Supreme Court Ruling on Drug Experiments Raises Specter of Radiation Tests

When I last saw her almost three years ago, Pat Broudy--a diminutive dynamo of energy and persistence who lives in Laguna Niguel--was on the verge of becoming the first American citizen to successfully challenge the sovereign immunity concept of the federal government.

She had filed a wrongful-death suit against the government on behalf of her deceased husband, Marine Corps Maj. Charles Broudy, who died of lymphoma in 1977 after heavy exposure to nuclear tests in the Nevada desert as a military observer. Although the original suit was dismissed twice in U.S. District Court, that decision was twice overturned in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

It all ended June 22, 1987, when the appeals court refused to overturn the lower court decision the third time around. Pat Broudy was dismayed but not defeated. Her long court battle publicized the plight of the victims of government-induced radiation and their families. And it got the attention of public officials who no longer ignore the activities of the National Assn. of Radiation Survivors--of which Broudy is an official.

I ran into her a few weeks ago on the UC Irvine campus. She had taken the day off from her job as a legal secretary to help her son--a UCI senior--pass out leaflets urging students to attend the upcoming appearance of Ron Kovic on campus. She looked like an average sophomore in her blue jeans and matching jacket, and she waved me over to her table.

“When my case was argued,” she said, “government attorneys admitted in court that the government knew the dangers of radiation from testing but felt it was worth the sacrifice of a few men for the good of the country. Now I know that this concept goes far beyond radiation. I’ve been digging around in a lot of obscure government documents, and I’ve discovered that we carried out all sorts of experiments on people who knew nothing about it. The whole thing is terribly frightening.”

She pulled out a stack of documents and began showing me what she meant. I asked if I could take the documents with me and look them over a little more leisurely. She agreed, and they have been sitting in a sack under my desk ever since.

Then last week, The Times published a story out of Washington, D.C., on a 6-3 ruling by the Supreme Court that the government may legally force prison inmates to take mind-altering drugs against their will. The decision written for the majority by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy concluded: “Notwithstanding the risks that are involved, we conclude that the inmate’s interests are adequately protected, and perhaps better served, by allowing the decision to medicate to be made by medical professionals rather than a judge.”

This reminded me instantly of Pat Broudy’s documents, so I began reading them. They are, indeed, frightening, enough so that Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, was moved to write the Secretary of the Department of Energy in 1986 that American scientists were led to “mimic the kind of demented human experiments conducted by the Nazis.”

The subcommittee’s report--aptly entitled “American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens”--described in detail programs in which 695 people were deliberately subjected to radiation experiments, some designed to intentionally cause injury, performed on “captive audiences or populations that some experimenters frighteningly perhaps might have considered ‘expendable’: the elderly, prisoners, hospital patients suffering from terminal diseases who might not have retained their full faculties for informed consent.”

Some of the correspondence between doctors involved in this program sounds like a bad science fiction movie script. This was not untypical: “I am writing concerning our experimental subject, Mr. Stephens . . . who was given the 50 micrograms two months ago. We are very much afraid that the man, due to his illness, may sell his house and go to live at some distant point which would, of course, put an end to our most interesting series of experiments.”

A government document entitled “Testing and Use of Chemical and Biological Agents by the Intelligence Community” in 1976 was even scarier. This one detailed the story of Dr. Frank Olson, a civilian employee of the Army, who was given 70 micrograms of LSD in a cocktail by a CIA officer when they were drinking together--apparently just to see what would happen. What happened was that Olson freaked out and a week later jumped or fell to his death from a 10th-story hotel window in New York City. And the CIA, under director Richard Helms, kept right on slipping LSD Mickey Finns in the drinks of unsuspecting victims.

When the U.S. Senate subcommittee finally got wind of these activities and aired them in hearings, its final report read, in part: “These research and development programs to find materials which could be used to alter human behavior . . . resulted in massive abridgements of the right of American citizens, sometimes with tragic consequences. . . . The nature of the tests, their scale, and the fact that they were continued for years after the danger of surreptitious administration of LSD was known demonstrate a fundamental disregard for the value of human life.”

And remember, we’re not talking about the Gestapo here, or the KGB. We’re talking about the good old American CIA.

To Pat Broudy, this knowledge added up to total frustration. She expected to find outrage when she talked about it; instead, she got yawns. “Nobody cares,” she says angrily. “Nobody cares at all.”

Those who do react tell her this all happened so long ago that it scarcely matters now. “But it does matter,” she says. “I don’t know that it isn’t still going on, but whether it is or not, the only way to be sure that it doesn’t happen again is for the public to express outrage.”

She hopes that last week’s Supreme Court decision allowing prison inmates to be injected with mind-altering drugs against their will wakes some people up to the broader implications of that decision.

“Think what Richard Helms could have done with that kind of legal support,” she says. “Or George Bush when he was head of the CIA.”