by JASON DUAINE HAHN
Some conspiracy theories are just crazy enough to be true.
The American government is not lacking in controversial decisions, from starting a war in Iraq based on faulty intelligence, to using drone strikes to kill American citizens overseas. Then there’s your occasional conspiracy theory that attempts to pin something absurd on the government, like 9/11 being orchestrated by the Bush Administration. As crazy as that seems, every once in awhile, the truth is crazier than fiction. The U.S. government has done its share of things that test the concept of liberty, and a lot of them—while seemingly impossible today—only happened a few decades ago. For some families, the effects of what the government has done may still ripple into 2015.
While this is by no means a comprehensive list of all the government has done wrong (let’s leave what they’ve done to foreign countries for another day), here are some of the craziest true things that the American government actually has done to Americans. Leave the conspiracy theories at the door.
Letting African Americans Die of Syphilis When Treatment Was Available
Back in 1932, the Great Depression was in full effect, and syphilis had become a major problem. In order to find out more how the disease progressed, the U.S. Public Health Service sponsored a study called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” with the Tuskagee Institute of Alabama. The institute is located in Macon County, where 35 percent of the male population was infected with the disease at the time.
The PHS partnered with the Rosenwald Fund, which promoted the education and healthcare of poor African American farmers, and they sought out male farmers to undergo a six-month study into syphilis treatment, with the original goal of finding a better means of stopping the illness. They got 600 farmers, 399 with syphilis and 201 without, and told them they would get free healthcare, medical exams, meals, and burial insurance. Doesn’t sound like a bad deal, right?
But, when it was time for the program to start, the doctors didn’t tell the men who had already contracted the disease that they were infected with syphilis. Instead, they told them that the treatment they were receiving was for “bad blood,” a colloquial term that meant a number of general diseases, even fatigue. They were never treated for syphilis, and instead were monitored and experimented on like guinea pigs to see how how bad the disease could get. One of the “free treatments” performed on them were painful spinal taps, which weren’t even needed.
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