Minority Guinea Pigs
Discrimination can assume its most insidious forms—with the most destructive results on individuals—when mixed with unethical practices in science and medicine.
Freedom has exposed numerous incidents of minorities being singled out for human testing of dangerous drugs and other harmful “treatments.” One underlying cause for the discriminatory treatment has been the ill-founded stereotyping of minorities as the chief conveyors of crime, violence and other societal illnesses.
Such bigoted stereotyping led to a plan in Los Angeles in the 1970s to establish a “violence center” in which blacks and Hispanics would be treated for “violent tendencies” with chemical castration and electrodes passing electric current to the brain. The Church of Scientology and Freedom were among those who vociferously condemned the plan, which was subsequently dropped. Freedom also conducted extensive investigations into its orchestrator, Dr. Louis Jolyn West, a psychiatrist whose views of minorities are consistent with his peers in the psychiatric industry.
In the 1980s, Freedom exposed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which confirmed that blacks were singled out as human guinea pigs for psychiatric drug testing in the 1950s and 1960s. For instance, records showed extensive testing of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs on blacks between 1953 and 1958 in a CIA-sponsored research program at the National Institute for Mental Health’s Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Freedom also published accounts of drug testing on blacks in other medical facilities and prisons.
Biological warfare testing conducted on unwitting citizens during the 1950s and 1960s, as exposed by Freedom, also at times targeted minorities. Experimental dissemination of the whooping cough virus in Florida in the 1960s, for example, was heaviest in a region inhabited by African-Americans. Investigation by Freedom revealed that the testing also led to several deaths—mostly of young children. [See Government Reform]
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