XPost: alt.society.mental-health, alt.psychology.personality   
   From: pjbrass@uswest.net   
      
   Letters to the Editor: letters@washpost.com   
      
   Washington Post   
   Some Detainees Are Drugged For Deportation - Immigrants Sedated   
   Without Medical Reason   
   by Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest   
   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.   
      
   "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.   
      
      
   U.S. Government Forces Antipsychotic Drugs on Foreigners   
   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.   
      
   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.   
      
   Stung by lawsuits over two sedation cases, the agency changed its   
   policy in June to require a court order before drugging any deportee   
   for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons. In at least one   
   instance identified by The Post, the agency appears not to have   
   followed those rules.   
      
   In the five years since its creation, ICE has stepped up arrests and   
   removals of foreigners who are in the country illegally, have been   
   turned down for asylum or have been convicted of a crime in the past.   
      
   If the government wants a detainee to be sedated, a deportation   
   officer asks for permission for a medical escort from the aviation   
   medicine branch of the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS),   
   the agency responsible for medical care for people in immigration   
   custody. A mental health official in aviation medicine is supposed to   
   assess the detainee's medical records, although some deportees'   
   records contain no evidence of that happening. If the sedatives are   
   approved, a U.S. public health nurse is assigned as the medical escort   
   and given prescriptions for the drugs.   
      
   After injecting the sedatives, the nurse travels with the deportee and   
   immigration guards to their destination, usually giving more doses   
   along the way. To recruit medical escorts, the government has sought   
   to glamorize this work. "Do you ever dream of escaping to exotic,   
   exciting locations?" said an item in an agency newsletter. "Want to   
   get away from the office but are strapped for cash? Make your dreams   
   come true by signing up as a Medical Escort for DIHS!"   
      
   The nurses are required to fill out step-by-step medical logs for each   
   trip. Hundreds of logs for the past five years, obtained by The Post,   
   chronicle in vivid detail deviations from the government's sedation   
   rules.   
      
   An analysis by The Post of the known sedations during fiscal 2007,   
   ending last October, found that 67 people who got medical escorts had   
   no documented psychiatric reason. Of the 67, psychiatric drugs were   
   given to 53, 48 of whom had no documented history of violence, though   
   some had managed to thwart an earlier attempt to deport them. These   
   figures do not include two detainees who immigration officials said   
   were given sedatives for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons   
   before being deported on group charter flights, which are often used   
   to return people to Mexico and Central America.   
      
   Even some people who had been violent in the past proved peaceful the   
   day they were sent home. "Dt calm at this time," says the first entry,   
   using shorthand for "detainee," in the log for the January 2007   
   deportation of Yousif Nageib to his native Sudan. In requesting drugs   
   for his deportation, an immigration officer had noted that Nageib, 40,   
   had once fled to Canada to avoid an assault charge and had helped   
   instigate a detainee uprising while in custody. But on the morning of   
   his departure, the log says, he "is handcuffed and states he will do   
   what we say." Still, he was injected in his right buttock with a   
   three-drug cocktail.   
      
   In one printout of Nageib's medical log, next to the entry saying he   
   was calm,  is a handwritten asterisk. It was put there by Timothy T.   
   Shack, then medical director of the immigration health division, as he   
   reviewed last year's sedation cases. Next to the asterisk, in his   
   neat, looping handwriting, Shack placed a single word: "Problem."   
      
   When he landed in Lagos, Nigeria, Afolabi Ade was unable to talk.   
      
   "Every time I tried to force myself to speak, I couldn't, because my   
   tongue was . . . twisted. . . . I thought I was going to swallow it,"   
   Ade, 33, recalled in an interview. "I was nauseous. I was dizzy."   
      
   As he was being flown back to Africa, his American wife alerted his   
   parents there that he was on his way. His father was waiting at the   
   Lagos airport. It was the first time in three years that they had seen   
   one another. Shocked by how woozy the young man was, his father   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)