Edgewood Arsenal human experiments

US military chemical warfare research

From 1948 to 1975, the U. S. Army Chemical Corps conducted classified human subject research at the Edgewood Arsenal facility in Maryland. The purpose was to evaluate the impact of low dose chemical warfare agents on military personnel and to test protective clothing, pharmaceuticals, and vaccines. A small portion of these studies were directed at psychochemical warfare and grouped under the prosaic title of the "Medical Research Volunteer Program" (1956–1975). The MRVP was also driven by intelligence requirements and the need for new and more effective interrogation techniques. Overall, about 7,000 soldiers took part in these experiments that involved exposures to more than 250 different chemicals, according to the Department of Defense (DoD). Some of the volunteers exhibited symptoms at the time of exposure to these agents but long term follow up was not planned as part of the DoD studies. The experiments were abruptly terminated by the Army in late 1975 amidst an atmosphere of scandal and recrimination as lawmakers accused researchers of questionable ethics. Many official government reports and civilian lawsuits followed in the wake of the controversy. The chemical agents tested on volunteers included chemical warfare agents and other related agents:</blockquote>

In the late 1940s and early '50s, the U. S. Army worked with Harvard anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher at its interrogation center at Camp King in Germany on the use of psychoactive compounds (mescaline, LSD), including human subject experiments and the debriefing of former Nazi physicians and scientists who had worked along similar lines before the end of the war. In the 1950s, some officials in the U. S. Department of Defense publicly asserted that many "forms of chemical and allied warfare as more 'humane' than existing weapons. For example, certain types of 'psychochemicals' would make it possible to paralyze temporarily entire population centers without damage to homes and other structures." Soviet advances in the same field were cited as a special incentive giving impetus to research efforts in this area, according to testimony by Maj. Gen. Marshall Stubbs, the Army's chief chemical officer. General William M. Creasy, former chief chemical officer, U. S. Army, testified to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1959 that "provided sufficient emphasis is put behind it, I think the future lies in the psychochemicals." This was alarming enough to a Harvard psychiatrist, E. James Lieberman, that he published an article entitled "Psychochemicals as Weapons" in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1962. Lieberman, while acknowledging that "most of the military data" on the research ongoing at the Army Chemical Center was "secret and unpublished", asserted that "There are moral imponderables, such as whether insanity, temporary or permanent, is a more 'humane' military threat than the usual afflictions of war."

In September 1975, the Medical Research Volunteer Program was discontinued and all resident volunteers were removed from the Edgewood installation. The founder and director of the program, Van Murray Sim, was called before Congress and chastised by outraged lawmakers, who questioned the absence of follow up care for the human volunteers. An Army investigation subsequently found no evidence of serious injuries or deaths associated with the MRVP, but deplored both the recruiting process and the informed consent approach, which they characterized as "suggest[ing] possible coercion".

The official position of the Department of Defense, based on the three volume set of studies by the Institute of Medicine mentioned above, is that they "did not detect any significant long term health effects on the Edgewood Arsenal volunteers". As late as 2014 incomplete information due to the failure to declassify and release relevant classified documents prevented IOM from conducting adequate medical studies related to similar former US biowarfare programs. Even a book critical of the program, written by Lynn C. Klotz and Edward J. Sylvester, acknowledges that:

Unlike the CIA program, research subjects [at Edgewood] all signed informed consent forms, both a general one and another related to any experiment they were to participate in. Experiments were carried out with safety of subjects a principal focus. [ ] At Edgewood, even at the highest doses it often took an hour or more for incapacitating effects to show, and the end effects usually did not include full incapacitation, let alone unconsciousness. After all, the Edgewood experimenters were focused on disabling soldiers in combat, where there would be tactical value simply in disabling the enemy.