Therapy or Torture?
While doing some research for a story that I'm writing, I came across this fascinating paragaph describing the use of the drug succinylchloride in "therapy" for "sex perverts", a category that included gay men and straight pedophiles — the latter generally being typically described as "homosexuals" in the first half of the twentieth century. Apparently all your sex perverts where pretty much the same back then.
The description of the drug's use struck me as remarkably similar to the effects of "waterboarding", the currently popular practice that most deem to be torture or one of its euphemisms. It's not clear from this excerpt whether this "therapy" resulted in success, which also marks a similarity with waterboarding, but it does go to show that torture can be considered vital to society in more than just alleged-terrorist cases. I am mindful, of course, that the homosexual "menace" at the time was undoubtedly seen by many as a "ticking time-bomb" type scenario, considering its imagined threat to the government and the nation and the resolve of manly men during the McCarthy period.
I would like to point out that the events described in the following paragraph took place within my own lifetime.
The most famous of the treatment institutions [for "sex perverts"] was California's Atascadero State Hospital, which opened in 1954.[52] About sixty percent of the inmate population were sex offenders, including many convicted of consensual adult sodomy or oral copulation. At the beginning, the institution was relatively relaxed, even if ineffective in "curing" those incarcerated there. Key to the institution was controlling inmates resistant to treatment or authority. Doctors performed a steady but small stream of lobotomies, which Dr. Walter Freeman testified helped patients lose "their fear and hate and become noticeably friendly."[53] The main treatment, which Atascadero pioneered, involved the drug succinylchloride (Anectine), a "muscle relaxant which makes the victim unable to breathe. He feels like he's dying. And while he lies there unable to breathe, but fully conscious, the 'therapist' tells him that unless he's a good boy, and quits jerking off in the shower, or whatever, he will die."[54] This drug was used continually at Atascadero until 1969, when a visiting law student raised a scandal about its use. Some inmates were incarcerated here for only a short time, others for decades.
[original notes for this paragraph follow:]
[52] The account that follows is drawn from exposes of Atascadero in the early 1970s. See John LaStala, Atascadero: Dachau for Queers?, THE ADVOCATE, Apr. 26, 1972, at 11, 13 (LaStala was an inmate in 1955); Rob Cole, Inside Atascadero IV: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Treatment, THE ADVOCATE, Oct. 11, 1972, at 5.
[53] LaStala, supra note 52, at 11 (quoting Dr. Walter Freedman).
[54] Id. at 13.
[William N. Eskridge, Jr., "Privacy Jurisprudence and the Apartheid of the Closet, 1946-1961", 1997. "This Article is the published version of the Mason Ladd Lecture, delivered at the Florida State University College of Law on April 1, 1996" by Eskridge, at the time a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center.]