Subject Protection (8,10), Dr. James F. Childress, comments puzzling when he says in his book, “Coercion and controlling manipulation are occasionally justified, although these occasions are infrequent in medicine (by contrast to police work, where such techniques are more common and also more commonly justified).”
     Are we justified to use coercive (7,6), as well as non-coercive (6), techniques without due process of the law? Later in this paper, this notion will be expanded under the topic of informed consent and The United States Constitution. However, it is important to realize that these weapons are not necessarily all that non-lethal and they could be especially dangerous. Thomas E. Ricks of The Wall Street Journal comments on just how lethal these weapons are (23), “Despite the name, non-lethal weapons are hardly gentle, and in a few instances, they could even make war more grotesque. For example, powerful lasers designed to destroy an enemy tank’s optics could also explode a soldier’s eyeballs. Portable microwave weapons being field tested by the U.S. Special Forces can quietly cut enemy communications but also can cook internal organs.”  Furthermore, these technologies are beginning to be researched in law enforcement, again, Thomas E. Ricks goes on to say (23), “Some research is spilling into the civilian sector, too.  The Justice Department’s research arm is piggybacking several projects and expects within a few years to test foam and light immobilizers for use against everything from ordinary domestic disturbances to prison riots.” 

                                             Copyrights © Anthony N Lalli 2023

     So, one problem could stem from the fact that there is no guidance on social experiments and with the introduction of non-lethal weapons there is the possibility that such devices could be thought of in terms of social experimentation or social testing, even though there are strong behavioral overtones.  On the other hand, it was shown earlier that behavioral experimentation, which is supposedly regulated, has its own compliance issues (8), therefore one can only venture to guess whether non-lethal weapons, which if categorized as social experimentation or social testing, would have any accountability.  There is a big gap here that needs to be closed and it gets even bigger if the research is done in private non-government affiliated enterprises where regulations are even less clearly defined (3).  Furthermore, in the classified human research domain where social experimentation oversight can be even a larger issue, because of secrecy, informed consent becomes almost an unknown entity.

   Finally, it appears that some of the spillage may be in the form of low tech incessant harassment and stalking techniques in combination, with high tech techniques (7), and this should be disturbing to any fair minded person, because it is a reminder  of the United States’ dark  past, where there once were (24) human rights abuses in connection with the surveillance of Americans;  albeit, it was undoubtedly more low tech methodology in those days, as compared to some of today’s techniques, and while it was harmful then, the potential for harm today is on the scale of human torture, without