Back In The USSR

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

"The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

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. (...)

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.

More:

"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.

Records show that the government has routinely ignored its own rules, which allow deportees to be sedated only if they have a mental illness requiring the drugs, or if they are so aggressive that they imperil themselves or people around them. (...)

Internal government records show that most sedated deportees, such as Ade, received a cocktail of three drugs that included Haldol, also known as haloperidol, a medication normally used to treat schizophrenia and other acute psychotic states. Of the 53 deportees without a mental illness who were drugged in 2007, The Post's analysis found, 50 were injected with Haldol, sometimes in large amounts.

They were also given Ativan, used to control anxiety, and all but three were given Cogentin, a medication that is supposed to lessen Haldol's side effects of muscle spasms and rigidity. Two of the 53 deportees received Ativan alone. One person's medications were not specified.

Haldol gained notoriety in the Soviet Union, where it was often given to political dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals. "In the history of oppression, using haloperidol is kind of like detaining people in Abu Ghraib," the infamous prison in Iraq, said Nigel Rodley, who teaches international human rights law at the University of Essex in Britain and is a former United Nations special investigator on torture.

For people who are not psychotic, said Philip Seeman, a University of Toronto specialist in psychiatry and pharmacology, "prescribing Haldol . . . is medically and ethically wrong." Seeman studied the drug in the 1960s and later discovered the brain receptors on which several antipsychotic drugs work."

Read the whole thing. It's awful. We didn't care for this sort of thing when the Soviet Union did it; has it somehow improved since then?

If someone really cannot be induced to fly home without big problems, there are physical restraints. Moreover, if for some reason we have to sedate people and violate human rights codes, why on earth would we use antipsychotics, as opposed to, I don't know, Valium? These drugs, especially Haldol, are very serious, and can have serious side effects. (Haldol, Ativan, Cogentin.) It's beyond comprehension to me that we would use them on people with no history of mental illness.

And bear in mind: these are people who are being deported. They need not have been convicted of any crime. Consider this man:

"He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out. (...)

“The border patrol officer said to my face that Domenico said he would be killed if he went back to Italy,” she recalled, voicing incredulity that, in his halting English, he could express such a thought. “Also, who on earth would ever seek asylum from Italy?""

Maybe if Domenico had been just a little more unlucky, he'd have been forcibly injected with antipsychotics and shipped back home. Maybe if he was even more unlucky than that, he would have ended up with one of the less pleasant side effects of Haldol, like irreversible tardive dyskinesia:

"The symptoms are persistent and in some patients appear irreversible. The syndrome is characterized by rhythmical involuntary movements of tongue, face, mouth or jaw (e.g., protrusion of tongue, puffing of cheeks, puckering of mouth, chewing movements). Sometimes these may be accompanied by involuntary movements of extremities and the trunk."

Tardive dyskinesia: it makes a hell of a souvenir.

Comments

[Redhand]

Well, of course, Hilzoy the Cheney/Addington/Yoo theory of "inherent presidential power" lets Bush violate any law or standard of basic human rights with impunity. And, he never loses sleep because it's all done in the name of "protecting the American people."

Reminds me of a joke making the rounds:

Q. "How long is Bush's third term?"

A. "Twenty years to life."

[Nombrilisme Vide]

“Once at the station, one of the guards asked a French officer 'where we could inject the detainee when needed.'”

That one line, in context, almost made me ill.

Though if we just want to evoke raw cynicism, this ICE non-answer is certainly worthy of some small note:

“Asked to explain the reason for using Haldol and other psychotropic drugs with people who are not mentally ill, ICE responded, 'The medications used by Aviation Medicine are widely used in psychiatry.'”

[Brick Oven Bill]

Oh please Hilzoy. The Soviets would shoot foreigners who broke into Russia as spies; not sedate them for their own safety on the plane ride home. Here’s a Chicago link explaining what would probably happen to an ‘undocumented’ in the USSR before they were executed (warning- it’s worse than waterboarding):

http://internationalstudies.uchicago.edu/torture/abstracts/jeffreyburds.htm

Using a leather strap we would fasten the [prisoner’s] heels to the back of his head, doing so gradually–sometimes pressing in on the [prisoner’s] spinal column, other times stretching it, tearing it. This generated unendurable pain. In front of his own comrades, even the most obstinate zek soon began to ask for mercy, then to beg for it, then to cry and moan, and eventually to howl and lose consciousness. We would pour water on him, bring him back to consciousness, and then begin the torture anew. The prisoner would beg us [to stop], promising his tormenters that he would do everything we wanted. Then we would untie him and force him to lap up his own urine from the floor like a cat.

[hilzoy]

Brick Oven Bill: there were many things that the USSR did that we deplored. Just because we are not doing all of them to people who violate immigration rules, as opposed to at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, is not a reason to celebrate, as far as I'm concerned.

[Nombrilisme Vide]

...not sedate them for their own safety...

Reading the article, I can't help but feel that this is about ICE agents' safety mostly in a peripheral manner, and the prisoners' even less so. We're taking about preemptive drugging on the slightest pretense in a lot of these cases, by the sounds of it.

Admittedly, I was primed to view this in such a light, having read immediately prior a Vancouver Sun article regarding how low the tasing threshold of a lot of law enforcement has sunk. Not to, you know, draw parallels...

[Nombrilisme Vide]

And BOB, sorry to do it, but the best retort to your misdirection above is to break out the Debord:

"Cette démocratie si parfaite fabrique elle-même son inconcevable ennemi, le terrorisme. Elle veut, en effet, être jugée sur ses ennemis plutôt que sur ses résultats. L’histoire du terrorisme est écrite par l’État ; elle est donc éducative. Les populations spectatrices ne peuvent certes pas tout savoir du terrorisme, mais elles peuvent toujours en savoir assez pour être persuadées que, par rapport à ce terrorisme, tout le reste devra leur sembler plutôt acceptable, en tout cas plus rationnel et plus démocratique."

- Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la Société du Spectacle

[Mike Schilling]

Been away so long I hardly knew the place...

[jack]

I remember we used this on Elian Gonzalez before we sent him back to Cuba. I asked if it was safe to do this to such a young boy, but was told not to ask any questions, as this is what Castro wanted. This has been going on for a long time. I'm surprised the info is just now getting out.

[dlo]

Psychiatric drugs have to be prescribed by a psychiatrist. Who?

[Rebecca]

It might reassure you slightly that irreversible tardive dyskinesia is extremely rare when antipsychotics are used short term. That being said, it can happen, but almost never the extreme version described above. There is a mild tardive dyskenesia symptom often described as 'stiffness', but I've been told that it feels more like ones skin is a size or two too small, that I know can persist even after short term use. Classic TD (with facial tics) is really only seen in people who've been on large doses for long periods of time (often decades).

That being said, Haldol is a horrifying drug that has not been used for sedation purposes except in extreme circumstances (eg. someone who's violent and on PCP) since maybe the 1950s. The sedation effect is part of a month long round of initial side effects that correspond to ones brain essentially rewiring itself to cope with this new chemical. The actual effect (treating schizophrenia) doesn't show up for at least two weeks of constant dosage.

[rea]

Oh please Hilzoy. The Soviets would shoot foreigners who broke into Russia

The likes of BOB would be trumpeting our moral superiority to the Nazis if the administration set up camps and gassed 5,999,999 Jews.

"Our atrocities aren't quite as bad as theirs" is a morally bankrupt position.

[Phil]

Heck, all BOB is describing is stress positions. Nothing torturous about that, right?

[Brett Bellmore]

I don't imagine they're doing it for the benefit of those being expelled, but instead for the benefit of other passengers on the planes, which are just regular commercial air flights, rather than special "con-air" dedicated flights where an involuntary passenger loudly complaining the whole way would be disturbing.

Which, of course, just adds lying about the purpose to the other offenses.

[Luis]

I'm a clinical psychology Ph.D. student, not an M.D. or even in med school, but I do have experience working in a mental hospital and I'm pretty sure of the following points:

1. Tardive dyskinesia doesn't usually show up until you've kept someone on neuroleptics for a long time. One day's worth, as long as the dose is not astronomically high, should not cause TD or other neuroleptic malignant syndrome.

2. Psychiatric drugs can be prescribed by any M.D., regardless of specialization, I think. Certainly a generalist M.D. can, if not, say, an orthopod (although I am pretty sure the orthopod can legally do so, if not ethically. Some other licenses can prescribe them as well (e.g., APRNs) depending on the state.

2a. Haldol, affectionately known as Vitamin H, is, to my anecdotal knowledge at least, not uncommonly used as chemical restraint in, say, Emergency Departments. It is definitely not prescribed in these cases by psychiatrists.

[Francis]

Cette démocratie si parfaite fabrique elle-même son inconcevable ennemi, le terrorisme. Elle veut, en effet, être jugée sur ses ennemis plutôt que sur ses résultats. L’histoire du terrorisme est écrite par l’État ; elle est donc éducative. Les populations spectatrices ne peuvent certes pas tout savoir du terrorisme, mais elles peuvent toujours en savoir assez pour être persuadées que, par rapport à ce terrorisme, tout le reste devra leur sembler plutôt acceptable, en tout cas plus rationnel et plus démocratique."

wow, my French is rusty. Let's see how I do.

This oh-so-perfect democracy itself creates its own inconceivable enemy: terrorism. It wishes, in effect, to be judged by its enemies rather than its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State; it is thus an education. The watching populations cannot be certain that they know all about terrorism; but they can always know enough to be persuaded that, in contrast to terrorism, all that remains should seem mostly acceptable and in any case more rational and more democratic.

better translators desired.

[hilzoy]

Francis: good job. Two amendations: (a) the (watching? spectator?) populations can certainly not know everything about terrorism... (or: of course, those populations cannot know everything...); (b) the rest should seem to them mostly acceptable...

[Hartmut]

Rejected asylum seekers have been deported from Germany under similar circumstances with occasionally lethal results. Currently no links at hand but there was at least one case where a deportee died due to suffocation (a closed helmet was put on his head and iirc gagging was also involved). Another person suspected of smuggling drugs in his stomach died when the forcefully fed emetive was overdosed. I would not be surprised, if the US had learned those techniques from their German partners here.
As for transportation on normal flights, now the method is to pool deportees and to charter a whole plane for them that "delivers" them in sequence. This was adopted as a result of public complaints.
I am ashamed of my country about that too.

[antics]

Antipsychotics and psychiatric drugs are rarely short term. They address diseases that are almost always long term. The drugs are created to be slow acting over months to be effective. A short term use of a long term drug would be to use the drug as it wasn't designed for some short term affect rather than addressing the long term disease. A psychiatrist wouldn't do this, but a medical doctor, if allowed to prescribe psychiatric drugs by the DEA, might, and would be open to law suits for prescribing the drugs.

We would have to know if the drugs were prescribed by a medical doctor or psychiatrist and sue from there. Medical doctors have participated in torture in Iraq. If a psychiatrist is, it's a whole new world and they have to be jailed.

[Francis]

hil: yup, that's better. thx.

[Nombrilisme Vide]

I suppose I could have been less lazy and taken the 10 minutes to hunt down an English translation last night (or, yes, done one myself); it was late, I was tired? Please?

Per SIO:

"This perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State and it is thus instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, in any case more rational and democratic."

(I personally would go with "spectator populations", and agree on "in effect" over "actually", but that's quibbling.)

[Gary Farber]

"From the Washington Post:"

I wrote a fairly long and detailed and linky post about all this and more on 5/14/2008 12:14:00 PM, and sent you an email about it at 12:47 p.m. of that day, in case you might want to be aware of all the stories, and write about it.

I guess my post didn't have anything additional you felt worth mentioning, despite all the links and additional information. Oh, well.

[Gary Farber]

I also posted this here at 2:47 p.m. on the 14th, come to think of it.

[Gary Farber]

Crooks and Liars. Blue Girl, Red State.

[Gary Farber]

Comments From Left Field. Avedon.