there are plenty of efforts to pretend to respect the rights of minorities or other people when using them for medical research. There are also plenty of exaggerated conspiracy theories about abuses that are taking place in research experiments; however there is also evidence to indicate that they're not all exaggerations and that the people developing the ethical guidelines aren't the ones being used for research, with the possible exception of minor experiments that aren't very dangerous.

I'm not opposed to reasonable research or science; but when one class of people, perhaps you could call them an academic class that comes mostly from the ruling class, develop all the guidelines, and has access to the education necessary to understand them, and another class of people is used as research subjects that they don't understand this should be considered a problem, or virtual, if not literal slavery.

Under the current circumstances the vast majority of people being used for medical research don't have the educational background to understand the full risks their tasking or potential benefits. The people that advise them may have better educational background, but they may also have a subtle, or even blatant interest in misleading them, so they can get subjects for research. On top of that the vast majority of the benefits from this research goes to the ruling class, with little or no benefit going to the people that provide the research material. The academic world has supposedly developed ethical guidelines decades ago; however they're controlled by people with a clear bias, since, if they make them too strict they will lose some of their potential benefits, and the people that are being put at risk don't understand the research so they're not in a position to stand up for their own rights, when it counts.

Is there any doubt that the educated upper class of people are much more likely to get health care and that the benefits of patents that drive up the cost of medications or medical treatment goes almost entirely to the rich while poorer people, who are occasionally used for research, are much less likely to get access to health care. This situation makes it easier to offer the poor limited amounts of health care in return for participating in research, but there is no consideration of limiting the amount of profits the rich can make as a result of the patents developed with the research.

This could be dramatically reduced if we had Single Payer Health Care; however the rich control the political systems that are withholding it and they also control the media establishment that provides little or no discussion about the benefits of a Single Payer system. Despite their efforts to suppress coverage of Single Payer a growing number of people at the grassroots are learning about it yet the political establishment refuses to give it serious discussion or consideration, presumably because they represent campaign contributors not voters, who only hear from candidates approved by the mainstream media.

In the cases where there has been some reparations, it is almost always when people from the lower classes speak out loudly and receive help from some sympathetic people that have better education that can help guide them through the legal and medical process. Even then they rarely ever get full reparations, since the court system and academic world are both controlled by the upper class, and they rig the rules heavily in their own favor.

Some of the worst examples of abusive and often incompetent research on minorities, mostly black, was reported by Harriet Washington in “Medical Apartheid" including the following excerpt describing how James Marion Sims and Dr. T. Stillman openly experimented on blacks and even advertised for them as pieces of property with no regard for their rights as humans:

Sam’s version of events is not recorded, so we don’t know whether more than fear of pain caused him to balk at surgery. …. If Sam had gotten wind of Sim’s dismal surgical statistics, his famed fondness for forced experimentation on captive patients, or his penchant for taking shoemakers’ tools to black infant’s skulls, Sam’s opinion of Sim’s skill would have sunk low indeed. But he would not have dared to openly voice doubts about Sim’s abilities, so refusing treatment because of “the pain” may have been a canny dodge.

However Sam was enslaved, so the decision was not left to him but to his owner, who was eager to return his slave to profitable work. ….

Staging Disease: Treatment Under the Microscope

There were many Sams. Like circuses, clinics and hospitals had an abundance of uses for the displayed African American body. After the mid-nineteenth century, a supply of black bodies was key to the primacy of the hospital as the new center for American medical instruction and treatment. African Americans filled medical school rosters as well as circus tents, because medical teaching, training, and research utilized black bodies disproportionately, and in some southern venues, they were used exclusively.

During the 1830s, a Dr. T. Stillman ran serial advertisements in the Charleston Mercury for his infirmary, in which he principally treated skin diseases. On October 12, 1838, he made a fascinating addendum: “Wanted: FIFTY NEGROES. Any person having sick Negroes, considered incurable by their respective physicians and wishing to dispose of them …. The highest cash prize will be paid upon application as above.”

Slaves who had become too old of too sick to work supplied the bulk of hospital “clinical material.” They enjoyed no legal rights and could mount no legal challenge to their incarceration and treatment. Stillman advertised his desire for blacks who suffered from disorders far beyond his own specialty, such as apoplexy, kidney disease, and stomach, intestinal, bladder, liver, and spleen disorders, as well as scrofula and hypochondriasm. He wished to test new techniques and medications he had formulated on debilitated and chronically unhealthy blacks in the same institution where he treated paying whites. He then marketed the medications and techniques. (Harriet Washington “Medical Apartheid” 2007 p.102-3)

Additional excerpts from Harriet Washington “Medical Apartheid”

At several points in this book Harriet Washington debunks some of the exaggerations or false conspiracy theories that many minorities believe; however she confirms many others, and demonstrates that even if minorities are more inclined to believe some of the worst exaggerations, the opposite is often the case for people that aren't the victims of “Medical Apartheid,” who have an incentive to believe in the establishment, since they often get much better care.

She also admits to facing some of her own denials as a member of the establishment in the academic world and at least tries to do her best to recognize that some of these conspiracy theories are at least partially true when she writes the following:

When I haltingly voiced my fears to an African American acquaintance who had worked as a ward clerk in the nephrology unit, she looked at me as if I were not too bright and minced no words, “Girl, black people don’t get organs they give organs.” During our ensuing debate, she pointed out to me that the race bias in the hospital where we worked should have resolved any doubts: in the early 1980s, most of the black employees worked in housekeeping and clerical support. Blacks were noticeably scarce among the administration and medical staffs. Why, she asked, was I naïve enough to believe that racial bias stopped at the staffing roster? (Harriet Washington “Medical Apartheid” 2007 p.14-5)

The vast majority of research is only discussed in the academic world and there is very little attempt to educate the majority of the public about the risks behind this research, often until it is too late and many people find out the hard way. In many cases this happens when they find out about the negative side effects of medications they were given the impression were safe and wind up in law suits after the fact as I have pointed out in several previous articles, some listed below, including current lawsuits about talcum powder causing ovarian cancer the dangers of Miracle Grow or Round up and many more.

“Medical Apartheid” is probably the most thorough book I have seen yet that attempts to inform the public about this, but there is far more that many people can recognize if they understand the basic principles of science and research. For example, intentionally or not when there are environmental disasters in Flint Michigan, Chrystal City Texas, East Chicago Indiana, Love Canal New York, the disasters exposed by Erin Brockovich, Woburn Mass exposed by John Travolta in "Civil Action" and many others including those reported in "Dumping in Dixie" by Robert Bullard, they provide ample opportunity for research whether they could could be beneficial or not. However in all of these cases it should have been clear that before the disaster they already had enough research to determine that epidemic levels of pollution are disastrous and not worth the risks.

The most important lesson that we could learn if we tried isn't about medical research since these unintentional research projects are so incompetent and unethical; but about how corrupt our political economic and media institutions are!

These environmental disasters all have a lot in common with the research by Harriet Washington, since the vast majority of the benefits, when there are actual benefits to the research, goes to the wealthy with political power, while the vast majority of the sacrifices go to those without political power, often minorities especially blacks!

Additional research by Gary Webb also exposed that there was an enormous amount of incompetent research being done in the drug industry targeting mostly Hispanics or African Americans, and this was followed up by attempts to profit off it to finance some past wars based on lies including financing the Nicaraguan Contras in the eighties based on lies. Additional researchers including Alfred McCoy and Robert Parry has shown that this hasn't been limited to the Contras it began no later than Vietnam and that this activity has continued long after the Contras including events in Afghanistan and a plane that went down in 2007. the following except from Gary Webb's book shows some of the incompetent research that resulted from political corruption, or to read the full chapter for the full context see the link at end of excerpts:

Gary Webb "Dark Alliance" Excerpts from Chapter One focusing primarily on research into Cocaine use.

Dr. Robert Byck, a drug expert from Yale University, sat in the audience listening patiently to the testimony all day. When it was Byck's turn to speak, Guyer warmly welcomed him up to the witness table, complimenting him on his "very, very impressive" academic and professional credentials.

Byck thanked Guyer and then politely ripped into the federal government for spreading misinformation about the drug. "What I would like to talk to you about for the most part is the importance of telling the truth," Byck, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale Medical School, began. The truth was that cocaine wasn't the horrible health hazard Americans were being told it was. "Cocaine doesn't have the kind of health consequences that one sees with drugs such as alcohol and cigarettes. Right now, if we look at the hospital admission records and death records, cocaine doesn't look like a dangerous drug. . .. We have given a great deal of cocaine to many individuals and find it to be a most unremarkable drug. We are giving cocaine by nose to normal young men. When anyone visits our laboratory, they look at the TV screen and say, 'That guy took cocaine?' They don't jump around, they don't get excited; they sit calmly and experience a drug high and don't become dangerous."

"What about five years later?" Guyer cried. "Are the membranes and so on not affected at all?"

"The damage to people's membranes is quite rare with cocaine. It does occur, but it is a rare phenomenon," Byck answered. "Part of this is because people don't use very much cocaine. It is expensive. Tell me the last alcoholic you saw with cirrhosis of the liver when cirrhosis was caused by Dom Perignon. You almost never see it." ......

He was there to deliver a warning from the scientific community.

Something bad was coming, Byck knew, something so deadly awful that the only way to prevent a catastrophe was for the government to tell the truth, and pray to God that it was believed. ....

For about a year, a Peruvian police psychiatrist named Dr. Raul Jeri had been insisting that wealthy drug users in Lima were being driven insane by cocaine. A psychiatrist in Bolivia, Dr. Nils Nova, began making similar claims shortly thereafter. Their reports, written in Spanish and published in obscure medical journals, went largely unnoticed in the United States because, frankly, they sounded so weird. .....

Byck, who among other things had collected and edited Sigmund Freud's cocaine papers, had been skeptical of the South American reports until he sent one of his students down to Peru on a summer project. In the spring of 1978 a first-year Yale med student named David Paly came to Byck with an idea the scientist found intriguing: Paly wanted to measure the blood plasma levels of Peru's coca-leaf-chewing Indians to see what it was that got the Indians high. .....

Byck quickly got some federal grant money and sent Paly back to Lima to do some controlled experiments on cocaine smokers. ....

Paly was both fascinated and repelled. "It was Pavlovian," he said. "It was just unbelievable. Some of these kids, in the lab, would smoke twenty grams of paste and then, after you had paid them for their time, they would run out on the street with the money and buy more." .....

When the hearings resumed, the congressmen peppered the witnesses with such questions as whether they thought Hollywood cocaine use was contributing to the deterioration of quality TV shows (as one of them had heard recently on the Mike Douglas Show); if it was true that Coca-Cola once contained cocaine; and if the TV series Quincy, in which Jack Klugman played a coroner, was "accurate" or if it was "way out." Not another word was said about doing research or warning the public about the dangers of cocaine smoking. Byck left the hearing stunned. "Nobody paid any attention," he recalled. "They listened to it, and everyone said, 'So what?' I felt very strongly that the information that I had should have caused somebody to say, 'All right! We've got to start finding out about this stuff!' But they didn't." .....

Byck said the Food and Drug Administration shut down attempts to do any serious research on addiction or treatment, refusing to approve grant requests or research proposals and withholding the government permits necessary to run experiments with controlled substances. ...

Byck told Guyer's committee sarcastically. "The regulations which govern the legal importation of cocaine and coca research are much more effective than the regulations which seem to govern smoking or smuggling." Full Chapter

The traditional media attempts to dismiss this as fringe conspiracy theory; however Gary Webb began his research by reporting on the Kerry committee report which was carried out by John Kerry and is part of the congressional record, so if his work is fringe then so is testimony before congress. Also the media pundits and CIA didn't attempt to discredit him by addressing his sources which include many additional court transcripts newspaper articles from traditional media and testimony from police and government attorneys, instead they attempted to smear him through unreliable methods that should, if anything add to his credibility, not detract from it! due to the incredible controversial nature of his reporting it appears as if even some of the supposedly progressive reporters from alternative media outlets may have been pressured to refute it, since on some occasions even a few authors from the Nation magazine claimed that some of his reporting wasn't accurate, but they didn't specify what was wrong with it.

If you read his book it may be clear that Gary Webb provided extensive sources for his claims and even, at times admitted that some of them might not be completely reliable, which is to be expected considering the subject matter, so it is an easy and reliable claim to say that some of it isn't true; even Gary Webb would admit that and did when he raised some questions himself. However and enormous amount of it is clearly true despite the spin that the government and mainstream media comes up with!

This research along with an enormous amount of additional research into drug running by many other authors, that the mainstream media refuses to cover, is enough to show that even if a large portion of it needs some review there is enough there to indicate that the drug war is based on lies, like other wars including the Vietnam war which was against a country that signed their own declaration of Independence, the Gulf War which was about weapons of mass destruction which didn't exist and many other wars based on lies that are only well disclosed in the alternative media outlets that the mainstream media recently attempted to portray as "Russian Propaganda." a close look at many of these outlets they referred to as "Russian Propaganda" quickly exposed that most of them had no connection to Russia at all and even the media that made that claim "walked it back!"

Michelle Alexander also exposed how the mass incarceration craze has eroded the appearance of justice which should now be considered a tragedy and a farce, or at least it would be if most people were aware of the news that is only reported at a low level in the alternative media outlets, in "The New Jim Crow," which is also very well sourced as far as it goes. However regrettably she spends very little time informing the public about the CIA involvement in running drugs and only mentions it briefly. Considering the subject matter and how much it applies to the expansion of mass incarceration it is hard to understand why she hardly even mentions it; however she did manage to get much more attention from the traditional media that most other alternative researchers and the work that she does is very good as far as it goes.

I can't help but owner if she was pressured to downplay the connection with the CIA and mass incarceration or if she would have gotten nearly as much attention from the mainstream media if she had reported more extensively on it.

Regardless of why Michelle Alexander didn't mention the CIA connection more, it is a major part of the reason for mass incarceration and it increases the availability of prison research subjects which Harriet Washington wrote about and it also increases the availability of traditional slave labor, which contrary to what most people believe is still legal under the thirteenth amendment according to Penal labor in the United States

In addition to being denied access to affordable health care even when the public is being used to develop medications that are making drug companies wealthy, we're also being denied access to news about the full extent of environmental destruction which is only reported in alternative media outlets or when it is reported in traditional outlets, it is scattered in locations far and wide so that most people are only aware of a small fraction of it. the public is also denied coverage of political candidates that don't bend over backwards to serve corporate interests, thanks to the consolidated commercial media which effectively rigs elections.

In order to have a viable chance to get elected any candidate need to start with name recognition, and with over ninety percent of the media in the control of just six oligarchies they can control who does or doesn't get name recognition, which is why two of the least like candidates, both of whom were under investigation by the FBI last year, managed to get the nomination ensuring that only candidates that serve corporate interests can get elected.

If we had diverse media there is no way either of these highly disliked candidates could have been elected and on top of that we would be in a much better position to minimize or eliminate unethical uses of research on those without political power for the benefit of those with political power, without full disclosure or informing the people being used for research of the full risks involved.

Even when some of us do pay far more attention to alternative media outlets it is easy to miss out on some of the reporting of some of these issues including what was apparently a massive prison strike that I didn't even hear about until I searched for it now and it only happened a few months ago. According to Prison Labor Is Unseen and "Utterly Exploitative," 10/06/2016 "An estimated 24,000 inmates missed work and as many as 29 prisons were affected, according to activists." Not only wasn't this reported in the traditional media which almost never reports some of the biggest grassroots movements but it wasn't reported nearly as well as I would have expected it to be in the alternative media.

The risks of horrifying research without fully considering the consequences, including some that was never intended to be done as research in the first place should be clear to anyone that takes a close look at many of the disasters resulting from past wars including WWI, WWII, The Vietnam War both Gulf Wars and many others all of which used chemical weapons although they weren't fully disclosed by traditional media and the results were often refuted even when there has been enormous amounts of evidence.

There was far more research into the damage done by Mustard Gas in both WWI & II, damage done by radiation during atomic tests in the fifties, Agent Orange in the Vietnam war, depleted Uranium in the Gulf Wars and who knows how many other undisclosed research projects than the vast majority of the public even suspect is going on; yet we keep fighting one war after another based on lies. this research is public for those that look for it but it is rarely reported by the traditional media; and when it is they often give preferential treatment to government denials even when they have no credibility. On occasions when they're faced with so much evidence that they have to admit to it they often do so quickly and briefly, for one and only one of these disasters at a time, before letting them fall down the memory hole without mentioning all the others and letting the public know that it is being repeated over and over again.

If more people knew half of this then it wouldn't be surprising that there are so many conspiracy theories about all the research that is being done without full disclosure. It should be more surprising that there isn't much more! Harriet Washington is one of the rare researchers that does such a good job sorting through all the real experiments and sorting out the false conspiracies in “Medical Apartheid" but regrettably she doesn't get nearly as much attention as she should.

One of the rare occasions where there is some discussion about some of this research is when it is done with the help of Planned Parenthood; however regrettably the discussion doesn't involve a rational review of the ethics of using poor people for research at all! Instead it has become a partisan political debate dividing people up to two sides, neither of which fully discuss the details properly. Harriet Washington also explored some of the misinformation on this subject as well and so did I in a previous article, Both sides of Planned Parenthood controversy ignore or misrepresent human research experiments where I pointed out that even though Planned Parenthood is supposedly a non-profit organization the people they were selling research material to were almost certainly for profit corporations that were making big money off the research they were doing. Cecile Richards was portrayed as a hero defending the rights of the poor yet she is being paid an enormous amount of money without mentioning that the research material they provide is being used to help multinational corporations increase their profits without requiring them to provide affordable health care.

Liberals and Progressives that might be outraged by this have remained silent thanks to the partisan debate about the abortion issue, and amazingly it is the right wing that is bring up this subject although they don't seem interested in learning from the research being done or providing affordable care. If this was brought in the open and discussed then it could and should be used as an other argument for Single Payer and to limit or in some cases eliminate patents which the public contributes to either by providing research subjects or in many cases subsidizing the rese4arch with tax payer dollars. When I reported on this previously it was being reported that Cecil Richards pay had surged from $300,000 to over $500,000; but apparently it may have surged even more after that close to a million dollars a year, yet she still doesn't explain how she's using research from the poor to enrich multinational corporations. This was reported by anti-abortion organizations based on tax returns from Planned Parenthood but mainstream efforts to refute this limited themselves to reports from before this came out, implying that it is probably true as far as I can find with an internet search.

We should be able to have this debate without assuming that this is the only way to get health care to the poor. If it was disclosed we could bring down the costs of health care and research dramatically and there would still be plenty of work for medical personnel including those providing abortion services, although if there was more contraceptive or other prevention methods unwanted pregnancies would almost certainly be less common.

However there might not be nearly as much work for bureaucrats making enormous amounts of money by pushing the interests of the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

Not that this would bother some of us!

Planned Parenthood President’s Salary Reached Almost $1 Mill In 2014 10/12/2016