Dr. James Ketchum joined the Army right out of medical school. Four short years and a board certification in psychiatry later, he got an unusual job for a doctor; testing hallucinogens and other “incapacitating agents” on military volunteers for their potential use on the battlefield. Which was a funny way to say he tested chemical weapons on American soldiers.
He would defend chemical warfare until his dying day.
But he’s dead now, so fuck that guy.
Today’s Moment of Science… Operation Delirium, Part 1: How is this shit legal?
The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 were pretty clear about not trying to make anybody too dead with chemical weapons, warning “no poisonous gas you fucking assholes.” Plenty of countries signed, the US did not.
Then the Great War came and despite those rules, way too many countries picked up a nasty habit of spritzing Europe with military grade cabbage farts (my band name). So in 1925 after the dust settled, 38 countries signed something called *deep inhale* The Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare.
But because yikes, it’s usually just called The Geneva Protocol (not to be confused with the Geneva Convention). Much like the Hague Convention, it still says “for real this time no poisonous gas Germany fucking seriously we’re gonna make you pay a fine or something for this bullshit.”
Many countries signed with reservations. The US was one of the original 38 countries to sign, but only ratified it 50 years later under a “we’ll follow the rules as long as the other guy does” proviso. We’re fun, aren’t we?
WWII came and Germany didn’t deploy their sarin supplies on the battlefield, but they sure didn’t hold back on the chemical fuckery in their death camps. After the war, an uncomfortably high number of Nazis just went on living their lives like they hadn’t genocided their way across Europe. That just wouldn’t do, and some of those fuckers were hunted to the ends of the goddamn Earth to face trial.
The Nuremberg Trials were held by representatives from the US, UK, USSR, and France. Then the Nuremberg Military Tribunals were conducted solely by the US. In the case known as the Doctors’ Trial, Nazi doctors were all “what, it was 1939, everyone was experimenting on the feebleminded, there’s no law against it.” This may have had the slightest shred of basis in fact. I mean not that everyone was conducting awful experiments, but that nobody had agreed on a code of conduct or ethics for legitimate research.
Out of this came the Nuremberg Code, a set of ten easy ethical questions to determine if it’s research or war crimes. Things like voluntary consent, taking steps to avoid unnecessary mental and physical suffering, and no experimentation if you think it might make the subject too dead? This is shit they had to write down.
Anyway, it was a mixed bag of sentences at the Doctors’ Trial. Some were sentenced to death by hanging. Every prison sentence was reduced from life or decades to just a few years. And some were just plain acquitted.
After his acquittal, Dr. Kurt Blome was one of a bunch of nazi fucksticks who got a sweet relocation package courtesy of the CIA, eventually working on the MK-Ultra program. And if “rumors” are to be believed, several doctors and scientists who committed atrocities ended up in the US at the same facility at the same time as one Dr. James Ketchum.
“Mrs. Auntie SciBabe wait you said you’d explain how this fuckery is legal and this still seems a bit illegal.” Well, it wouldn’t be legal on most human subjects. But Ketchum’s experiments weren’t conducted on most human subjects; they were conducted on members of the military.
A 1950 US supreme court decision declared “if you get injured or dead on duty, that sounds like a ‘you’ problem.” Known as the Feres Doctrine, it all but prevents the government from owning any liability for the shit they definitely did.
Like testing chemical weapons on soldiers.
This has been your Moment of Science, just letting you know now that this gets incredibly grim tomorrow.
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Some of my favorite drug discoveries have been the results of happy accidents. A blood pressure medication side effect was repackaged into Rogaine, the hair loss treatment. From the ashes of a failed drug trial for angina treatment, Viagra was erected ahem resurrected. An injectable toxin first developed to treat eye muscle disorders is much better known today for its ability to smooth wrinkles, Botox.
And then there was that time a drug failed to treat tummy aches in Switzerland, so the US government locked some soldiers in a room and made them trip balls on that shit for god and country.
Today’s Moment of Science… Operation Delirium Part 2: “We hurt a lot of people.”
3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ) was first cooked up in 1951 at the Swiss pharmaceutical company now known as Roche. It’s an anticholinergic, meaning it blocks the action of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. There are a vast array of drugs in this class, including tri-cyclic antidepressants, antihistamines, and motion sickness drugs.
They were researching potential ulcer treatments at Roche. BZ caused temporary but complete incapacitation, delirium, and hallucinations; no word on if people returned to reality with a mildly improved ulcer.
A substance with no known medical applications but that wouldn’t make you too dead was ideal for the US military’s new, slightly gentler chemical weapons program. Biological and chemical weapons had been super goddamn banned to use in war since the 1920s except under this little “if the other guy does it maybe nobody will scream too much” proviso.
There were also a zillion new rules about what researchers could and couldn’t do to volunteers in medical research. However, even today, there are very few circumstances under which someone who’s active duty military can sue the government for damages, up to and including death. Their test subjects for this were military members, in many cases voluntold to guinea pig duty.
Approximately 250 substances were tested on 7,000 service members, including cannabis, muscle relaxants, and LSD. Just to liven up the mood I mean do government sanctioned research, one physician slipped LSD into his fellow researchers’ coffee. And their cocktails. And an Army unit’s water supply.
Also on the list of potential substances to be used in happy little chemical warfare were PCP, mustard gas, chlorine gas, tear gas, VX and sarin. Now I’m just a chemist who analyzed organophosphates for a spell there, but a few entries on that list are what we refer to colloquially in the lab as “not in my fucking contract” chemicals. The dose makes the poison and all, but you need very little dose of VX or sarin to get particularly poisonous.
Dr. James Ketchum wasn’t the only one running the trials obviously, but he managed to publicly report on his own culpability to an alarming degree. “People said we were putting them through terrible experiences that were really unjust and immoral. Most of the people who were delirious didn’t remember any of these delirious behaviors, same as if you had a dream. I don’t think drug studies were in those that they had in mind when the Nuremberg rules were first put together,” which is gonna be a yikes from me doc.
A quick glance at the videos of the tests and they may seem goofy at first. A soldier can’t figure out how to open up a door. When asked why there are taxes, another answered, “that would be difficult for me to answer, because I don’t like rice.” Ronald Zadrozny was given the highest dose in their recorded test. He failed to put on his gas mask when ordered, mistook a drape for a group of men, and tried escaping through a medicine cabinet. He was awake and hallucinating for 36 hours.
Years later, Zadrozny killed his wife and then took his own life.
After a large scale test showed BZ’s efficacy of inducing delirium, the military ordered up 100,000lbs of the stuff, to be delivered as an incapacitating agent via cluster bomb.
Dr. Ketchum touted that none of the 7,000 volunteers died during their two month stay at Edgewood, even claiming “none suffered a serious illness or permanent injury.” Well.
Participants had to keep their experiences secret for fifty years. Seeking treatment at the VA meant breaking their oath of secrecy and losing their military pensions. Some of them reported hallucinations every night for decades. One man was subjected to testing riot control gas at such a high concentration that he reported going blind in one eye and having permanent brain damage. Must have slipped Ketchum’s mind.
Participants signed consent forms, but consent to what? “The consent stated that you knew and had been explained what would happen to you, which was a lie, it was an out blatant lie,” one of the volunteers said in an interview. “They didn’t even know what would happen to you. And you signed a disclaimer that you knew what they were giving you, even though you didn’t.”
“I tried to get a followup study done,” claimed Dr. Ketchum, something that had been promised to the volunteers. His boss limited it to “50 guys who got different drugs. We didn’t get enough guys in one drug category to draw any conclusion, all we can say is that no one, none of the fifty showed anything to worry about.”
Yes, people are so often sworn to secrecy for half a century and denied medical care when everything went swimmingly.
In 1989, all of the US military’s stock of BZ was destroyed in part of a long, slow march towards eliminating the chemical weapons program.
This has been your Moment of Science, reminding you not to sign anything from someone in the military without a lawyer present.
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