Politics
Senate Bill Would Restore Benefits For U.S. Army Veterans Subjected To Psychedelic Experiments By Former Nazis During Secret Program
A new U.S. Senate bill aims to ensure benefits for veterans exposed to potentially hazardous chemicals during the Cold War era—including psychedelics, nerve agents and mustard gas. The secret testing program, which ran from 1948 to 1975 at an Army base in Maryland, involved former Nazi scientists administering the substances to American military members.
The legislation, S. 5324, from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), is aimed at ensuring that “veterans of secrecy oath programs receive the full benefits they have earned.” It acknowledges that over the course of nearly three decades at Edgewood Arsenal at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, “more than 7,000 United States Army personnel participated in a program under which they were subjected to secret chemical warfare testing.”
The “Obligations to Aberdeen’s Trusted Hero’s Act”—or the OATH Act—was filed on Thursday.
“Government-employed scientists, including former Nazi Germany scientists, tested mustard agents, psychedelics, nerve agents, and other dangerous chemicals on the Army members,” the legislation says. “When the members of the Army entered the program at Edgewood, they were sworn to secrecy—a violation of their oath came with the threat of court-martial or criminal prosecution.”
That secrecy has long prevented veterans of the program from seeking benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the bill explains, although it notes that in 2006, the Department of Defense released participants from their secrecy oaths.
Blumenthal’s proposal aims to ensure veterans have access to the full suite of services they earned in exchange for their service.
“Because the statute governing veterans’ benefits requires veterans to apply within one year of discharge to receive retroactive benefits, veterans of the program could only receive benefits beginning from the date of their disability application,” it notes. “By complying with their secrecy oaths, the veterans of the program lost the ability to receive the full veterans’ benefits they earned.”
While some veterans have “received limited relief in the courts,” the proposal says, there’s still “uncertainty about the scope of benefits available to those veterans.” It also points out that veterans of other secrecy oath programs may face similar obstacles to obtaining care.
The bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.
What’s known as the Edgewood Arsenal experiments occurred as the U.S. government was involved in a variety of clandestine programs around chemical and biological warfare, including Project MKUltra and Project 112.
U.S. Department of Defense
The U.S. Senate has previously said that, as with Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) projects at the time, “individual rights were…subordinated to national security concerns” at the Army facility and “informed consent and follow-up examinations of subjects were neglected in efforts to maintain the secrecy of the tests.”
These days, the U.S. military’s focus on psychedelics is less about wartime offensives and more about addressing service-related trauma, pain and mental health conditions. In addition to further study into how psychedelics can treat ailments such as PTSD in veterans, the U.S. military in recent years has also invested millions in an effort to develop a new class of drugs that offers the same fast-acting mental health benefits as traditional psychedelics but without a psychedelic trip.
“Although drugs like ketamine and potentially psilocybin have rapid antidepressant actions, their hallucinogenic, addictive, and disorienting side effects make their clinical use limited,” Bryan L. Roth, a professor of pharmacology at UNC School of Medicine and the research project’s leader, said at the project’s launch, in 2020. “Our team has developed innovative methods and technologies to overcome these limitations with the goal of creating better medications to treat these neuropsychiatric conditions.”
This past May, a top VA official said there’s an “unstoppable narrative” in support of advancing psychedelic medicine, with a combination of compelling personal stories of recovery and robust clinical data. The official also said that bipartisan acceptance of psychedelics has “surpassed” that of marijuana in Congress.
Outside the government, military veterans and other advocates have also put together resources aimed at harnessing the healing potential of psychedelics.
Last month, for example, the Heroic Hearts Project, which helps connect veterans with psychedelic-assisted therapy in jurisdictions where it’s permitted, published a guide titled “The Veteran’s Guide to Psychedelics: A Preparation and Integration Workbook,” a nearly 300-page resource aimed at demystifying the process of psychedelic practices and equipping readers with the knowledge and questions to pursue treatment that integrates entheogenic substances.
Veterans have taken a lead role in the psychedelics reform movement currently unfolding at the state and federal levels. Earlier this year, for example, veterans service organizations (VSOs) pressed members of Congress to more urgently pursue the potential benefits of psychedelic-assisted therapy and medical marijuana.
The requests from groups like the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, Disabled American Veterans and the Wounded Warrior Project came on the heels of organizations at last year’s set of annual VSO hearings criticizing the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for “dragging their feet” on medical marijuana research.
Led largely by Republican politicians, efforts at reform have included a GOP-sponsored psychedelics bill in Congress that focused on veterans’ access, various state-level changes and a bevy of hearings on expanded access.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI), who filed one congressional psychedelics bill that advanced through a committee, is also a co-sponsor of a bipartisan measure to provide funding to the Department of Defense (DOD) to conduct clinical trials into the therapeutic potential of certain psychedelics for active duty military members. That reform was signed into law by President Joe Biden under an amendment attached to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
In March, congressional appropriations leaders also unveiled a spending package that contains language providing $10 million to facilitate the psychedelics studies.
In January, VA separately issued a request for applications to conduct in-depth research on the use of psychedelics to treat PTSD and depression. And last October, the department launched a new podcast about the future of veteran health care, with the first episode of the series focused on the healing potential of psychedelics.
At the state level, the governor of Massachusetts in August signed a military veterans-focused bill that includes provisions to create a psychedelics working group to study and make recommendations about the potential therapeutic benefits of substances like psilocybin and MDMA.
Meanwhile in California, lawmakers in June pulled from consideration a bipartisan bill that would have authorized a pilot program to provide psilocybin treatment to military veterans and former first responders.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.
