🚀 go-pugleaf

ewd_tang@ece.concordia.ca wrote:
> 
> In concordia.general * Huggy * <hugs@radiotelephone.net.PAS_DE_SPAM> wrote:
> : <<<<<<===========--M--A--S--A--T--A--K--A----N--O--D--A--============>>>>>>
> 
> :  De 9 Dec 1998 21:40:46 GMT,
> : <74mqou$si6$3@newsflash.concordia.ca>,
> : ewd_tang@ece.concordia.ca
> : a �crit dans le message (Re: *** Human Experiments @ McGill University
> : ***)...
> 
> : ====================
> 
> :>: I just gave the examples if you can do whatever with "voluntary"
> :>: workers or "volunteers" if they sign forms and they comply.   You
> :>: obviously do not like to learn history.
> :>
> :>If they get paid, they aren't volunteers.
> :>If they get a bonus to handle the nitro glycerine, that's danger pay
> 
> : then the students used for LSD experiments were NOT volunteers
> : according to your standard point since I would expect that they were
> : paid around $5 per session or so at that time of year.
> 
> They were voluntary subjects, and paid for their services.
> If the pay was not commensurate with the hazard level, that is something
> different from calling them volunteers.
> 
> The railway workers were paid, it may not have been good pay, there may
> have been massive discrimination, but they were not volunteers.
> If they get a bonus for handling nitro, it would be danger pay. It was not
> commensurate with the hazard of handling the nitro, but it was still
> danger pay for dangerous work.
> 
> What you are comparing are two totally incomparable things, especially
> since the students didn't see some guy from the work camp die in the
> tunnel the day before.

	By and large I disagree with Masa, but in the case of LSD experiments,
it is possible for LSD to bring on psychotic episodes in some people
(which was known at that time), and one can only wonder if any of the
volunteers ended up at the Allen Memorial as psych patients, getting
electroshock and being used as guineau pigs for other experimental
drugs. Even the ones who enjoyed the LSD might have found that it
affected their ability to succeed in their studies in technical areas
like chemical engineering, for example. I once read of a scientist who
took LSD and he said that it took about a year before he could think
analytically again at his former standard.
	At the same time, Huxley's book, "The Doors of Perception," was
well-known, and there had been articles about LSD inducing a
hallucinatory state, so it isn't as if the volunteers had no idea what
they were getting into.
	Maybe Masa needs to give a second thought to the validity of jumping at
every $5 that's waved in one's face, and perhaps also look up the word
"volunteer" in the dictionary. A volunteer, or someone who applies for a
job, generally knows the terms of the arrangement and has FREELY CHOSEN
to accept them. In the case of LSD experiments, the risks were probably
not yet even known, let alone spelled out, but the fact that the drug
was so new and experimental in itself should have set off alarm bells in
any reasonable person's mind, so I really have little sympathy for the
VOLUNTEERS who CHOSE to accept MONEY for participating, although I do
sympathize with a stupid idiot who jumped at the money and ended up
permanently psychotic.
	Masa's racist views about people of European ancestry and about the
"plight" of Chinese people who CHOSE to immigrate to North America, at
their expense, knowing the general xenophobia of the human species (of
which Masa's posts are a fine example), have nothing whatsoever to do
with McGill University. Perhaps, in bringing the Panama Canal into it,
he is trying to do an impersonation of the bizarre irrationality that
can result from taking LSD.

									Michael H.