By the time they reach high school, nearly 20 percent of all American boys will be diagnosed with ADHD. Millions of those boys will be prescribed a powerful stimulant to "normalize" them. A great many of those boys will suffer serious side effects from those drugs. The shocking truth is that many of those diagnoses are wrong, and that most of those boys are being drugged for no good reason—simply for being boys. It's time we recognize this as a crisis.
If you have a son, you have a one-in-seven chance that he has been diagnosed with ADHD. If you have a son who has been diagnosed, it's more than likely that he has been prescribed a stimulant—the most famous brand names are Ritalin and Adderall; newer ones include Vyvanse and Concerta—to deal with the symptoms of that psychiatric condition.
If you have a son, you have a one-in-seven chance that he has been diagnosed with ADHD. If you have a son who has been diagnosed, it's more than likely that he has been prescribed a stimulant—the most famous brand names are Ritalin and Adderall; newer ones include Vyvanse and Concerta—to deal with the symptoms of that psychiatric condition.
The Drug Enforcement Administration classifies stimulants as Schedule II drugs, defined as having a "high potential for abuse" and "with use potentially leading to severe psychological or physical dependence." (According to a University of Michigan study, Adderall is the most abused brand-name drug among high school seniors.) In addition to stimulants like Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse, and Concerta, Schedule II drugs include cocaine, methamphetamine, Demerol, and OxyContin.
According to manufacturers of ADHD stimulants, they are associated with sudden death in children who have heart problems, whether those heart problems have been previously detected or not. They can bring on a bipolar condition in a child who didn't exhibit any symptoms of such a disorder before taking stimulants. They are associated with "new or worse aggressive behavior or hostility." They can cause "new psychotic symptoms (such as hearing voices and believing things that are not true) or new manic symptoms." They commonly cause noticeable weight loss and trouble sleeping. In some children, some stimulants can cause the paranoid feeling that bugs are crawling on them. Facial tics. They can cause children's eyes to glaze over, their spirits to dampen. One study reported fears of being harmed by other children and thoughts of suicide.
Imagine you have a six-year-old son. A little boy for whom you are responsible. A little boy you would take a bullet for, a little boy in whom you search for glimpses of yourself, and hope every day that he will turn out just like you, only better. A little boy who would do anything to make you happy. Now imagine that little boy—your little boy—alone in his bed in the night, eyes wide with fear, afraid to move, a frightening and unfamiliar voice echoing in his head, afraid to call for you. Imagine him shivering because he hasn't eaten all day because he isn't hungry. His head is pounding. He doesn't know why any of this is happening.
Now imagine that he is suffering like this because of a mistake. Because a doctor examined him for twelve minutes, looked at a questionnaire on which you had checked some boxes, listened to your brief and vague report that he seemed to have trouble sitting still in kindergarten, made a diagnosis for a disorder the boy doesn't have, and wrote a prescription for a powerful drug he doesn't need.
If you have a son in America, there is an alarming probability that this has happened or will happen to you.
6.4 MILLION CHILDREN BETWEEN THE AGES OF FOUR AND SEVENTEEN HAVE BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH ADHD. BY HIGH SCHOOL, NEARLY 20% OF ALL BOYS WILL HAVE BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH ADHD—A 37% INCREASE SINCE 2003.
On this everyone agrees: The numbers are big. The number of children who have been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder—overwhelmingly boys—in the United States has climbed at an astonishing rate over a relatively short period of time. The Centers for Disease Control first attempted to tally ADHD cases in 1997 and found that about 3 percent of American schoolchildren had received the diagnosis, a number that seemed roughly in line with past estimates. But after that year, the number of diagnosed cases began to increase by at least 3 percent every year. Then, between 2003 and 2007, cases increased at a rate of 5.5 percent each year. In 2013, the CDC released data revealing that 11 percent of American schoolchildren had been diagnosed with ADHD, which amounts to 6.4 million children between the ages of four and seventeen—a 16 percent increase since 2007 and a 42 percent increase since 2003. Boys are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed as girls—15.1 percent to 6.7 percent. By high school, even more boys are diagnosed—nearly one in five. Almost 20 percent. And overall, of the children in this country who are told they suffer from attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, two thirds are on prescription drugs. And on this, too, everyone agrees: That among those millions of diagnoses, there are false ones. That there are high-energy kids—normal boys, most likely—who had the misfortune of seeing a doctor who had scant (if any) training in psychiatric disorders during his long-ago residency but had heard about all these new cases and determined that a hyper kid whose teacher said he has trouble sitting still in class must have ADHD. That among the 6.4 million are a significant percentage of boys who are swallowing pills every day for a disorder they don't have.
On this, too, everyone with standing in this fight seems to agree. But on the subject of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, that is where the agreement ends. For example: Doctors, parents, and therapists give a lot of different explanations for the sharp rise. Increased awareness—that's a big one. We know more now. Other possibilities put forth: Too many video games. Too much refined sugar. Pharmaceutical companies pushing ADHD drugs. Lack of gym classes at schools. All of these factors are cited. And people have a lot of different ideas about what to do for the children who receive these diagnoses. Many believe that medicine should be the first treatment, either combined with behavioral therapy or not. Others feel that drugs should be a last resort after making every other alleviative effort you can find or think of, from hypnosis to herbal treatments to neurofeedback. Given today's prevailing pharmaceutical culture, clinicians who believe that drugs should never be used to treat ADHD in children are very much in the minority. Marketing is powerful, and blockbuster drugs like Ritalin are big business. Business booms, market share grows when scripts are written, and countercultural doctors and therapists who advocate caution and who believe that diagnoses are made too easily—doctors and therapists who preach alternatives to drugs—are finding themselves the butt of jokes. But more about them shortly. The United States government first collected information on mental disorders in 1840, when the national census listed two generally accepted conditions: idiocy and insanity. A century later, psychiatrists knew more. They had options when making diagnoses, and by the 1940s difficult kids were classified as "hyperkinetic." Other terms would follow, like minimal brain dysfunction. In 1955, there came a pill doctors could prescribe for these children to temper their hyperactivity and make them behave more like "normal" children. It was a stimulant, so called because it heightened the brain's utilization of dopamine, which can improve attention and concentration. The active ingredient was a highly addictive compound called methylphenidate. The drug was called Ritalin. By 1987, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) had settled on a more refined name for a disorder among children who exhibited the same set of symptoms, including trouble concentrating and impulsive behavior: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. ADHD. At the time, in American schools, it was still considered unusual for a child to take Ritalin. It was, frankly, considered weird. Today, it has simply become a default method for dealing with a "difficult" child. "We are pathologizing boyhood," says Ned Hallo-well, a psychiatrist who has been diagnosed with ADHD himself and has cowritten two books about it, Driven to Distraction and Delivered from Distraction. "God bless the women's movement—we needed it—but what's happened is, particularly in schools where most of the teachers are women, there's been a general girlification of elementary school, where any kind of disruptive behavior is sinful. What I call the 'moral diagnosis' gets made: You're bad. Now go get a doctor and get on medication so you'll be good. And that's a real perversion of what ought to happen. Most boys are naturally more restless than most girls, and I would say that's good. But schools want these little goody-goodies who sit still and do what they're told—these robots—and that's just not who boys are." Especially when they're young. One of the most shocking studies of the rise in ADHD diagnoses was published in 2012 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. It was called "Influence of Relative Age on Diagnosis and Treatment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Children." Nearly one million children between the ages of six and twelve took part, making it the largest study of its kind ever. The researchers found that "boys who were born in December"—typically the youngest students in their class—"were 30 percent more likely to receive a diagnosis of ADHD than boys born in January," who were a full year older. And "boys were 41 percent more likely to be given a prescription for a medication to treat ADHD if they were born in December than if they were born in January." These findings suggest, of course, that an errant diagnosis can sometimes result from a developmental period that a boy can grow out of. And there are other underlying reasons for the recent explosion in diagnoses. Stephen Hinshaw, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and the editor of Psychological Bulletin, the research publication of the American Psychological Association, presents evidence in a new book that ADHD diagnoses can vary widely according to demographics and even education policy, which could account for why some states see a rate of 4 percent of schoolchildren with ADHD while others see a rate of almost 15 percent. Most shocking is Hinshaw's examination of the implications of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which gave incentives to states whose students scored well on standardized tests. The result: "Such laws provide real incentive to have children diagnosed and treated." Children with ADHD often get more time to take tests, and in some school districts, tests taken by ADHD kids do not even have to be included in the overall average. "That is, an ADHD diagnosis might exempt a low-achieving youth from lowering the district's overall achievement ranking"—thus ensuring that the district not incur federal sanctions for low scores.
In a study of the years between 2003 and 2007, the years in which the policy was rolled out, the authors looked at children between ages eight and thirteen. They found that among children in many low-income areas (the districts most "targeted" by the bill), ADHD diagnoses increased from 10 percent to 15.3 percent—"a huge rise of 53 percent" in just four years.
48% OF SUBJECTS OF ONE STUDY WHO TOOK ADHD MEDICATIONS EXPERIENCED SIDE EFFECTS LIKE SLEEP PROBLEMS AND "MOOD DISTURBANCES." IN ANOTHER, 6% OF CHILDREN SUFFERED PSYCHOTIC SYMPTOMS, INCLUDING THOUGHTS OF SUICIDE.
And yet among many of the people interviewed for this story, the most common explanation for the staggering increase in diagnoses is that doctors know more now. Great strides have been made. "I don't think there's an epidemic of new cases," says Mario Saltarelli, a neurologist and the senior vice-president of clinical development at Shire, which manufactures Adderall and Vyvanse. (Since our interview, he has left the company.) "It's always been there. It's now more appropriately understood and recognized." Instead of lumping together all the kids with high energy and bad behavior and calling them hyper, many experts say, doctors can identify the children who exhibit the symptoms specific to ADHD and treat them accordingly. "We were paying attention," says Jeffrey Lieberman, the president of the American Psychiatric Association and chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. "We [now] have reliable descriptions and the means of diagnosing.
Every fifteen years or so, the APA publishes a book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which doctors around the world use as a guide for diagnosing mental disorders in their patients. Known as the DSM, it has been published seven times, first in 1952 and most recently in 2013. For each revision, a new task force of psychiatrists tweaks, refines, and often expands the descriptions, definitions, and symptoms of hundreds of psychiatric disorders. It's not uncommon for definitions to be written more broadly, thus broadening the universe of people who might be diagnosed with a given disorder. In the DSM-5, the 916-page version that came out last year, there was one important change made to the section on ADHD. The age at which a child can be diagnosed with ADHD was raised from seven to twelve. In the previous edition of the DSM, in order to meet the criteria for diagnosis, several symptoms of ADHD had to be present by age seven. Citing "substantial research published since 1994," the authors increased the window for diagnosis by five years, meaning that twenty million more children are now eligible to be told they have ADHD.
And so if a child is deemed to meet the criteria for ADHD as defined in the DSM, even by a rushed pediatrician after a cursory twelve-minute examination, the clinical-practice guidelines strongly recommend medication as part of the first step in treating kids starting at age six. (Behavior therapy is recommended as a first step for four- and five-year-olds, followed by methylphenidate, or stimulants, if the behavior therapies "do not provide significant improvement and there is moderate-to-severe continuing disturbance in the child's function.")
A cynical person might wonder whether the task forces who write the DSM are influenced by pharmaceutical companies, seeing that with each new disorder they add and each new symptom they deem valid, more people can get expensive prescriptions. ADHD drugs alone were a $10.4 billion business in 2012, a 13 percent increase over the year before.
"I think it happens in an indirect but nonetheless powerful way," says Lisa Cosgrove, a clinical psychologist who is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a fellow at the Center for Ethics at Harvard. In a study of the DSM-5, she found that 69 percent of the task force acknowledged ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Many of these were likely indirect affiliations, but Cosgrove says that doesn't matter. "It's not that I think there's this quid pro quo kind of corruption going on. But when the individuals who are charged with the responsibility of developing criteria or with changing the symptom criteria—I don't think they are consciously aware of the way in which industry affiliations create pro-industry habits of thought." Cosgrove points to what she calls a "major gap" in the APA's disclosure policy for doctors who worked on the DSM-5: It allows unrestricted research grants from drug companies. "Now, 'unrestricted' means that the pharmaceutical company cannot in-house analyze the data...but there's a wealth of social-psych research that shows that when you are paid even small amounts—and there's the potential for future payment—it affects your behavior.
If I get an unrestricted research grant from Pfizer for $500,000, and I'm hoping to get a $2 million grant, at some level I'm going to be aware of how I talk about the results."
The journal Accountability in Research chose Cosgrove's paper "Commentary: The Public Health Consequences of an Industry-Influenced Psychiatric Taxonomy" for publication in 2010, when a first draft of the DSM-5 was made public. In the paper, Cosgrove and her coauthors lambasted the psychiatric community for supporting a manual that largely ignores side effects and promotes diagnosis by constantly adding symptoms and disorders. "A psychiatric taxonomy [i.e., the DSM] which touts indication for medications, but is effectively silent about their associated risks, is evidently unbalanced and raises questions about undue influence," they wrote. "The time has come to seriously reconsider whether the heavily pharmaceutically funded APA should continue to be entrusted with the revision of the DSM."
Dr. Allen Frances, professor emeritus at Duke University School of Medicine, the former chairman of its psychiatry department, and the chairman of the DSM-IV (1994) task force, feels the problem is not corruption but the slow creep of misinformation. "I know the people. They're not doing it for the drug companies—they really believe what they're doing is right. They really believe ADHD is underdiagnosed, and they want to help people who should be getting medication. I just think they're dead wrong."
Frances points to the fact that in August 1997—the same year the CDC first started tallying ADHD cases in the United States—the Food and Drug Administration made it easier for pharmaceutical companies to advertise their drugs to consumers. Spending on direct-to-consumer drug advertising increased from $220 million in 1997 to more than $2.8 billion by 2002.
It's not that Frances believes ADHD is not a real and valid diagnosis; he just believes that these days it's made so frequently it has been rendered meaningless. "It's been watered down so much in the way it's applied that it now includes many kids who are just developmentally different or are immature," he says. "It's a disease called childhood."
Falsely diagnosing a psychiatric disorder in a boy's developing brain is a terrifying prospect. You don't have to be a parent to understand that. And yet it apparently happens all the time. "Kids who don't meet our criteria for our ADHD research studies have the diagnosis—and are being treated for it," says Dr. Steven Cuffe, chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Florida College of Medicine, Jacksonville and vice-chair of the child and adolescent psychiatry steering committee for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.
The ADHD clinical-practice guidelines published by the American Academy of Pediatrics—the document doctors are supposed to follow when diagnosing a disorder—state only that doctors should determine whether a patient's symptoms are in line with the definition of ADHD in the DSM. To do this accurately requires days or even weeks of work, including multiple interviews with the child and his parents and reports from teachers, plus significant observation.
And yet a 2011 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that one third of pediatrician visits last less than ten minutes. (Visits for the specific purpose of a psychosocial evaluation are around twenty minutes.) "A proper, well-done assessment cannot be done in ten or fifteen minutes," says Ruth Hughes, a psychologist who is the CEO of Children and Adults with ADHD (CHADD), an advocacy group.
Only one significant study has ever been done to try to determine how many kids have been misdiagnosed with ADHD, and it was done more than twenty years ago. It was led by Peter Jensen, now the vice-chair for psychiatry and psychology research at the Mayo Clinic, but at the time a researcher for the National Institute of Mental Health. After a study of 1,285 children, Jensen estimated that even way back then—before ADHD became a knee-jerk diagnosis in America, before one in seven boys had been given the diagnosis—between 20 and 25 percent were misdiagnosed. They had been told they had the disorder when in fact they did not.
Part of the problem is subjectivity, and the power of a culture that has settled on a drug-based solution. Decades of research have gone into trying to define the disorder in a clinical way, and yet the ultimate diagnosis—Your son has ADHD—is inherently subjective. And insurance companies don't reimburse or reward doctors for time spent doing the diligent work involved in giving a proper opinion. "You have to observe the behavior of the child over different environments. You have to talk to the parents. You have to talk to the teachers. I don't know an insurance company out there that pays for a pediatrician to call and talk to the teachers. They just don't," says Hughes.
Ned Hallowell does not accept insurance in his private psychiatry practice, which he says allows him to spend more time with patients. "But for the average person, it's the luck of the draw," he says. "Do they have a good, savvy pediatrician who can be careful about the diagnosis, or do they have somebody who just hears 'ADD' and writes a prescription?"
Lieberman, the APA president, says most doctors try to get it right. "Are there pressures that are packed on clinicians that make them less than optimally rigorous [in making a diagnosis]? Unfortunately, there are," he says. "But I mean, you have our health-care financing system that's quite dysfunctional, and it's created a situation where doctors have to spend a certain amount of time with bureaucratic, administrative paperwork and regulatory-compliance stuff.... We also have a culture where there's pressure, both from schools as well as from parents, to do something—to alleviate the problem and enhance the performance of the child. That's no excuse, and doctors shouldn't succumb to that. But, you know, doctors are human.... We'd like everybody to be these heroic figures who fulfill the virtues of the Hippocratic oath. I think most doctors aspire to try to do that. But human limitations being what they are...caveat emptor."
One man believes that drugging children's brains is too risky. That until we get a lot closer to achieving a foolproof diagnosis for ADHD, we need to think twice about giving a single pill to a single child. He believes that what is called attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder might in fact be a boy's greatest gift, the gift of energy. And that the best way to treat it is to first teach the boy to control the energy all by himself, because by learning to control it all by himself, a boy can channel that energy to help him succeed. That the responsible thing to do is first to see if there is some problem with the boy's heart—not with the way it pumps blood, but with its ability to show and accept love. The man's name is Howard Glasser, and he is one of those countercultural clinicians who, as American society has become inured to giving psychotropic drugs to kids, has built a practice predicated on opposing the very idea.
If he were a child today, Glasser would be given a prescription for a stimulant in about five minutes. Little Howie was a wired kid. Obstreperous. But good. A good kid. And when he grew up and became a family therapist—he has applied to earn his doctorate in education from Harvard starting this fall—he created a way of dealing with wired, obstreperous, uncontrollable kids who are, beneath all that, good. And he believes all of them are good.
He calls the method the Nurtured Heart Approach, and it seems simple on the surface: You nurture the child's heart. If a child is hyperactive and defiant and has trouble listening and concentrating, Glasser feels it is our responsibility as a society—as grown-ups—to do everything we can for a child's heart before we start adding chemicals to his brain, because what if his brain is fine? What if the diagnosis isn't right? And even if it is, what if something else works?
Hyperactive, defiant—he was all those things. At home—the apartment his parents rented in Kew Gardens, a leafy, almost suburban corner of Queens—he was sometimes so defiant that his mother would shout into the air, asking what she had done to deserve this, her face brightening with incarnadine helplessness. His father was a salesman of electrical supplies, and he and Howie used to go at it pretty good. Sometimes, when it was his turn to teach Howie a lesson, his father would reach for the rubber machine belt. Howie took that punishment laughing. Heartbreaking laughter.
At school he would sit in the back of the class, cracking jokes until his teachers were overcome with that unique kind of exasperation that results from feeling outrage and disappointment at the same time. Outrage because you wouldn't believe the mouth on this kid. Disappointment because he was so smart. Because he had so much potential.
Man, was Howie Glasser smart. That was the problem nobody saw: He was a funny, clever kid who scored high in both English and math without much studying. School bored him. The teachers, though, had to teach to every student in the class, and Howie felt forgotten. He didn't need to listen, so he sat in the back of the room and goofed off, his gangly frame folded awkwardly into a too-small wooden chair. Kids would laugh, and he'd do it more. And every time the teachers got angry and pointed their fingers toward the principal's office, struggling to keep from screaming at Howie—to keep from smacking him, probably—they were only feeding his recalcitrance. Finally, someone was paying attention to him! Deep down Howie didn't like the negative attention, but it was better than no attention at all.
In junior high school, they wanted to hold him back. He couldn't handle the next grade, they said—he couldn't concentrate, he was hanging around with the wrong kids, he just wasn't ready. But then Howie took a test, and his score surprised even the teachers who knew he was smarter than he let on. He scored high enough to skip ahead and graduated high school at sixteen.
Glasser graduated from City College with a degree in psychology, then got a master's in counseling at New York University. He had started work on a Ph.D., also at NYU, but after a year or so he dropped out to do the thing he loved most, the thing that made all the noise go away, all the trouble, all the teachers who couldn't figure out how to harness and channel his energy, his hollering parents who didn't understand why he couldn't be more like his older brother: He worked with wood.
Howie's Woodworking opened on Third Avenue and East Twelfth Street in New York in 1980. He collected wood around the city—old floorboards from gutted townhouses, planks, pallets, scraps. He made planters and mosaics and odd pieces of furniture. People would see the sign and come in and ask if he could do bigger jobs—cabinetry, fine furniture, storefronts. Glasser would always tell them he could do it, even though he had no idea how. Then he'd hire people who could show him.
After a few years, Glasser moved out west, far from the overdrive of New York, to the Arizona desert. On his way out, in Boulder, Colorado, he got to know a man named Michael Davis, who, with his wife, Anita, was raising four sons, two of whom were adolescents at the time. The first time Glasser visited Davis's house, there was some kind of minor drama unfolding that day, the kind of argument that periodically bubbles up in a house where teenagers live.
And the way the Davises handled it made Glasser weep."Michael and Anita were talking to their kids in the most loving way. I had never until that day—ever—encountered anybody who talked to their kids that way. I had tears streaming down my face," he says. "In my world, in my circumscribed world, it was not the culture. It's kind of breathtaking to me now." Even as he tells this story almost thirty years later, Glasser has to pause, swallow hard, and clear his throat.
He eventually moved to Tucson with the woman who would be the mother of his only child, a daughter. Almost as soon as he arrived, he found a job at a family-therapy institute where he could use his psychology training. "It was like the sea parted," he says. He felt as if he was doing what he needed to be doing. He got a second job at a clinic that was known for helping kids with behavior problems. Many of them had been diagnosed with ADHD.
"I had been one of these kids," he says. "And here I am with twelve preadolescent kids who aren't on their meds on the weekends—I would meet with them on Saturday mornings. So you get to see: These are very interesting human beings. I got to experience the truth of these kids off medication."
Glasser would open up group discussions by asking what the rules should be. The children half-raised their hands and called out predictable answers: no hitting, no yelling, no bad words, no this, no that. The first time it happened, Glasser was seized with memories, a darkness moving over his brain like a shadow. "It was PTSD for me. I grew up with rules that start with no, and I hated rules that start with no.They always led to me getting in trouble, and ultimately getting hit," he says. "It got my attention that kids saw rules that way."
The clinic and the therapy institute both employed other bright young therapists, and they all called on their state-of-the-art psychology training to try to help the troubled families in their care. They used positive reinforcement. Instead of rules that started with no, they set rules like "Be respectful" and "Use nice words." This was all fine and hewed closely to the education and therapy trends of the day. Kids behaved better. Families improved. But they didn't change. Positive reinforcement is great, but there was only so far it could go with a difficult child. Glasser knew he hadn't truly scraped away the artifice of defiant behavior to get at whatever pain was festering inside these kids. He wasn't finding whatever it was that stirred them to yell and swear and make the grown-ups think they needed medication.
The problem with the positive rules was that there didn't seem to be a very good way to teach them. The old rules were mostly taught when children broke them. If the rule is "No hitting" and one kid hits another, you'd teach the child the rule in that moment. "What you just did was wrong." You'd tell him to go sit in the corner, or go to his room, or apologize. But in those moments, everyone's upset. The kid who got hit is crying, the hitter is angry and scared, and the grown-up is amping up the authority. The offending child gets all the attention. The rule doesn't stick.
Still, Glasser saw that kids seemed to like "no" rules because they're clear. The line of transgression was definite. He had an idea: What if he told the children how great they were when they didn't break a rule? It would be like a video game. When you do something great while playing a video game—when you simply do what the game expects—you get points and you get to keep going. When you go out of bounds or break one of the game's rules, no one yells at you or reminds you what rule you've broken. You simply miss a turn or lose points. And there is no grudge once you pay the fine. As Glasser wrote in his first book in 1999, Transforming the Difficult Child,"When the consequence is over, it's right back to scoring."
Crimes Committed by the N.S.A.
Sunday, July 3, 2016
By the time they reach high school, nearly 20 percent of all American boys will be diagnosed with ADHD. Millions of those boys will be prescribed a powerful stimulant to "normalize" them. A great many of those boys will suffer serious side effects from those drugs. The shocking truth is that many of those diagnoses are wrong, and that most of those boys are being drugged for no good reason—simply for being boys. It's time we recognize this as a crisis. If you have a son, you have a one-in-seven chance that he has been diagnosed with ADHD. If you have a son who has been diagnosed, it's more than likely that he has been prescribed a stimulant—the most famous brand names are Ritalin and Adderall; newer ones include Vyvanse and Concerta—to deal with the symptoms of that psychiatric condition. If you have a son, you have a one-in-seven chance that he has been diagnosed with ADHD. If you have a son who has been diagnosed, it's more than likely that he has been prescribed a stimulant—the most famous brand names are Ritalin and Adderall; newer ones include Vyvanse and Concerta—to deal with the symptoms of that psychiatric condition.
Project ARTICHOKE Project ARTICHOKE (also referred to as Operation ARTICHOKE) was a CIA project that researched interrogation methods and arose from Project BLUEBIRD on August 20, 1951, run by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. A memorandum by Richard Helms to CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles indicated Artichoke became Project MKULTRA on April 13, 1953. The project studied hypnosis, forced morphine addiction (and subsequent forced withdrawal), and the use of other chemicals including LSD, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects. ARTICHOKE was a mind controlprogram that gathered information together with the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and FBI. In addition, the scope of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?" Project Artichoke was the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret code name for carrying out in-house and overseas experiments using LSD, hypnosis, and total isolation as a form of physiological harassment for special interrogations on human subjects. The subjects who left this project were fogged with amnesia, resulting in faulty and vague memories of the experience. The name of this project came about from a New York City criminal who was nicknamed “the Artichoke King” Ciro Terranova. (Kaye) It was formally known as Project Bluebird, but in August 1951, the operation was renamed. This project was a kickoff for MKUltra. The CIA disputed which department would take over the operation. Finally, it was decided that an agent from the CIA research staff, a former army brigadier general, Paul F. Gaynor, would oversee it. The CIA chose the weaker and less intelligent as its subjects, which they thought to be homosexuals, racial minorities and military prisoners. The operation took place in special isolated locations throughout Japan, Europe, and Asia.
Project ARTICHOKE
Project ARTICHOKE (also referred to as Operation ARTICHOKE) was a CIA project that researched interrogation methods and arose from Project BLUEBIRD on August 20, 1951, run by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. A memorandum by Richard Helms to CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles indicated Artichoke became Project MKULTRA on April 13, 1953.
The project studied hypnosis, forced morphine addiction (and subsequent forced withdrawal), and the use of other chemicals including LSD, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.
ARTICHOKE was a mind controlprogram that gathered information together with the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and FBI. In addition, the scope of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?"
Project Artichoke was the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret code name for carrying out in-house and overseas experiments using LSD, hypnosis, and total isolation as a form of physiological harassment for special interrogations on human subjects.
The subjects who left this project were fogged with amnesia, resulting in faulty and vague memories of the experience. The name of this project came about from a New York City criminal who was nicknamed “the Artichoke King” Ciro Terranova. (Kaye) It was formally known as Project Bluebird, but in August 1951, the operation was renamed. This project was a kickoff for MKUltra.
The CIA disputed which department would take over the operation. Finally, it was decided that an agent from the CIA research staff, a former army brigadier general, Paul F. Gaynor, would oversee it. The CIA chose the weaker and less intelligent as its subjects, which they thought to be homosexuals, racial minorities and military prisoners. The operation took place in special isolated locations throughout Japan, Europe, and Asia.
Project ARTICHOKE (also referred to as Operation ARTICHOKE) was a CIA project that researched interrogation methods and arose from Project BLUEBIRD on August 20, 1951, run by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. A memorandum by Richard Helms to CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles indicated Artichoke became Project MKULTRA on April 13, 1953.
The project studied hypnosis, forced morphine addiction (and subsequent forced withdrawal), and the use of other chemicals including LSD, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.
ARTICHOKE was a mind controlprogram that gathered information together with the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and FBI. In addition, the scope of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?"
Project Artichoke was the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret code name for carrying out in-house and overseas experiments using LSD, hypnosis, and total isolation as a form of physiological harassment for special interrogations on human subjects.
The subjects who left this project were fogged with amnesia, resulting in faulty and vague memories of the experience. The name of this project came about from a New York City criminal who was nicknamed “the Artichoke King” Ciro Terranova. (Kaye) It was formally known as Project Bluebird, but in August 1951, the operation was renamed. This project was a kickoff for MKUltra.
The CIA disputed which department would take over the operation. Finally, it was decided that an agent from the CIA research staff, a former army brigadier general, Paul F. Gaynor, would oversee it. The CIA chose the weaker and less intelligent as its subjects, which they thought to be homosexuals, racial minorities and military prisoners. The operation took place in special isolated locations throughout Japan, Europe, and Asia.
Friday, June 17, 2016
Father of public school philosophy hated God, morality, and country... “To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.” —George Brock Chisholm, in a Speech given at the, Conference on Education, Asilomar, California, September 11, 1954 Few parents of public school children realize that one of the primary engineers of today's Godless public school philosophy was a God-hating, family-hating, immoral, sick-minded, Communist. His name is George Brock Chisholm (1896-1971). Dr. Brock Chisholm, the first head of the World Health Organization (WHO), laid the blame for war and human conflict squarely at the feet of parents and Sunday School teachers who — from the beginning — fed their children the “poisonous certainties” of the Bible: “Can we identify the reasons why we fight wars...? Many of them are easy to list: prejudice, isolationism, the ability to emotionally and uncritically believe unreasonable things. ...
Father of public school philosophy hated God, morality, and country...
“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.” —George Brock Chisholm, in a Speech given at the, Conference on Education, Asilomar, California, September 11, 1954
Few parents of public school children realize that one of the primary engineers of today's Godless public school philosophy was a God-hating, family-hating, immoral, sick-minded, Communist. His name is George Brock Chisholm (1896-1971). Dr. Brock Chisholm, the first head of the World Health Organization (WHO), laid the blame for war and human conflict squarely at the feet of parents and Sunday School teachers who — from the beginning — fed their children the “poisonous certainties” of the Bible: “Can we identify the reasons why we fight wars...? Many of them are easy to list: prejudice, isolationism, the ability to emotionally and uncritically believe unreasonable things. ...
“When the other [infectious diseases] were attacked at the preventative level, some martyrs had to be sacrificed to the cause of humanity, because reactionary forces fought back. Ignorance, superstition, moral certainties... resisted through anti-reform organizations, religious and political pressure groups, even political parties.” [Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, "The Re-Establishment of Peacetime Society,” Psychiatry, February 1946.] The following excerpts are taken from the book, None Dare Call It Treason, by John A. Stormer: For the rare citizen who escapes indoctrination in the "new social order" in progressive schools; for the Bible-believing Christian who rejects "theologians" who teach that socialism is the new "Kingdom of God on Earth"; for all the sturdy souls who hold to age-old concepts of right and wrong, and are vocal about it, the collectivists have one final, ultimate weapon. Declare them insane! Fantastic? Not at all. Just as in the fields of education, religion, press, radio and TV, the collectivists have succeeded in infiltrating and twisting the honorable psychiatric and psychological professions to their own ends.
The "new leaders" in the psychiatric field propose to re-educate the world's population using psychological procedures to create a new breed of amoral men who will accept a one-world socialistic government. They hold the weapon of commitment to a mental institution over the heads of those "reactionaries" who rebel at accepting the "new social order." It sounds unbelievable? Listen to the words of Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, first head of the World Federation of Mental Health, and later head of the World Health Organization of the United Nations. His address, sponsored by the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation was delivered in October 1945 in Washington D.C. to a large group of psychiatrists and high government officials. Dr. George Brock Chisholm said: What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality--the concept of right and wrong. The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all psychotherapy.
If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility. Chisholm has been obsessed for years with the idea that instilling concepts of right and wrong, love of country, and morality in children by their parents is the paramount evil. In another speech, he said: The people who have been taught to believe whatever they were told by their parents or their teachers are the people who are the menace to the world. (Speech, Conference on Education, Asilomar, California, September 11, 1954) What besides concepts of morality and right and wrong does Dr. Chisholm consider to be a neurosis? He explains it in this speech: Even self-defense may involve a neurotic reaction when it means defending one's own excessive wealth from others who are in need. (Psychiatry, February, 1946)
Chisholm proposes that psychotherapy be used to eradicate such neuroses as a man wishing to defend his own private property in this way: There must be an opportunity to live reasonably comfortable for all the people in the world on economic levels which do not vary too widely either geographically or by groups within a population. This is a simple matter of redistribution of material wealth. (Mental Health and World Citizenship, International Congress on Mental Health, London, 1948, p.8)
This is the basic Marxist concept, i.e., that those who have should have it taken away. How different are Chisholm's ideas from those of America's pioneers. Had they decided on some scheme of redistribution of the wealth, all would have stayed poor and hungry, because there was no wealth. Instead of redistributing what meager wealth was available, they conceived a system of government which safeguarded private property. Initiative was stimulated and people were encouraged to produce, and by producing, to create new wealth for themselves. In the process, all men benefited from more jobs, new products and services. In freedom, men have made more spiritual, moral, intellectual progress, and produced more material wealth for themselves and others than under any other system conceived by man. Although honored and recognized by many as a great humanitarian, George Brock Chisholm was a wolf in sheep's clothing who despised God, morality, and the Christian family. The public school system today is controlled by evil people who have sold their souls to the Devil. Children who should be learning about their Creator are instead being brainwashed with the unproven and non-scientific THEORIES of godless Evolution. Sicko groups like GLSEN, working in the public school, are trying to turn children into homosexuals. The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) EXPOSED!
Dr. Chisholm, Margaret Mead (the federation’s second president) and other social scientists from ten countries wrote its founding document, "Mental Health and World Citizenship" (SOURCE: "Origins of the World Federation for Mental Health"). Notice their attitude toward traditional values...
“Studies of human development indicate the modifiability of human behaviour throughout life, especially during infancy, childhood and adolescence.... The social sciences and psychiatry also offer a better understanding of the great obstacles to rapid progress in human affairs.... "Social institutions such as family and school impose their imprint early.... It is the men and women in whom these patterns of attitude and behaviour have been incorporated who present the immediate resistance to social, economic and political changes. Thus, prejudice, hostility or excessive nationalism may become deeply embedded in the developing personality... often at great human cost....
"...change will be strongly resisted unless an attitude of acceptance has first been engendered."
(SOURCE: "Mental Health and World Citizenship," founding document of the World Federation for Mental Health, pages 7 and 8. Distributed by the National Association For Mental Health, Inc., 1790 Broadway, New York 19, N.Y.). Today, more than half a century later, that "attitude of acceptance" has been built. Nations around the world are fast conforming to the pattern set in the 1940s. The global network of "mental health" partners is working to prevent anything that would hinder "positive" collective thinking in the rising global village. Few notice its tentacles reaching into community health programs and civil society in over 130 nations around the world. END
“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.” —George Brock Chisholm, in a Speech given at the, Conference on Education, Asilomar, California, September 11, 1954
Few parents of public school children realize that one of the primary engineers of today's Godless public school philosophy was a God-hating, family-hating, immoral, sick-minded, Communist. His name is George Brock Chisholm (1896-1971). Dr. Brock Chisholm, the first head of the World Health Organization (WHO), laid the blame for war and human conflict squarely at the feet of parents and Sunday School teachers who — from the beginning — fed their children the “poisonous certainties” of the Bible: “Can we identify the reasons why we fight wars...? Many of them are easy to list: prejudice, isolationism, the ability to emotionally and uncritically believe unreasonable things. ...
“When the other [infectious diseases] were attacked at the preventative level, some martyrs had to be sacrificed to the cause of humanity, because reactionary forces fought back. Ignorance, superstition, moral certainties... resisted through anti-reform organizations, religious and political pressure groups, even political parties.” [Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, "The Re-Establishment of Peacetime Society,” Psychiatry, February 1946.] The following excerpts are taken from the book, None Dare Call It Treason, by John A. Stormer: For the rare citizen who escapes indoctrination in the "new social order" in progressive schools; for the Bible-believing Christian who rejects "theologians" who teach that socialism is the new "Kingdom of God on Earth"; for all the sturdy souls who hold to age-old concepts of right and wrong, and are vocal about it, the collectivists have one final, ultimate weapon. Declare them insane! Fantastic? Not at all. Just as in the fields of education, religion, press, radio and TV, the collectivists have succeeded in infiltrating and twisting the honorable psychiatric and psychological professions to their own ends.
The "new leaders" in the psychiatric field propose to re-educate the world's population using psychological procedures to create a new breed of amoral men who will accept a one-world socialistic government. They hold the weapon of commitment to a mental institution over the heads of those "reactionaries" who rebel at accepting the "new social order." It sounds unbelievable? Listen to the words of Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, first head of the World Federation of Mental Health, and later head of the World Health Organization of the United Nations. His address, sponsored by the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation was delivered in October 1945 in Washington D.C. to a large group of psychiatrists and high government officials. Dr. George Brock Chisholm said: What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality--the concept of right and wrong. The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all psychotherapy.
If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility. Chisholm has been obsessed for years with the idea that instilling concepts of right and wrong, love of country, and morality in children by their parents is the paramount evil. In another speech, he said: The people who have been taught to believe whatever they were told by their parents or their teachers are the people who are the menace to the world. (Speech, Conference on Education, Asilomar, California, September 11, 1954) What besides concepts of morality and right and wrong does Dr. Chisholm consider to be a neurosis? He explains it in this speech: Even self-defense may involve a neurotic reaction when it means defending one's own excessive wealth from others who are in need. (Psychiatry, February, 1946)
Chisholm proposes that psychotherapy be used to eradicate such neuroses as a man wishing to defend his own private property in this way: There must be an opportunity to live reasonably comfortable for all the people in the world on economic levels which do not vary too widely either geographically or by groups within a population. This is a simple matter of redistribution of material wealth. (Mental Health and World Citizenship, International Congress on Mental Health, London, 1948, p.8)
This is the basic Marxist concept, i.e., that those who have should have it taken away. How different are Chisholm's ideas from those of America's pioneers. Had they decided on some scheme of redistribution of the wealth, all would have stayed poor and hungry, because there was no wealth. Instead of redistributing what meager wealth was available, they conceived a system of government which safeguarded private property. Initiative was stimulated and people were encouraged to produce, and by producing, to create new wealth for themselves. In the process, all men benefited from more jobs, new products and services. In freedom, men have made more spiritual, moral, intellectual progress, and produced more material wealth for themselves and others than under any other system conceived by man. Although honored and recognized by many as a great humanitarian, George Brock Chisholm was a wolf in sheep's clothing who despised God, morality, and the Christian family. The public school system today is controlled by evil people who have sold their souls to the Devil. Children who should be learning about their Creator are instead being brainwashed with the unproven and non-scientific THEORIES of godless Evolution. Sicko groups like GLSEN, working in the public school, are trying to turn children into homosexuals. The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) EXPOSED!
Dr. Chisholm, Margaret Mead (the federation’s second president) and other social scientists from ten countries wrote its founding document, "Mental Health and World Citizenship" (SOURCE: "Origins of the World Federation for Mental Health"). Notice their attitude toward traditional values...
“Studies of human development indicate the modifiability of human behaviour throughout life, especially during infancy, childhood and adolescence.... The social sciences and psychiatry also offer a better understanding of the great obstacles to rapid progress in human affairs.... "Social institutions such as family and school impose their imprint early.... It is the men and women in whom these patterns of attitude and behaviour have been incorporated who present the immediate resistance to social, economic and political changes. Thus, prejudice, hostility or excessive nationalism may become deeply embedded in the developing personality... often at great human cost....
"...change will be strongly resisted unless an attitude of acceptance has first been engendered."
(SOURCE: "Mental Health and World Citizenship," founding document of the World Federation for Mental Health, pages 7 and 8. Distributed by the National Association For Mental Health, Inc., 1790 Broadway, New York 19, N.Y.). Today, more than half a century later, that "attitude of acceptance" has been built. Nations around the world are fast conforming to the pattern set in the 1940s. The global network of "mental health" partners is working to prevent anything that would hinder "positive" collective thinking in the rising global village. Few notice its tentacles reaching into community health programs and civil society in over 130 nations around the world. END
10 of the Most Evil Medical Experiments Conducted in history Evil scares us. Arguably our best horror stories, the ones that give us nightmares, are about evil people doing evil things—especially evil experiments. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells is a classic that comes to mind. In modern cinema, movies like The Human Centipede continue that gruesome tradition. But these are fictional. The truth is that we need only look at recent human history to find real, live, utterly repugnant evil. Worse yet, it is evil perpetrated by doctors. Here are 10 of the most evil experiments ever performed on human beings—black and other people of color, women, prisoners, children and gay people have been the predominant victims. 1. The Tuskegee Experiments There's a good reason many African Americans are wary of the good intentions of government and the medical estblishment. Even today, many believe the conspiracy theory that AIDS, which ravaged the African-American community, both gay and straight, was created by the government to wipe out African Americans. What happened in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1932 is one explanation for these fears. At the time, treatments for syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that causes pain, insanity and ultimately, death, were mostly toxic and ineffective (things like mercury, which caused, kidney failure, mouth ulcers, tooth loss, insanity, and death). Government-funded doctors decided it would be interesting to see if no treatment at all was better than the treatments they were using. So began the Tuskegee experiments.
10 of the Most Evil Medical Experiments Conducted in history
Evil scares us. Arguably our best horror stories, the ones that give us nightmares, are about evil people doing evil things—especially evil experiments. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells is a classic that comes to mind. In modern cinema, movies like The Human Centipede continue that gruesome tradition. But these are fictional. The truth is that we need only look at recent human history to find real, live, utterly repugnant evil. Worse yet, it is evil perpetrated by doctors.
Here are 10 of the most evil experiments ever performed on human beings—black and other people of color, women, prisoners, children and gay people have been the predominant victims.
1. The Tuskegee Experiments
There's a good reason many African Americans are wary of the good intentions of government and the medical estblishment. Even today, many believe the conspiracy theory that AIDS, which ravaged the African-American community, both gay and straight, was created by the government to wipe out African Americans. What happened in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1932 is one explanation for these fears.
At the time, treatments for syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that causes pain, insanity and ultimately, death, were mostly toxic and ineffective (things like mercury, which caused, kidney failure, mouth ulcers, tooth loss, insanity, and death). Government-funded doctors decided it would be interesting to see if no treatment at all was better than the treatments they were using. So began the Tuskegee experiments.
Over the course of the next 40 years, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male denied treatment to 399 syphilitic patients, most of them poor, black, illiterate sharecroppers. Even after penicillin emerged as an effective treatment in 1947, these patients, who were not told they had syphilis, but were informed they suffered from “bad blood,” were denied treatment, or given fake placebo treatments. By the end of the study, in 1972, only 74 of the subjects were still alive. Twenty eight patients died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
2. The Aversion Project
They didn’t like gay people in apartheid-era South Africa. Especially in the armed forces. How they got rid of them is shocking. Using army psychiatrists and military chaplains, who were, presumably privy to private, “confidential” confessions, the apartheid regime flushed out homosexuals in the armed forces. But it did not evict them from the military. The homosexual “undesirables” were sent to a military hospital near Pretoria, to a place called Ward 22 (which in itself sounds terrifying).
There, between 1971 and 1989, many victims were submitted to chemical castrations and electric shock treatment, meant to cure them of their homosexual “condition.” As many as 900 homosexuals, mostly 16-24 years old who had been drafted and had not voluntarily joined the military, were subjected to forced “sexual reassignment” surgeries. Men were surgically turned into women against their will, then cast out into the world, the gender reassignment often incomplete, and without the means to pay for expensive hormones to maintain their new sexual identities.
The head of this project, Dr. Aubrey Levin, went on to become a clinical professor at the University of Calgary. That is until 2010, when his license was suspended for making sexual advances towards a male student. He was sentenced to five years in prison for other sexual assaults (against males).
3. Guatemalan STD Study
Syphilis seemed to bring out the inherent racism in government-funded doctors in the 1940s. Tuskegee's black people weren’t the only victims of morally reprehensible studies of this disease. Turns out Guatemalans were also deemed suitable unknowing guinea pigs by the U.S. government.
Penicillin having emerged as a cure for syphilis in 1947, the government decided to see just how effective it was. The way to do this, the government decided, was to turn syphilitic prostitutes loose on Guatemalan prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers, none of whom consented to be subjects of an experiment. If actual sex didn’t infect the subject, then surreptitious inoculation did the trick. Once infected, the victim was given penicillin to see if it worked. Or not given penicillin, just to see what happened, apparently. About a third of the approximately 1,500 victims fell into the latter group. More than 80 “participants” in the experiment died.
The Guatemalan study was led by John Charles Cutler, who subsequently participated in the later stages of Tuskegee. In 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally apologized to Guatemala for this dark chapter in American history.
4. Agent Orange Experiments
Prisoners, like people of color, have often been the unwilling objects of evil experiments. From 1965 to 1966, Dr. Albert Kligman, funded by Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson, and the U.S. Army, conducted what was deemed “dermatological research” on approximately 75 prisoners. What was actually being studied was the effects of Agent Orange on humans.
Prisoners were injected with dioxin (a toxic byproduct of Agent Orange)—468 times the amount the study originally called for. The results were prisoners with volcanic eruptions of chloracne (severe acne combined with blackheads, cysts, pustules, and other really bad stuff) on the face, armpits and groin. Long after the experiments ended, prisoners continued to suffer from the effects of the exposure. Dr. Kligman, apparently very enthusiastic about the study, was quoted as saying, “All I saw before me were acres of skin… It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” Kligman went on to become the doctor behind Retin-A, a major treatment for acne.
5. Irradiation of Black Cancer Patients
During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union spent much of their time trying to figure out if they could survive a nuclear catastrophe. How much radiation could a human body take? This would be important information for the Pentagon to know, in order to protect its soldiers in the event they were crazy enough to start an atomic holocaust. Enter the seeming go-to government choice for secret experimentation: unknowing African Americans.
From 1960 until 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, led an experiment exposing 88 cancer patients, poor and mostly black, to whole body radiation, even though this sort of treatment had already been pretty well discredited for the types of cancer these patients had. They were not asked to sign consent forms, nor were they told the Pentagon funded the study. They were simply told they would be getting a treatment that might help them. Patients were exposed, in the period of one hour, to the equivalent of about 20,000 x-rays worth of radiation. Nausea, vomiting, severe stomach pain, loss of appetite, and mental confusion were the results. A report in 1972 indicated that as many as a quarter of the patients died of radiation poisoning.
6. Slave Experiments
It should be no surprise that experiments were often conducted on human chattel during America’s shameful slavery history. The man considered the father of modern gynecology, J. Marion Sims, conducted numerous experiments on female slaves between 1845 and 1849. The women, afflicted with vesico-vaginal fistulas, a tear between the vagina and the bladder, suffered greatly from the condition and were incontinent, resulting in societal ostracism. Because Sims felt the surgery was, “not painful enough to justify the trouble,” as he said in an 1857 lecture, the operations were done without anesthesia. Being slaves, the women had no say as to whether they wanted the procedures or not, and some were subjected to as many as 30 operations. There are many advocates for Dr. Sims, pointing out that the women would have been anxious for any possibility of curing their condition, and that anesthetics were new and unproven at the time. Nevertheless, it is telling that black slaves and not white women, who presumably would have been just as anxious, were the subjects of the experiments.
7. “The Chamber”
Back to the Cold War. Prisoners were again the victims, as the Soviet Secret Police conducted poison experiments in Soviet gulags. The Soviets hoped to develop a deadly poison gas that was tasteless and odorless. At the laboratory, known as “The Chamber," unknowing and unwilling prisoners were given preparations of mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin, and other concoctions, hidden in meals, beverages or given as “medication.” Presumably, many of these prisoners were not happy with their meals, although, being the gulag, records are spotty. The Secret Police apparently did finally come up with their dream poison, called C-2. According to witnesses, it caused actual physical changes (victims became shorter), and victims subsequently weakened and died within 15 minutes.
8. World War II: Heyday of Evil Experiments
While evil experiments may have been going on in the U.S. during World War II (Tuskegee, for example), it’s hard to argue that the Nazis and the Japanese are the indisputable kings of evil experimentation. The Germans, of course, conducted their well-known experiments on Jewish prisoners (and, to a much lesser extent, Romany people and homosexuals and Poles, among others) in their concentration/death camps. In 1942, the Luftwaffe submerged naked prisoners in ice water for up to three hours to study the effects of cold temperatures on human beings and to devise ways to rewarm them once subjected. Other prisoners were subjected to streptococcus, tetanus and gas gangrene. Blood vessels were tied off to create artificial “battlefield” wounds. Wood shavings and glass particles were rubbed deep into the wounds to aggravate them. The goal was to test the effectiveness of sulfonamide, an antibacterial agent. Women were forcibly sterilized. More gruesomely, one woman had her breasts tied off with string to see how long it took for her breastfeeding child to die. She eventually killed her own child to stop the suffering. And there is the infamous Josef Mengele, whose experimental “expertise” was on twins. He injected various chemicals into twins, and even sewed two together to create conjoined twins. Mengele escaped to South America after the war and lived until his death in Brazil, never answering for his evil experiments. Not to be outdone, the Japanese killed as many as 200,000 people during numerous experimental atrocities in both the Sino-Japanese War and WWII. Some of the experiments put the Nazis to shame. People were cut open and kept alive, without the assistance of anesthesia. Body limbs were amputated and sewn on other parts of the body. Limbs were frozen and then thawed, resulting in gangrene. Grenades and flame-throwers were tested on living humans. Various bacteria and diseases were purposely injected into prisoners to study the effects. Unit 731, led by Commander Shiro Ishii, conducted these experiments in the name of biological and chemical warfare research. Before Japan surrendered, in 1945, the Unit 731 lab was destroyed and the prisoners all executed. Ishii himself was never prosecuted for his evil experiments, and in fact was granted immunity by Douglas MacArthur in exchange for the information Ishii gained from the experiments.
9. The Monster Study
Add children to the list of vulnerable people subjected to evil experiments. In 1939, Wendell Johnson, University of Iowa speech pathologist, and his grad student Mary Tudor, conducted stuttering experiments on 22 non-stuttering orphan children. The children were split into two groups. One group was given positive speech therapy, praising them for their fluent speech. The unfortunate other group was given negative therapy, harshly criticizing them for any flaw in their speech abilities, labeling them stutterers. The result of this cruel experiment was that children in the negative group, while not transforming into full-fledged stutterers, suffered negative psychological effects and several suffered from speech problems for the rest of their lives. Formerly normal children came out of the experiment, dubbed “The Monster Study,” anxious, withdrawn and silent. Several, as adults, eventually sued the University of Iowa, which settled the case in 2007.
10. Project 4.1
Project 4.1 was a medical study conducted on the natives of the Marshall Islands, who in 1952 were exposed to radiation fallout from the Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, which inadvertently blew upwind to the nearby islands. Instead of informing the residents of the island of their exposure, and treating the victims while they studied them, the U.S. elected instead just to watch quietly and see what happened. At first the effects were inconclusive. For the first 10 years, miscarriages and stillbirths increased but then returned to normal. Some children had developmental problems or stunted growth, but no conclusive pattern was detectable. After that first decade, though, a pattern did emerge, and it was ugly: Children with thyroid cancer significantly above what would be considered normal. By 1974, almost a third of exposed islanders developed tumors. A Department of Energy report stated that, “The dual purpose of what is now a DOE medical program has led to a view by the Marshallese that they were being used as ‘guinea pigs’ in a ‘radiation experiment.’”
Evil scares us. Arguably our best horror stories, the ones that give us nightmares, are about evil people doing evil things—especially evil experiments. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells is a classic that comes to mind. In modern cinema, movies like The Human Centipede continue that gruesome tradition. But these are fictional. The truth is that we need only look at recent human history to find real, live, utterly repugnant evil. Worse yet, it is evil perpetrated by doctors.
Here are 10 of the most evil experiments ever performed on human beings—black and other people of color, women, prisoners, children and gay people have been the predominant victims.
1. The Tuskegee Experiments
There's a good reason many African Americans are wary of the good intentions of government and the medical estblishment. Even today, many believe the conspiracy theory that AIDS, which ravaged the African-American community, both gay and straight, was created by the government to wipe out African Americans. What happened in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1932 is one explanation for these fears.
At the time, treatments for syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that causes pain, insanity and ultimately, death, were mostly toxic and ineffective (things like mercury, which caused, kidney failure, mouth ulcers, tooth loss, insanity, and death). Government-funded doctors decided it would be interesting to see if no treatment at all was better than the treatments they were using. So began the Tuskegee experiments.
Over the course of the next 40 years, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male denied treatment to 399 syphilitic patients, most of them poor, black, illiterate sharecroppers. Even after penicillin emerged as an effective treatment in 1947, these patients, who were not told they had syphilis, but were informed they suffered from “bad blood,” were denied treatment, or given fake placebo treatments. By the end of the study, in 1972, only 74 of the subjects were still alive. Twenty eight patients died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
2. The Aversion Project
They didn’t like gay people in apartheid-era South Africa. Especially in the armed forces. How they got rid of them is shocking. Using army psychiatrists and military chaplains, who were, presumably privy to private, “confidential” confessions, the apartheid regime flushed out homosexuals in the armed forces. But it did not evict them from the military. The homosexual “undesirables” were sent to a military hospital near Pretoria, to a place called Ward 22 (which in itself sounds terrifying).
There, between 1971 and 1989, many victims were submitted to chemical castrations and electric shock treatment, meant to cure them of their homosexual “condition.” As many as 900 homosexuals, mostly 16-24 years old who had been drafted and had not voluntarily joined the military, were subjected to forced “sexual reassignment” surgeries. Men were surgically turned into women against their will, then cast out into the world, the gender reassignment often incomplete, and without the means to pay for expensive hormones to maintain their new sexual identities.
The head of this project, Dr. Aubrey Levin, went on to become a clinical professor at the University of Calgary. That is until 2010, when his license was suspended for making sexual advances towards a male student. He was sentenced to five years in prison for other sexual assaults (against males).
3. Guatemalan STD Study
Syphilis seemed to bring out the inherent racism in government-funded doctors in the 1940s. Tuskegee's black people weren’t the only victims of morally reprehensible studies of this disease. Turns out Guatemalans were also deemed suitable unknowing guinea pigs by the U.S. government.
Penicillin having emerged as a cure for syphilis in 1947, the government decided to see just how effective it was. The way to do this, the government decided, was to turn syphilitic prostitutes loose on Guatemalan prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers, none of whom consented to be subjects of an experiment. If actual sex didn’t infect the subject, then surreptitious inoculation did the trick. Once infected, the victim was given penicillin to see if it worked. Or not given penicillin, just to see what happened, apparently. About a third of the approximately 1,500 victims fell into the latter group. More than 80 “participants” in the experiment died.
The Guatemalan study was led by John Charles Cutler, who subsequently participated in the later stages of Tuskegee. In 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton formally apologized to Guatemala for this dark chapter in American history.
4. Agent Orange Experiments
Prisoners, like people of color, have often been the unwilling objects of evil experiments. From 1965 to 1966, Dr. Albert Kligman, funded by Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson, and the U.S. Army, conducted what was deemed “dermatological research” on approximately 75 prisoners. What was actually being studied was the effects of Agent Orange on humans.
Prisoners were injected with dioxin (a toxic byproduct of Agent Orange)—468 times the amount the study originally called for. The results were prisoners with volcanic eruptions of chloracne (severe acne combined with blackheads, cysts, pustules, and other really bad stuff) on the face, armpits and groin. Long after the experiments ended, prisoners continued to suffer from the effects of the exposure. Dr. Kligman, apparently very enthusiastic about the study, was quoted as saying, “All I saw before me were acres of skin… It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” Kligman went on to become the doctor behind Retin-A, a major treatment for acne.
5. Irradiation of Black Cancer Patients
During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union spent much of their time trying to figure out if they could survive a nuclear catastrophe. How much radiation could a human body take? This would be important information for the Pentagon to know, in order to protect its soldiers in the event they were crazy enough to start an atomic holocaust. Enter the seeming go-to government choice for secret experimentation: unknowing African Americans.
From 1960 until 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, led an experiment exposing 88 cancer patients, poor and mostly black, to whole body radiation, even though this sort of treatment had already been pretty well discredited for the types of cancer these patients had. They were not asked to sign consent forms, nor were they told the Pentagon funded the study. They were simply told they would be getting a treatment that might help them. Patients were exposed, in the period of one hour, to the equivalent of about 20,000 x-rays worth of radiation. Nausea, vomiting, severe stomach pain, loss of appetite, and mental confusion were the results. A report in 1972 indicated that as many as a quarter of the patients died of radiation poisoning.
6. Slave Experiments
It should be no surprise that experiments were often conducted on human chattel during America’s shameful slavery history. The man considered the father of modern gynecology, J. Marion Sims, conducted numerous experiments on female slaves between 1845 and 1849. The women, afflicted with vesico-vaginal fistulas, a tear between the vagina and the bladder, suffered greatly from the condition and were incontinent, resulting in societal ostracism. Because Sims felt the surgery was, “not painful enough to justify the trouble,” as he said in an 1857 lecture, the operations were done without anesthesia. Being slaves, the women had no say as to whether they wanted the procedures or not, and some were subjected to as many as 30 operations. There are many advocates for Dr. Sims, pointing out that the women would have been anxious for any possibility of curing their condition, and that anesthetics were new and unproven at the time. Nevertheless, it is telling that black slaves and not white women, who presumably would have been just as anxious, were the subjects of the experiments.
7. “The Chamber”
Back to the Cold War. Prisoners were again the victims, as the Soviet Secret Police conducted poison experiments in Soviet gulags. The Soviets hoped to develop a deadly poison gas that was tasteless and odorless. At the laboratory, known as “The Chamber," unknowing and unwilling prisoners were given preparations of mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin, and other concoctions, hidden in meals, beverages or given as “medication.” Presumably, many of these prisoners were not happy with their meals, although, being the gulag, records are spotty. The Secret Police apparently did finally come up with their dream poison, called C-2. According to witnesses, it caused actual physical changes (victims became shorter), and victims subsequently weakened and died within 15 minutes.
8. World War II: Heyday of Evil Experiments
While evil experiments may have been going on in the U.S. during World War II (Tuskegee, for example), it’s hard to argue that the Nazis and the Japanese are the indisputable kings of evil experimentation. The Germans, of course, conducted their well-known experiments on Jewish prisoners (and, to a much lesser extent, Romany people and homosexuals and Poles, among others) in their concentration/death camps. In 1942, the Luftwaffe submerged naked prisoners in ice water for up to three hours to study the effects of cold temperatures on human beings and to devise ways to rewarm them once subjected. Other prisoners were subjected to streptococcus, tetanus and gas gangrene. Blood vessels were tied off to create artificial “battlefield” wounds. Wood shavings and glass particles were rubbed deep into the wounds to aggravate them. The goal was to test the effectiveness of sulfonamide, an antibacterial agent. Women were forcibly sterilized. More gruesomely, one woman had her breasts tied off with string to see how long it took for her breastfeeding child to die. She eventually killed her own child to stop the suffering. And there is the infamous Josef Mengele, whose experimental “expertise” was on twins. He injected various chemicals into twins, and even sewed two together to create conjoined twins. Mengele escaped to South America after the war and lived until his death in Brazil, never answering for his evil experiments. Not to be outdone, the Japanese killed as many as 200,000 people during numerous experimental atrocities in both the Sino-Japanese War and WWII. Some of the experiments put the Nazis to shame. People were cut open and kept alive, without the assistance of anesthesia. Body limbs were amputated and sewn on other parts of the body. Limbs were frozen and then thawed, resulting in gangrene. Grenades and flame-throwers were tested on living humans. Various bacteria and diseases were purposely injected into prisoners to study the effects. Unit 731, led by Commander Shiro Ishii, conducted these experiments in the name of biological and chemical warfare research. Before Japan surrendered, in 1945, the Unit 731 lab was destroyed and the prisoners all executed. Ishii himself was never prosecuted for his evil experiments, and in fact was granted immunity by Douglas MacArthur in exchange for the information Ishii gained from the experiments.
9. The Monster Study
Add children to the list of vulnerable people subjected to evil experiments. In 1939, Wendell Johnson, University of Iowa speech pathologist, and his grad student Mary Tudor, conducted stuttering experiments on 22 non-stuttering orphan children. The children were split into two groups. One group was given positive speech therapy, praising them for their fluent speech. The unfortunate other group was given negative therapy, harshly criticizing them for any flaw in their speech abilities, labeling them stutterers. The result of this cruel experiment was that children in the negative group, while not transforming into full-fledged stutterers, suffered negative psychological effects and several suffered from speech problems for the rest of their lives. Formerly normal children came out of the experiment, dubbed “The Monster Study,” anxious, withdrawn and silent. Several, as adults, eventually sued the University of Iowa, which settled the case in 2007.
10. Project 4.1
Project 4.1 was a medical study conducted on the natives of the Marshall Islands, who in 1952 were exposed to radiation fallout from the Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, which inadvertently blew upwind to the nearby islands. Instead of informing the residents of the island of their exposure, and treating the victims while they studied them, the U.S. elected instead just to watch quietly and see what happened. At first the effects were inconclusive. For the first 10 years, miscarriages and stillbirths increased but then returned to normal. Some children had developmental problems or stunted growth, but no conclusive pattern was detectable. After that first decade, though, a pattern did emerge, and it was ugly: Children with thyroid cancer significantly above what would be considered normal. By 1974, almost a third of exposed islanders developed tumors. A Department of Energy report stated that, “The dual purpose of what is now a DOE medical program has led to a view by the Marshallese that they were being used as ‘guinea pigs’ in a ‘radiation experiment.’”
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
The Bilderberg Illuminati Secret Conference The world’s most secretive meeting took place on June 9-12. At an undisclosed location in Dresden, Germany, heads of states, politicians, tech luminaries and finance’s top names will convene for the 64th annual Bilderberg Summit. The invite-only conference featured no press, no cameras and no quotes. Led by a steering committee, helmed by Henri de Castries, French Count and CEO of multinational insurance firm AXA, the Bilderberg provides its attendees with a forum for informal discussions about the major issues facing the world, without the need to propose resolutions or pass any votes deciding any outcome. Naturally, the veil of secrecy has stimulated the imaginations of conspiracy theorists, who view the Bilderberg Meetings as a forum for a cabal of the world’s elite to influence the future course of humanity. One of the most popular conspiracy theories behind the purpose of the meetings, is the furthering of the so-called “New World Order”—a homogenous single government that seeks to impose its dominion over every sovereign nation on the planet.
The Bilderberg Illuminati Secret Conference
The world’s most secretive meeting took place on June 9-12. At an undisclosed location in Dresden, Germany, heads of states, politicians, tech luminaries and finance’s top names will convene for the 64th annual Bilderberg Summit. The invite-only conference featured no press, no cameras and no quotes. Led by a steering committee, helmed by Henri de Castries, French Count and CEO of multinational insurance firm AXA, the Bilderberg provides its attendees with a forum for informal discussions about the major issues facing the world, without the need to propose resolutions or pass any votes deciding any outcome. Naturally, the veil of secrecy has stimulated the imaginations of conspiracy theorists, who view the Bilderberg Meetings as a forum for a cabal of the world’s elite to influence the future course of humanity. One of the most popular conspiracy theories behind the purpose of the meetings, is the furthering of the so-called “New World Order”—a homogenous single government that seeks to impose its dominion over every sovereign nation on the planet.
However, real life is not as nefarious. According to the Bilderberg’s official page, the key topics discussed included: 1. Current events (most likely with an emphasis on Brexit ) 2. China 3. Europe: migration, growth, reform, vision, unity 4. Middle East 5. Russia 6. US political landscape, economy: growth, debt, reform 7. Cyber security 8. Geo-politics of energy and commodity prices 9. Precariat and middle class 10. Technological innovation Perhaps the SPECTRE-esque plots were on the other memo. Rather, the remarkably tame list is reminiscent of other exclusive meetings such as Davos. Of note however, is the discussion around the “precariat”, which according to British economist Guy Standing, who popularized the term, are: “…the perpetual part-timers, the minimum-wagers, the temporary foreign workers, the grey-market domestics paid in cash… the techno-impoverished whose piecemeal work has no office and no end, the seniors who struggle with dwindling benefits, the indigenous people who are kept outside, the single mothers without support, the cash laborers who have no savings, the generation for whom a pension and a retirement is neither available nor desired.’
In other words, the marginalized and alienated groups that are fueling the rise of demagogues such as Donald Trump and new Philippines president Rodrigo Duerte, is a cause of concern amongst the global elite.
Some of the big names on this year’s guest list includes, several finance ministers, professors, 30 plus heads of companies, such as John Cryan, CEO of Deutsche Bank AG (DB), David Cote, CEO of Honeywell (HON), Ben van Beurden CEO of Royal Dutch Shell plc (RDS), Peter Thiel, President of Thiel Capital and co-founder of Paypal (PYPL) and Eric Scmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL). And finally, before we get too dismissive about the conspiracies, note that two attendees from 1991 and 1993 were a young Senator from Arkansas by the name of Bill Clinton and a lowly minister by the name of Tony Blair. Coincidence? You decide.
The world’s most secretive meeting took place on June 9-12. At an undisclosed location in Dresden, Germany, heads of states, politicians, tech luminaries and finance’s top names will convene for the 64th annual Bilderberg Summit. The invite-only conference featured no press, no cameras and no quotes. Led by a steering committee, helmed by Henri de Castries, French Count and CEO of multinational insurance firm AXA, the Bilderberg provides its attendees with a forum for informal discussions about the major issues facing the world, without the need to propose resolutions or pass any votes deciding any outcome. Naturally, the veil of secrecy has stimulated the imaginations of conspiracy theorists, who view the Bilderberg Meetings as a forum for a cabal of the world’s elite to influence the future course of humanity. One of the most popular conspiracy theories behind the purpose of the meetings, is the furthering of the so-called “New World Order”—a homogenous single government that seeks to impose its dominion over every sovereign nation on the planet.
However, real life is not as nefarious. According to the Bilderberg’s official page, the key topics discussed included: 1. Current events (most likely with an emphasis on Brexit ) 2. China 3. Europe: migration, growth, reform, vision, unity 4. Middle East 5. Russia 6. US political landscape, economy: growth, debt, reform 7. Cyber security 8. Geo-politics of energy and commodity prices 9. Precariat and middle class 10. Technological innovation Perhaps the SPECTRE-esque plots were on the other memo. Rather, the remarkably tame list is reminiscent of other exclusive meetings such as Davos. Of note however, is the discussion around the “precariat”, which according to British economist Guy Standing, who popularized the term, are: “…the perpetual part-timers, the minimum-wagers, the temporary foreign workers, the grey-market domestics paid in cash… the techno-impoverished whose piecemeal work has no office and no end, the seniors who struggle with dwindling benefits, the indigenous people who are kept outside, the single mothers without support, the cash laborers who have no savings, the generation for whom a pension and a retirement is neither available nor desired.’
In other words, the marginalized and alienated groups that are fueling the rise of demagogues such as Donald Trump and new Philippines president Rodrigo Duerte, is a cause of concern amongst the global elite.
Some of the big names on this year’s guest list includes, several finance ministers, professors, 30 plus heads of companies, such as John Cryan, CEO of Deutsche Bank AG (DB), David Cote, CEO of Honeywell (HON), Ben van Beurden CEO of Royal Dutch Shell plc (RDS), Peter Thiel, President of Thiel Capital and co-founder of Paypal (PYPL) and Eric Scmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL). And finally, before we get too dismissive about the conspiracies, note that two attendees from 1991 and 1993 were a young Senator from Arkansas by the name of Bill Clinton and a lowly minister by the name of Tony Blair. Coincidence? You decide.
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