Imagine suffering from excruciating pain and a high fever. Nothing you've taken medicinally seems to work. You are admitted to the local hospital where you undergo procedures that maintain the illusion you are being treated for your ailment. It isn't until after your death years later that your family learns that the treatment and procedures you were subjected to were both ineffectual and bogus. “The Tuskegee Study” is often cited as the benchmark for using impoverished and unwitting African Americans for medical experiments.
This situation exemplifies and is at the heart of Harriet A. Washington's informative, poignant and painful book “Medical Apartheid.” However, it is not-- the worse--experimental abuse of African Americans. The “Tuskegee Study” has been eclipsed in both numbers and egregiousness by other abusive medical studies.
The use of African Americans as guinea pigs didn't end with the abolition of slavery and it was not restricted to the Southern U.S. only. From 1988 –2001 approximately 500 children some as young as 6 months old in foster care in New York were subjected to experimentation with the AIDS drug AZT and other toxic HIV drugs. Fifteen percent of those children died but the circumstances of the role the drugs played in their deaths are yet to be explained.
During the 1990's both African American and Latino youth in New York were diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and were subjected to treatment with fenfluramine (fen Phen) a now banned drug because of the high number of correlated/associated deaths. These youth of color were selected on the basis of anti-social behavior and the drugs purported ability to cure this behavior. The strange part is there were no white kids included in the study. Are we left to believe that white kids have no anti-social behavior? Please see skinheads, Aryan posse etc.
In a case that was broken by a local journalist here in Albuquerque it was noted that Americans, many of which were African American, lost the rights to their own bodies when many were surreptitiously placed, without their knowing consent, into a radiation experiment sponsored by the US Atomic Energy Commission. The African American Cabinet Secretary, who oversaw the agency during the Clinton Administration, initiated a tour of the US where these experiments were done and promised to provide care and compensation to those victims or families that were affected.
An even more controversial experiment occurred in 1991 when women, African American teens, were implanted with the now defunct birth control device Norplant in Baltimore, Maryland. This experiment was applauded by many observers who noted that it could be an effective way to reduce the so called “under-class” in America.
“Medical Apartheid” details the ways African slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some African American populations.
It also reveals how African Americans have been prey to grave robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the 20th Century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation of and shoddy medical treatment of African Americans, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities.
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