Talk:United States v. Stanley

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The holding listed is not what the Court actually ruled. They decided the case based on rather technical legal grounds (specifically the interplay between the Chappell and Bivens doctrines). The Court expressly declined to re-examine the much more interesting issue (decided by the lower court) that the LSD was part of normal military service. The dissenting opinions wanted to re-examine it, but they were in the minority. So properly speaking, the issue of whether the army can secretly give soldiers LSD has never been decided by the Supreme Court. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lawguy9 (talk • contribs) 19:45, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

OK, I changed it to reflect what the Court ruled. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lawguy9 (talk • contribs) 19:54, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Memoirs

From the memoirs of James Ketchum, p. 118:

In the late 1950s, Dr. Van Sim and colleagues sometimes gave LSD covertly to Edgewood volunteers. Such studies could be, and eventually were, criticized as lacking in rigorous design, and particularly for their lack of sufficient regard for possible adverse psychological consequences, as well as trampling on the civil rights of the unknowing recipients. Nevertheless, Dr. Sim and his team at Edgewood did carry out some interesting and informative field tests of military skills.

Our own studies, starting in 1961, were likewise far from perfect in design, but we strictly avoided giving any drug covertly.

So it seems plausible that Stanley was one of those given LSD covertly in 1958. 86.121.18.17 (talk) 08:24, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

And from the recent article in The New Yorker [1]:

Doctors informed the volunteers in generalities and asked them to sign a consent form—usually long before any specific test was announced. The forms were designed to offer few details; as one version was drafted, the words “mental disturbance or unconsciousness” were replaced with “discomfiture.” Sometimes a little more information would be provided just before the test began, but not always. Van Sim later confessed that researchers testing nerve gas would tell volunteers that the drug might give them a “runny nose” or a “slight tightness of the chest.” In 1961, a volunteer from Kansas, named John Ross, was given soman, a highly persistent nerve agent. Only when the needle was in his arm did he overhear the doctors saying that he had been given something lethal. “I started having convulsions,” he told me. “I started vomiting. One of the guys standing over me said, ‘We gave you a little too much.’ They told me to walk it off. I started to panic. I thought I was going to die.” Ross became rigid and was rushed to Walter Reed. For years afterward, he suffered from insomnia and depression.

Test subjects had a right to decline an experiment—assuming that they knew they were part of one—but they almost never did. “There was no question that they would participate,” Bowers recalled. Withdrawing from a test required backing down from a commitment to one’s superior, which was anathema in the Army. “In the military, if you don’t do something you will be ostracized,” a soldier given LSD in 1958 told me. “I believe they did give us the option to leave, at first, but you didn’t really have a choice once you were in.”

The ambiguities of the recruitment process, the classified nature of the research, and the highly selective way that doctors followed Army policy has left behind irreconcilable memories. Gerald Elbin, one of Ketchum’s first BZ test subjects, told me that he did not know exactly what he was signing up for when he volunteered, but he enjoyed his time at Edgewood. “It was O.K. to say no,” he said. “There wasn’t any hammer coming down on you.”

The same day Elbin was given BZ, Ketchum gave the drug to Teddie Osborne, who had been stationed at the Yuma Test Center, in Arizona, where he was using a crude detector and a caged rabbit to look for chemical leaks. Osborne thought that his work would not change much at Edgewood. “It wasn’t really explained,” he told me. At the arsenal, he was assigned to help manage the recruits; he liked the work and volunteered again. The second time, he was told that he was going to be a subject. He felt tricked. “I could not have said no,” he told me. “You are dealing with professionals. We were very gullible.” One Wednesday, Osborne was injected with BZ, and ushered into a padded room. He had no idea what the drug was or what it would do. “I don’t remember anything until Saturday,” he told me. “That was so disturbing. Later, it still haunted me.”

Test protocols and the subject experiences entailing from those varied a fair bit. From the oral interview with Hunt, Stanley was given LSD orally two or three times during month-long participation (last one may have been BZ, based on him not recalling anything for a day) and he was also injected with a substance which he was told was "liquid nicotine" as he remembers it. Besides that audio interview, no account of Stanley's story outside of the courtroom proceedings seems to exist. I'll write a summary of that interview later. 86.121.18.17 (talk) 22:18, 19 June 2013 (UTC)