Posted by
Brittney on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 12:27:59 PM
So
Today another article came out on foxnews.com that details the government’s use of soldiers in a drug study. We need to stop using our military as lab rats.
This time the study was of the drug Chantix that is to help people quit smoking. What the government failed to do was tell these soldiers and veterans that it could cause hallucinations or suicidal attempts, tendencies, or completions. One soldier ended up being shot with a taser and thrown in jail after a hallucination caused by an experimental drug. That soldier was not informed of the potential complications and therefore ended up in a really bad situation.
As a veteran myself, I know that I was subject to the experimental testing of the Anthrax shots and the Malaria pills when I was deployed to Iraq. After they had already injected all of the soldiers with the Anthrax series, they found it to not be able to prevent effects from all forms of Anthrax and therefore deemed that it wasn’t mandatory. Then they made soldiers stop taking the Malaria pills after they determined that they don’t do anything to prevent Malaria, but in fact it is the same medication that they use to treat Malaria.
As Veterans of the Vietnam War will tell you, exposure can cause life threatening consequences. We shouldn’t be using our fighting men and women as lab rats. There is a time and a place for drug experiments and we shouldn’t be doing them on those people who signed up to protect and defend this country in foreign lands. We especially shouldn’t be testing these drugs on soldiers who are deployed without having full understanding of potential side effects. We need to implore our Congressmen to tell the DoD and the VA to move the experiments back in to the labs and quit performing them on our soldiers.