Washington Times:

The government is testing drugs with severe side effects like psychosis and suicidal behavior on hundreds of military veterans, using small cash payments to attract patients into medical experiments that often target distressed soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, a Washington Times/ABC News investigation has found.

In one such experiment involving the controversial anti-smoking drug Chantix, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took three months to alert its patients about severe mental side effects. The warning did not arrive until after one of the veterans taking the drug had suffered a psychotic episode that ended in a near lethal confrontation with police.
…
Mr. Elliott, a chain smoker, began taking Chantix last fall as part of a VA experiment that specifically targeted veterans with PTSD, opting to collect $30 a month for enrolling in the clinical trial because he needed cash as he returned to school. He soon began suffering hallucinations and suicidal thoughts, unaware that the new drug he was taking could have caused them.
…
“You’re a lab rat for $30 a month,” Mr. Elliott said.

We’ve started an illegal war halfway across the world and young men and women went to support our country at any cost. When they’re there, we don’t give them what need, farm out their meals, their suppliers - their health and safety - to no-bid, private contractors like Halliburton who steal from the soldiers in providing sub-standard services and products and steal from Americans by charging 3 to 20 to 100 times reasonable cost from what we pay in taxes. When they come home, if they’re injured, they stay in slum medical facilities “maintained” by our government. If they’re not physically injured, they don’t receive proper attention and care for mental illness or PTSD. And we still haven’t passed a decent GI bill to toss out a few “gimmies” - like fully-paid college education - to our deserving veterans.

And now it comes to light that our own government, knee-deep in Big-Pharm money, are taking on veterans - already hard-up for money because of lack of proper government care - who would sell their sanity, what health they have left, for $30/mo. $30 a fucking month!

It doesn’t matter what you think about the war(s) or how they got started: Why are we not taking proper care of the men and women in our country who felt the call to fight on the behalf of our leaders?

How could we let a man who honorably served in the military get to the point of “needing” $30/month?

How do we allow drug companies and our government to treat these heroes like rats?

What the hell is wrong with our country?