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Detainees drugged against
their will for deportation
Raw
Story
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
In day 4 of a Washington Post series, Careless Detention,
it is revealed that the United States has injected hundreds
of foreigners without their consent with dangerous mind-altering
drugs for trips returning them to their home countries, according
to government documents, medical records, and interviews with
some of the actual people who were drugged.
From the report:
The government's forced use of antipsychotic
drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes
dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail,"
as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal
guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto
an airplane. "Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac,"
says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman
to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was "dragged
down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose," according
to an airline crew member's written account. Repeatedly, documents
describe immigration guards "taking down" a reluctant
deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.
In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006,
five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry
he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse's account
in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse
could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right
buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted,
"Nighty-night." Such episodes are among more than
250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the
government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant
to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped
out of the United States since 2003 -- the year the Bush administration
handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland
Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency,
known as ICE. Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees,
unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of
some international human rights codes. The practice is banned
by several countries where, confidential documents make clear,
U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra
doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.
Federal officials have seldom acknowledged publicly that they
sedate people for deportation. The few times officials have
spoken of the practice, they have understated it, portraying
sedation as rare and "an act of last resort." Neither
is true, records and interviews indicate.
The most frequently used drugs in the sedation 'cocktail'
are haldol, an anti-psychotic medication that "gained
notoriety in the Soviet Union, where it was often given to
political dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals."
Ativan, used to control anxiety, and Cogentin, a medication
that supposedly lessens Haldol's side effects of muscle spasms
and rigidity.
(Article continues below)
The medically recommended dosage for the Haldol alone, from
the report:
For aggressive behavior, 0.5 milligrams twice
a day to 5 milligrams three times a day, although doses of
up to 10 milligrams a day may be used in a hospital emergency
room.
This graph illustrates the dosage, and number of detainees
given Haldol:
The U.S. made flight layovers during some trips with sedated
detainees, and as there are foreign nations that forbid the
practice, the report also details some run-ins between flight
nurses and foreign officials, which in one instance resulted
in a detainee being returned to Atlanta, GA from a layover
in France.
The full report by the Washington Post's Amy Goldstein and
Dana Priest is available online here.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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