When Governments Perform Harmful Experiments on Their People
US ARMY ADMITS IT SPRAYED A KNOWN CARCINOGEN ON A ST LOUIS NEIGHBORHOOD
When Governments Perform Harmful Experiments on Their People’, and we ought to begin with the story making the headlines, which concerns an admission from the US army that it sprayed a known carcinogen on a St Louis neighborhood. SO, in more detail, in the 1950s and 1960s, the US Army conducted secret experiments in St Louis, Missouri, spraying zinc cadmium sulfide, which is a chemical now recognised as containing cadmium, a known carcinogen, over predominantly Black, low-income neighborhoods, particularly around the Pruitt-Igoe housing project. These tests, part of what was called Operation Large Area Coverage (or LAC), aimed to simulate the dispersion of biological weapons to assess vulnerabilities to potential Soviet attacks. The Army released this fine fluorescent powder from rooftops, vehicles, and airplanes, targeting areas chosen for their physical similarities to Soviet cities like Moscow, including population density, terrain, and river access.
During all of this, residents were misled, and told that the spraying was for testing a smoke screen to protect the city from aerial observation, unaware of the chemical’s potential health risks or the true purpose tied to a biological weapons program. The spraying occurred primarily in the Pruitt-Igoe complex, described in Army documents as a “densely populated slum district,” where about three-quarters of the residents were Black. The chemical was dispersed at night, often from blowers on high-rise rooftops or station wagons, creating a mist that settled over homes, schools, and playgrounds. Some residents, like Ben Phillips and Chester Deanes, who grew up in Pruitt-Igoe, recall seeing men in hazmat suits operating fog-like machines, with the chemical leaving a residue on cars and skin. At the time, many believed it was pesticide or a harmless substance. But, the reality emerged in 1994 when declassified documents revealed the tests’ true nature, sparking outrage and health concerns among former residents.
Part of what emerged was that zinc cadmium sulfide was chosen because its particle size (which is 2–3 micrometers) mimicked the dispersion of biological agents, and its fluorescence-under-ultraviolet light allowed easy tracking. While the Army claimed it was nontoxic at the time, later research raised alarms. Cadmium, which is a component of the compound, is now classified by the EPA as a human carcinogen, linked to lung cancer, kidney damage, and bone toxicity with prolonged exposure. Meanwhile, a 1932 study in the Journal of Industrial Hygiene had already warned that cadmium caused lung damage, stating no amount was safe for inhalation. BUT, despite this, the US Army conducted 34 tests across the US and Canada, including in Minneapolis, Fort Wayne and Corpus Christi, thus exposing millions without consent.
In addition to all of this, sociologist Lisa Martino-Taylor, whose 2012 research and 2017 book Behind the Fog brought renewed attention to these experiments, well, she alleges the possibility that radioactive particles were mixed with the zinc cadmium sulfide, citing connections to scientists involved in the Manhattan Project. Her findings thus prompted Missouri Senators Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt to demand answers from the Army, which has denied radiological involvement.
Then, a 1997 National Research Council report, commissioned by Congress, concluded that exposure levels in St Louis—estimated at 24.4 micrograms over 31 months—were unlikely to cause harm, comparing it to cadmium intake from food or smoking. However, the report noted limited research, primarily from animal studies, and recommended further health studies, which the Army has not clearly pursued. Meanwhile, former Pruitt-Igoe residents, like Doris Spates, who lost her father and four siblings to cancer, and Mary Helen Brindell, who battled multiple cancers, they state that they suspect the spraying of the army’s compound contributed to their health issues and losses.
THE TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENT: A DOCUMENTED HISTORY OF THE OBJECTIFICATION OF BLACK AMERICANS
And so, at the risk of sounding like I’m race bating, let’s nevertheless state the obvious, which is that human history is marked by prejudice that also manifested with the adoption of the racial categorisation of people; and this adoption was often enforced through plunder and brutalities of varying degrees. As such, as far as the intersection of race and science is concerned, history does not consist of merely misunderstood scientific pioneers who might have bent the rules towards what seemed like a noble cause at the time; RATHER, people incorporated pseudoscience (and science) in pursuit of horrific agendas – from eugenicists performing cruel and unusual experiments on black people to chemical companies developing concoctions to use in gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And herein lies what is a documented history of the objectification of people deemed the lesser! But, to prove that the admission from the US army is not a-contextual, let’s zoom in on the objectification of black Americans in particular.
To begin with, we ought to look at the Tuskegee experiment. The Tuskegee experiment began in 1932, at a time when there was no known cure for syphilis, a contagious venereal disease. After being recruited by the promise of free medical care, 600 African American men in Macon County, Alabama were enrolled in the project, which aimed to study the full progression of the disease. The participants were primarily sharecroppers, and many had never before visited a doctor. Doctors from the US Public Health Service (PHS), which was running the study, informed the participants—399 men with latent syphilis and a control group of 201 others who were free of the disease—they were being treated for bad blood, a term commonly used in the area at the time to refer to a variety of ailments.
The men were monitored by health workers but only given placebos such as aspirin and mineral supplements, despite the fact that penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis in 1947, some 15 years into the study. The US Public Health Service researchers convinced local physicians in Macon County not to treat the participants, and instead, research was done at the Tuskegee Institute. In order to track the disease’s full progression, researchers provided no effective care as the men died, went blind or insane or experienced other severe health problems due to their untreated syphilis.
Then, in the mid-1960s, a US Public Health Service venereal disease investigator in San Francisco named Peter Buxton found out about the Tuskegee study and expressed his concerns to his superiors that it was unethical. In response, the US Public Health Service officials formed a committee to review the study but ultimately opted to continue it—with the goal of tracking the participants until all had died, autopsies were performed and the project data could be analyzed.
Well, Peter Buxton then leaked the story to a reporter friend, who passed it on to a fellow reporter, Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Heller broke the story in July 1972, prompting public outrage and forcing the study to finally shut down. By that time, 28 participants had died from syphilis, 100 more had died from related complications, at least 40 spouses had been diagnosed with it and the disease had been passed to 19 children at birth. Then, in 1973, Congress held hearings on the Tuskegee experiments, and the following year the study’s surviving participants, along with the heirs of those who died, received a $10 million out-of-court settlement. But, additionally (and thankfully) new guidelines were issued to protect people in US government-funded research projects.
SIMILARLY, AFRICAN AMERICAS WERE SUBJECTED TO FORCED STERILISATIONS
Now, remember when we discussed the eugenicist roots of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger, and in particular how Sanger was an important figure in establishing the link between birth control and eugenics, even arguing for the forced sterilisation of the so-called “feeble-minded” ─ which were primarily people of other races, and those living in impoverished conditions; well, many people shared this diabolical vision. In fact, I believe you would be aware of the story of a woman named Fannie Lou Hamer who went to a hospital in 1961 to have a uterine tumor removed, and left without her reproductive organs. Well, dubbed a ‘Mississippi appendectomy,’ that action was actually part of a statewide effort to reduce the Black population through forced sterilisation!
Now, many of the black women were never told this was done; and many had only found out after the fact, similar to Fannie Lou Hamer. However, it was also frequently the case that those being sterilized were aware it was happening though had not consented. In the 20th century, and especially in the 1930s, forced and coerced sterilization of Black women was a rapidly spreading phenomenon. There were many cases of the government along with physicians pressuring Black women to get long term or permanent birth control, oftentimes with remuneration.
In addition, there were several notable court cases that allowed for the pervasiveness of forced sterilization in the US, such as the case of Buck v Bell (from 1927), in which the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that states had the right to forcibly sterilize people who were deemed unfit to reproduce, or people who were considered “feebleminded.” While this term refers to people of lowered intelligence and perpetuates the idea that unintelligent people were supposedly taking over society, “feebleminded” itself was intentionally a very malleable term that allowed for the categorisation of anyone deemed “undesirable” to be seen as unfit to reproduce, including disabled and sick people, minorities, poor people, and women who were seen as “promiscuous” – in fact, this same criteria can be seen in the the case of the Relf sisters.
Now, in addition to court rulings such as that of the case of Buck v Bell (from 1927), additionally, the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 was a major legislative turning point. The act served a federal grant program that assisted with comprehensive family planning services to low income and uninsured families; however, it also subsidized sterilizations for people who received healthcare through the Indian Health Service and Medicaid, meaning Black, Indigenous, and Latina women were specifically targeted by forced and coerced sterilization. Six years after the act was passed, physicians had sterilized over 25% of Indigenous women of childbearing age.
This was extremely devastating for Indigenous communities and is one example of a long history of the state’s efforts to control the reproduction of Indigenous people. In the 19th century, as Indigenous people were forced onto reservations by the United States government, there was increased illness and death since the U.S. government did not provide basic and substantial healthcare; as a result, the reservations had incredibly poor health conditions. Indigenous women rebelled against their situation by having more children even with their compromised health at unprecedentedly high rates. The government constructed rudimentary hospitals in which Native women could give birth. However, many forced sterilizations were also performed in these hospitals and other facilities outside of reservations that were contracted to treat tribal members.
This history has continued over time. In the 1970s the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center forcibly sterilized Latina women who came into the hospital for emergency C-sections. They were thrown consent papers that they were told authorized the doctor to give them pain medication, but in reality the consent forms were to perform tubal ligations. Most of the women didn’t know what they were reading or did not have time to read the document properly because of their emergent situation. Additionally, the consent forms were in English and many of the women did not know what they were reading due to a language barrier. Many of them were urged by medical staff speaking Spanish to sign the consent form in order to ensure the health of their baby. But, here’s more on this occurrence from those in North Carolina.
HOLMESBURG PRISON’S MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS IN PHILADELPHIA
Now, make no mistake: these actions are not exclusive to government actors. Evidently, the government’s experimental propensities have also been adopted by corporations. Dr Kligman may not be a household name today, but the products he developed are staples in the skincare and pharmaceutical industries. Perhaps the most well-known of these is the increasingly popular tretinoin, or Retin-A, a topical medication for acne that is also remarkably effective as an anti-aging treatment. But Kligman’s discoveries came on the backs of scores of incarcerated men—an overwhelming number of whom were Black—detained in Philadelphia’s now-shuttered Holmesburg Prison. Kligman’s development of Retin-A was directly made possible by the tests conducted on men imprisoned at Holmesburg. These men—and the family members to whom they returned upon their release–have maintained over decades that Dr Kligman’s experimentation was tortuous, unethical, and that it forever changed their lives.
While Holmesburg is most widely associated with the development of Retin-A, many other products and chemicals were tested on incarcerated men at the facility through contracts with pharmaceutical companies and even the US military. For example, both a Mr Moore and fellow panelist Herbert Rice—who was incarcerated at Holmesburg for two years—spoke of their participation in what was known as the “milkshake tests.” In one of the more lucrative experiments, the tests required living in an isolated cellblock and only eating a milkshake product (the ingredients of which were unknown to participants) three times a day for six months. While Moore remains unsure of what he was served, he believes that these may have been safety tests of the earliest versions of what are now known as protein shakes. In a 2021 profile written about the Holmesburg experiments, Yusef Anthony, a formerly incarcerated survivor of a handful of tests conducted at the prison, notes that these milkshake tests gave him hemorrhoids that forced him to undergo numerous operations.
A COMPANY TESTED UNAPPROVED IMPLANTED DRUG ON LOUISIANA PRISONERS
Similar to the case in Philadelphia, in 2019, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must immediately investigate California-based BioCorRx, Inc and the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections’ testing of an unapproved drug on prison inmates to determine its effectiveness in managing addiction disorders. The tests involved sustained-release naltrexone implants, which are surgically inserted under the skin in the abdomen. Although the FDA has approved naltrexone in oral tablet and injectable forms to treat alcohol and opioid dependence, the agency has never approved any surgically implanted form of the drug.
Not only did the experiment in Louisiana – which ended in the spring of 2019 amid criticism soon after it began – not follow regulations governing clinical trials, but BioCorRx apparently has conducted or may still be conducting similar clinical trials elsewhere in the US in violation of regulations. BioCorRx CEO and President Brady Grainer told a reporter in May that the company has used the unapproved implant in more than 1,000 people. The company also has announced other pilot programs. One in Philadelphia involved vulnerable homeless people struggling with addiction. Another in Silver Spring, Md., evaluated use of the naltrexone implant for weight loss, even though no naltrexone product is FDA-approved for such use.
Clinical trials must always be reviewed and approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) to ensure that people enrolled are provided certain protections, including being given adequate information before consenting to participate in the experiment and having safeguards to ensure that vulnerable people – such as prisoners – aren’t coerced into participating in the trial.
BUT, BioCorRx, Inc. and the Louisiana prison system had planned to conduct their experiment on 10 inmates without the approval of an IRB. A review of email correspondence between BioCorRx and Louisiana prison officials revealed that their participant consent forms lacked the elements of legally effective informed consent required under FDA human subjects protection regulations, leaving the participating prisoners unaware that they were part of an experiment or that the form of naltrexone they were to receive was not FDA-approved. But, while new drugs were tested on prisoners for the most part, it appears that the poor and homeless and the new targets!
THIS IS NOT A BLACK AMERICAN OR PRISONER PROBLEM, IT IS EVERYONE’S CONCERN
Now, here is what is exposed by the occurrence of these experiments in prisons and among homeless persons: all this exposes the fact that the audacity to subject people to harmful experiments is EVERYONE’S CONCERN because there are many corporations or organisations that are taking on similar experiments towards a goal that they think is uniquely justifiable – and often these goals now transcend considerations of race or incarceration status.
For example, recently, Nike was slammed over its alleged funding of a study on puberty blockers for children and how it would affect their athletic and training performance. The research is looking to discover how much medical intervention there needs to be for a male to “fairly” compete in girls’ and women’s sports. The first notion that Nike was allegedly funding was in a New York Times article published over the weekend about the plight of Blaire Fleming – the San Jose State Spartans transgender female volleyball player who played a controversial role in the 2024-25 NCAA women’s volleyball season.
The New York Times article mentions Joanna Harper, who identifies as a trans woman and who studies transgender athletes, and states that Joanna Harper is (quote) “currently helping to lead an ambitious study of trans adolescents that measures their results on a 10-step fitness test before they start hormone therapy and then, after they have begun to medically transition, every six months for five years.”
The article then reads that (quote), “But, she told me when we talked in February, ‘the current climate makes the study somewhat uncertain.’ I assumed she was referring to the Trump administration’s cuts to National Institutes of Health research grants, but she said money was not a problem: The study is being funded by Nike. The problem was Trump’s separate order targeting medical care for transgender youth. ‘If we can’t perform gender-affirming care,’ she explained, ‘then we can’t bring people into the study.” (end quote). But, all this details is that Nike essentially curated its own version of a transgender Tuskegee experiment.
Written By Lindokuhle Mabaso
