EDITORIAL: McCain and veterans

The McCain campaign’s flat-footedness amid revelations of dangerous government drug testing on veterans reflects very unfavorably on the candidate. Whereas Barack Obama swiftly condemned the Department of Veterans Affairs on Tuesday morning, John McCain, perhaps the nation’s most famous wounded veteran, still had not made any public remarks by our deadline last evening. Some scandals require studious silence until the facts emerge. This isn’t one of them.

As a three-month Washington Times/ABC News investigation revealed this week, the VA is administering drugs with severe potential side effects to hundreds of military veterans participating in studies that fail Medical Ethics 101: “First, do no harm.” In some cases, documented by The Washington Times, the VA failed to communicate the risks of the drugs to subjects who include many post-traumatic stress syndrome patients returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In one case described in The Times, a former Army sharpshooter suffered a dramatic recurrence of his stress symptoms while participating in a trial of Pfizer Inc.’s smoking-cessation drug Chantix. He did not find out that the drug’s potential side effects include “changes in behavior, agitation, depressed mood, suicidal ideation and suicidal behavior” until after a stress episode requiring police to Taser and restrain him. “I would have shot me,” the sharpshooter said of the potentially tragic encounter.

As we noted in our editorial Wednesday, the scope of this problem could be quite large. There have been 25 tests on veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and 300 studies on the disorder itself. At least five of the drugs under testing bear warnings about suicide or suicidal thoughts. There are 4,796 veterans enrolled in post-traumatic stress disorder studies at present. Medical research on the treatment of this disorder is of course vital. This begs the question: Why has the federal government not taken better precautions? Why does it continue to test Chantix on traumatized veterans? Nearly 40 suicides and more than 400 incidents of suicidal behavior in the general population have been linked to Chantix, according to the Food and Drug Administration. This drug should be nowhere near war veterans.

It has been quite natural for our troops and veterans to look to John McCain for leadership. He’s been in their shoes. But Mr. McCain risks spending down that goodwill on a scandal that is substantially more important than the Walter Reed Army Medical Center abuses, which rightly garnered much official attention last year.

Mr. McCain owes veterans more than studious silence. The VA scandal points up the loss of human life. As a sitting senator seeking the Oval Office, he owes veterans a pledge for action.