By David Kinney
ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHILADELPHIA, PA-The first time he walked into the prison in 1971, he noticed the telltale signs: gauze bandages on the arms, backs, even faces of inmate after inmate. Had they rioted, he asked a guard. Were there fights? Stabbings? No, he was told; the prisoners were testing perfumes for the University of Pennsylvania. "My jaw must have dropped six feet from my head to my feet," Allen M. Hornblum says. He would later discover that the inmates were not just test subjects for perfume, soap and cosmetics but for more menacing chemicals, from dioxin and psychological warfare agents to radioactive isotopes. Now a 50-year-old prison activist and an instructor at Temple University, Hornblum never forgot that first visit to the Philadelphia prison system.

Five years ago, he began digging into what happened. The result is a new book, "Acres of Skin." In the decades after World War II, medical experiments on prisoners were largely unquestioned. By 1969, fully 85% of new drugs were tested on inmates in 42 prisons. But could prisoners volunteer freely? No, concluded the National Commission for the Protection of Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which took a stand against the practice in the late 1970s. "Prisoners are, as a consequence of being prisoners, more subject to coerced choice and more readily available for the imposition of burdens which others will not willingly bear," the commission decided. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration followed suit, and by the early 1980s, most prison testing was history. (Possibly the prison officials recognized that instead of using the prisoners as test subjects, who might have expensive medical needs later on as a result, that they should exploit the inmates as slave laborers, to compete with the laborers in Third World countries; prisoners now do everything from scheduling airline travel for TWA to making labels for Proctor and Gamble. WFI Editor)

In documenting the 20-year testing program at Holmesburg Prison, Hornblum used the Freedom of Information Act to unseal old records. He found physicians who ran experiments and inmates who had been test subjects. He met Al Zabala, a thief who took part in the Army's chemical testing at Holmesburg. After a disorienting few hours in a padded cell, Zabala faced a barrage of questions from psychologists who returned him to his cell wearing a tag: "Please excuse this inmate's behavior. He can't think or act in a coherent manner." He left prison with $1,500 - and some questions. Had the testing caused him, a few years after his release, to lock himself in the bedroom of his sister's house and refuse to eat for three days? Had it caused him to pass out at a bar one day?

Zabala doesn't know. Neither do most of the other subjects, who apparently were never checked for long-term effects, Hornblum says. "You had some extremely destitute people in there. They were poor, uneducated, confined. They were taking tests when they had no idea what they were involved with," he says. "3The guards thought the inmates were absolutely crazy. Uniformly, their responses were they didn't want to do it, but it's t`e only way to make money." The money was good: a few hundred dollars a month to accept a number of tests, and more money for the Army's chemical warfare tests. Compared to stamping license plates, which paid pennies an hour, the tests were lucrative, and nearly everybody wanted in. Inmates even sued after the FDA drafted rules banning the tests. (This illustrates that once a people are degraded enough, they will accept conditions that are not only risky, but virtually suicidal. WFI Editor)

Hornblum is most critical of Dr. Albert M. Kligman, then a Penn dermatology professor who ran the program for two decades. Kligman is known as the inventor of Retin%A, the acne and wrinkle remover that was first tested on a group of Holmesburg prisoners. He went further than other scientists would go, Hornblum wrote, and sometimes ran several tests at the same time on the same prisoners, which is considered poor science. "Kligman established something thoroughly unique in this country: a human research factory, a department store of experimental research," Hornblum says. Kligman refused to comment in detail about the book or his actions, saying only, "That's 30 years ago, and I have a very different accounting of it." (Isn't it interesting that when they catch Nazi war criminals and put them on trial, they recite the same excuse for the atrocities they were responsible for. WFI Editor)

Three tests particularly galled Hornblum: 1) The Army tested an incapacitating agent, EA 3167, which it hoped to add to its chemical warfare stock. Inmates suffered hallucinations and confusion for up to three weeks. The prisoners' nickname for EA 3167 and the other mind-altering drugs they received was "LSD." 2) Kligman tested radioactive isotopes despite having little training in radioactive medicine. To get a required license from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, he lied, Hornblum says. First, he named Dr. Benjamin Calesnick as the radiation protection officer, a title Calesnick denies having had. Later, Kligman fudged his credentials to get AEC approval as protection officer, the book says. 3) In testing dioxin, a component of Agent Orange, for Dow Chemical Corp., Kligman went beyond company instructions, Hornblum says. He subjected several inmates to 7,500 micrograms of the toxic chemical - 468 times as much as Dow wanted, according to the book. Two inmates sued, settling for a few thousand dollars.

A Penn spokesman says the tests were done before medical ethicists understood the vulnerability of prisoners. (It takes an "ethicist" to recognize that the exploitation of prisoners of the state for medical experiments is immoral? WFI Editor) "At the time that Dr. Kligman carried out these studies, the use of prisoners was widespread. So he was not using a population that, at the time, the standard practitioners in the field would have viewed as different," says Dr. Richard Tannen, a senior vice dean of Penn's School of Medicine. "I think now we know better," Tannen says. "We do view prisoners - even if they have given adequate informed consent and have been paid - as a vulnerable population."

SOURCE: Reprinted from the 21 June, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition. Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.

(WFI EDITOR: When a free person commits a crime in a free society, it does not mean that the society is entitled to reduce that person to complete slavery. The idea of law enforcement, and of law itself, is to benefit mankind, not exploit him. When someone is a habitual law breaker, especially when young, it is in the best interests of the society to imbue into that person the benefits of compliance with the law, and that is best done through education. When people feel that the law is fair and impartial, they tend to cooperate voluntarily; but if the opposite impression is left, that the law is just an instrument of the powerful to oppress the weak, then cooperation amounts to betrayal of one's own best interests.

Every time a prisoner is abused by the penal system, it justifies in that prisoner's view every crime he ever committed. By consistently being fair with inmates, and not subjecting them to the kinds of sadistic tortures and mind-games that are routine in the jails and prisons of America at the hands of the guards, those that can be rehabilitated will eventually recognize that they will actually benefit by obeying the laws of the society, making them fit to be released. Of course, this does not apply to that core of life-time criminals, who make up a minority of the prison population, who have no hope of rehabilitation and who should remain prisoners for life, but the Government should stand for justice in the minds of all Americans, even prisoners convicted of crimes, otherwise the society is no better than a common criminal, and is not entitled to imprison anyone.)