The Healing Power of Placebos

By Marco Visscher
From Ode Magazine

A sugar pill, a salt solution, a doctor in a white jacket—these all have the power to cure as long as the patient believes in their healing qualities. That seems impossible. So what does science say about the elusive placebo effect? And how can we use it to feel better?

When Judy Ruth Ashley came out of the local anaesthesia, she already felt better. She had gone to the hospital in Denver, Colorado, for an operation to help diminish the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The surgeon was to drill four holes in her skull through which he would implant fetal neural tissue into her brain, to stimulate cells to grow and develop, reversing the course of the disease.

Everything seemed to be going fine. In the months that followed her operation, the 65-year-old Ashley was less and less bothered by the dyskinesia—excessive, uncontrollable movement—that ruled her life for over 20 years. “I would wake up pain-free. I would get up and walk to the bathroom before I took any medication at all. I could run the vacuum, no problem, and I could even drive a car most of the time. Besides this, my blood pressure no longer dropped when I stood up. My speech was so much better I was able to sing again in the karaoke bar.”

But there is one remarkably enigmatic element of this success story: Ashley hadn’t received the neural implant at all. She was participating in a study into the effectiveness of the operation—but without knowing it, she was in the control group of people whose needles remained empty.

Conducted some 10 years ago, the controversial study is one of several involving sham operations and wide debate about the power of the placebo effect. How is it people get better after an operation that provides no active treatment? It figures as a spectacular example of the placebo effect, a phenomenon that has been known for centuries, but is still hard to grasp.

The placebo effect is the sudden healing of a patient through treatment that is not scientifically effective but works because the patient believes in it. A placebo—Latin for “I shall please”—is surgery or medicine that contains no active ingredients but promotes healing.

Doctors have been aware of the occurrence for centuries and have made conscious use of it to put patients at ease. When a patient would complain of vague symptoms, some physicians would pull out the “very special pill.” The patient believed it would work and complaints often disappeared.

Some say the history of medical science is the history of the placebo effect. Bloodletting is a well-known example. Until the 19th century, it was a commonly used technique that helped many people but as we all know, had no therapeutic effect—quite the opposite. Nowadays, every new medicine is officially tested against a placebo. It regularly happens that the sugar pill produces the same or better results than the medicine.

But how is that possible? How can people recover using a treatment that has no reason to work? Why did Judy Ruth Ashley’s condition improve even though she hadn’t had a real operation? In other words: What explains the placebo effect?

Ashley’s miraculous improvement seems to demonstrate that placebos are effective even in the operating room. In fact, the placebo effect may be much stronger in the operating room, according to Cynthia McRae, a health psychologist at the University of Denver who led the study. “The more dramatic the medical intervention, the stronger the placebo effect will be. There is no doubt that brain surgery is much more invasive than taking a pill.”

That’s putting it mildly. Ashley’s husband remembers well what he thought when he watched as a frame was mounted on her head to make it easier for the surgeon to drill the holes in her skull. Monstrous!, he thought. Like medieval torture!

Of course Ashley knew she might get a sham operation. One year after the procedure, when it was revealed which patients had been given sham procedures, all were offered the chance to have the real surgery. This had been a factor in Ashley’s decision to join the study. What did she have to lose? The alternative was inevitable mental and physical deterioration.

Ashley was one of 40 participants questioned by psychologists about their experiences and tested several times over the course of a year. The result? Patients who erroneously thought they had had a real transplant experienced a “better quality of life” and scored higher on physical tests than those who had really undergone the procedure, but believed they were the unlucky ones in the control group. The results of the study point to an unmistakable placebo effect.

Very little research has been done in this area of medicine. The pharmaceutical industry can’t profit; after all, they can’t make money from sugar pills. That is why many research funders look upon the placebo effect as an irritating variable in a study. It is often forgotten that the effect could help people and shave billions off spiralling health-care costs. If researchers could gain more insight into how the effect works, it would stand as one of the biggest medical breakthroughs in history.

Doctors rarely dispense fake pills today. Medical ethics and a new emphasis on a patient’s right to know make it almost impossible. Fake pills are only accepted by the established medical order for research purposes. Imagine a manufacturer has developed a new medicine. Before it can be sold, its effectiveness must be established. That’s usually done through a study in which a group of patients is given the new medicine and another group gets a placebo that looks, smells and tastes exactly like the real thing. The participants must have agreed to participate in advance. They are randomly assigned to groups and neither the researcher nor the patient knows who is getting the real pill and who is getting a placebo. This is called a “random double-blind placebo-controlled study”—which is what health regulators want to see. If the group receiving the test medicine reports better results than the placebo group, the medicine is approved for sale.

It sounds like a formality. After all, everything we think we know about medical science tells us that a medicine developed following years of research will score better than a sugar pill. Wrong! Research shows that both groups of patients usually report improvement.

Depending on the illness, at least 30 percent of participants, including those taking the placebo, report they feel better, and the numbers can go as high as 70 percent. Sometimes the medicine will do better than the placebo by only a couple of percentage points. For instance, the medicine may make 72 percent of the study’s participants better; a placebo, 70 percent. And you guessed it: The test medicine will generally be put on the market.

Moreover, it is not unusual that a placebo is more effective than the test medicine, which then likely disappears into the rejection pile.

But how does the placebo effect work? Some people are convinced that the effect proves that strength of mind is sufficient to heal the body. This argument holds that positive thoughts (hope, belief, trust) incite the body to destroy sick cells. The conviction is fueled by the vision that body and mind are one and not—as Rene Descartes reasoned in the 17th century—separate entities. Supporters of this vision challenge Descartes’ mechanical world view, which forms the foundation of modern science.

Other people remain skeptical, pointing out that there is no proof for the theory that the mind can heal. They wonder how the patient would feel if there hadn’t been any treatment at all. Maybe he would have gotten better anyway. After all, many health complaints simply disappear. People go to the doctor when their symptoms are at their worst and it’s only logical that they ease with time.

Yet that cannot explain Judy Ruth Ashley’s striking improvements. Brain cells slowly die off in patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative illness. If there is no effective treatment, the deterioration persists.

It has also been suggested that the placebo effect is triggered by a Pavlovian response. Just as the dogs in Pavlov’s famous experiment started drooling as soon as they heard the sounds that signalled feeding time, people might recover when a doctor gives them a pill as long as they have had a similar experience in the past. Testing with placebos on animals supports this theory. When mice were given a sweet drink containing cyclophosphamide, a substance that suppresses the immune system, they became weak and nauseated. When given the sweet drink without cyclophosphamide, they showed the same symptoms.

But this theory also fails to explain why Ashley got better. After all, she had never had brain surgery before. How could she have exhibited a Pavlovian response?

Critics claim the placebo effect is only a short-term reaction. Indeed, most studies only last a few weeks and it is unclear whether the placebo group continues to report improvement compared with the group receiving the real medicine. But Ashley saw further progress many months after the sham operation. More to the point, her doctors—who knew she was participating in the study—were convinced their patient had been given the dopamine. Months later, when they adamantly claimed that any placebo effect from a sham operation would have long disappeared, they continued decreasing the dose of her regular medication, to half the original amount. (In 1997, two years after the sham operation, Ashley was given the real transplant. She continues to do well, under the circumstances.)

Placebos have a strong effect on patients dealing with pain. That became clear in World War II, when a continual shortage of morphine for wounded soldiers plagued the battlefields and hospitals. As long as wounded men didn’t know they were getting a simple saline solution, their pain eased.

During the 1980s, a study provided definitive proof of this phenomenon. People who had undergone tooth extraction were told their pain would be relieved by a machine emitting ultrasonic waves. What they didn’t know was that the machine was switched off for half the patients. Afterwards, the participants reported on their pain levels. Compared with a third group of patients who had not received any treatment, those treated with ultrasound scored higher. It didn’t matter whether the machine was on or off.

Placebos have also been proven successful in treating depression, anxiety, stress, warts and ulcers—sometimes in as many as 60 to 70 percent of the cases. People report they feel better, their appetite has increased and their general sense of well-being has improved. Because these are subjective experiences, critics say it’s all psychological. But doesn’t that miss the point? Isn’t the ultimate goal of every treatment to help patients experience less pain and feel better?

There are, however, objective effects everyone can measure. Placebo treatments have been shown to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels as well as improve reaction speeds, pulse rates and immune-system activity. In patients who are depressed, QEEG (“quantitative electroencephalogram”) equipment, also used to diagnose attention-deficit disorder, demonstrated that their brain activity increased markedly after two weeks on a placebo.

Moreover, in one study, PET scans indicated that patients with Parkinson’s disease were producing dopamine when given a particular medicine. Another group given a placebo showed the same result. The effect was brief; a temporary increase in dopamine in the brain doesn’t mean an automatic cure from the disease. Yet, Ashley saw improvement over one year, even after she knew she had received a sham operation.

Why are depression, anxiety and stress sensitive to the placebo effect? Perhaps, some claim, because these are the afflictions most receptive to personal attention. And attention is something many people miss from their family doctors. With the avalanche of new medicines coming onto the market in recent decades, the focus of doctors’ care has increasingly shifted from the patient to medical technology. Under increasing time pressure and often against their own wishes, doctors are now at the controls of a machine that is as detached as it is efficient. Patients get less attention than in days gone by.

That development has incited increasing numbers of people to seek help in the world of alternative and complementary therapies. Patient-satisfaction surveys consistently show that people are happier with treatment in the alternative sector. Why? Patients get more attention with alternative practitioners. People want a listening ear and emotional support, particularly when they are ill. But what they find at the doctor’s office is someone trained to assess patients critically, even skeptically. At the alternative practitioner’s office, they usually find someone who shows interest in them as people, exudes enthusiasm about the treatment and believes in what he or she is doing.

Could attention explain the placebo effect? In a placebo-controlled study, participants are given a lot of attention: They are asked questions about how they feel, someone listens to them, they have suddenly become important. This attention could be a vital contribution to feeling better, but it gives rise to yet another question: How could attention alone produce such strong effects?

Ultimately, the placebo phenomenon points to a strange paradox in modern medical science. As soon as an alternative-health treatment proves successful, it is dismissed as the placebo effect. It works only because people believe in it. Yet this explanation appears to contradict one of the foundations of medical science, which stresses that the mind and body are separate, therefore ruling out the possibility of healing through belief.

This blind spot exposes a painful reality in our health-care system. It is noteworthy that the debate over the ethics of placebos—Can patients be denied an effective treatment?—is conducted only by conventional-medicine practitioners. Sometimes that debate is a harsh one. Some argue placebo trials should be abandoned and pharmaceutical companies should find more responsible ways to test new medicines because patients may risk harm by being treated with inactive substances. Alternative practitioners are sometimes accused of endangering patients’ health by using unproven treatment methods.

Outside medical circles this is an irrelevant conversation. To the vast majority of the public, it’s more important that people get better than that their treatments be scientifically proven.

Placebos are not a solution for everything, but they do offer new opportunities for alternative-healing treatments. Various researchers have tried to determine whether a certain personality type is particularly sensitive or resistant to placebos. Those studies have produced uniform results. Everyone—men and women, young and old, the educated and uneducated—is sensitive to the placebo effect. It works on us all, even those who don’t believe in it. Some studies suggest, though, that a placebo effect is more likely to occur in people who are more optimistic than others and who have had positive experiments with medical interventions, thus expecting a treatment that will help them recover.

The personality of the doctor prescribing a placebo does, however, have an effect. Doctors who inspire trust, are optimistic, believe in their treatment, are clear in their diagnosis as well as being warm, sympathetic and involved, help stimulate a stronger placebo effect. Doctors can therefore become walking placebos themselves.

But the attitudes of patients matter too. Cynthia McRae, who led the quality-of-life study of Parkinson’s patients who received sham operations, believes that “the power of hope and optimism” should not be underestimated. The stronger the patient’s belief in the doctor’s authority, the greater the chance that the treatment will work, even when no active medicines are involved.

People would therefore be well-advised to look for a doctor who listens and in whom they have trust. Trust heals. Children know that. They totally trust everything will be okay when their mothers kiss their painful scraped knees. Maybe that’s the perfect example of the placebo effect, as was true for Judy Ruth Ashley: healing through the kiss of grace.

Drugs, Knives, and Midwives

The U.S. maternity care system is in crisis. A grassroots movement to save it is under way.

By Elizabeth Larsen
2007
From Utne Reader


The woman, who is expecting her first child, is a week past her due date. Even though tests show that her baby is doing well, her obstetrician decides to induce labor with Cytotec. It's a drug that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for pregnant women, and it can cause contractions that are strong enough to lacerate the anatomical barrier that keeps amniotic fluid separate from the mother's blood vessels -- a situation known as amniotic fluid embolism (AFE). AFE is almost always fatal.

The woman's contractions speed up immediately, but the doctor continues to give her Cytotec until her contractions are coming so rapidly that the baby is having difficulty getting oxygen. The fetal monitor shows that the baby is in extreme distress, so the doctor sets to work to save it.

Shortly after the birth, the mother starts to hemorrhage and goes into shock. The baby dies 35 minutes after birth. The mother dies a few hours later from AFE.

This nightmarish scenario is one of many from Marsden Wagner's book Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First (University of California Press, 2006). A perinatologist and a scientist, Wagner is a former director of women's and children's health at the World Health Organization (WHO). He's also an old-fashioned whistleblower. By his lights, the American birth industry is in a crisis because we have turned a natural event into a medical condition. As a result, we've allowed obstetricians -- and not the midwives who safely deliver the majority of the world's babies -- to control maternity care. The ironic result is that in our efforts to make birth as safe as possible, we have saddled American women and babies with a system that, despite being the most expensive on earth, puts us in the bottom tier of care for wealthy countries.

Today, more than 15 years after Jessica Mitford detailed the potential hazards of obstetrical forceps, fetal monitoring, and diagnostic ultrasound in The American Way of Birth and more than a quarter century after Immaculate Deception, author Suzanne Arms' expose of high-tech birth, sold more than 250,000 copies, the number of American women who die around the time of birth is on the rise. According to WHO, 28 countries -- including Croatia, Ireland, Kuwait, and Portugal -- have lower maternal mortality rates. Forty-one countries have lower infant mortality rates.

It's not just the shocking mortality rates that trouble Wagner and other reformers. Childbirth Connection, a New York organization dedicated to improving maternity care, recently published Listening to Mothers II, a national survey of 1,573 women who gave birth in 2005. Its findings document numerous indignities and dangers, most of which easily could have been prevented. Of the 25 percent of women who were given episiotomies (a cut in the muscle between the vagina and the anus to widen the birth canal), a startling 73 percent were not consulted before having the procedure.

While an episiotomy is a minor -- albeit painful and often unnecessary -- procedure, a cesarean section is major surgery, and 32 percent of Listening to Mothers II respondents had one. That's a higher rate than the 29 percent cited by Wagner, itself a steep increase from the 21 percent reported five years earlier. Given that WHO has calculated that the optimal rate of C-section for saving the most women and babies is between 10 and 15 percent, what's driving this trend?

Certainly, in this age of rising malpractice insurance costs, obstetricians want to protect themselves from being sued. But Wagner also thinks that C-sections offer doctors a way to bring the most time-consuming part of their practice under their control. "It means they can split their time between seeing patients in the office, doing gynecological surgical procedures in the hospital, and attending births, on a timetable of their choosing, and reduces the chance that they will be required to attend births at inconvenient times," he writes. "For some, it is perhaps their only chance to have a decent personal life." Wagner also believes that our skyrocketing C-section rates are driven by the internal politics of the birth industry. By promoting cesareans, doctors are choosing a procedure that midwives cannot perform.

Even in an elective cesarean, a woman is almost three times more likely to die than in a vaginal birth. Beyond the immediate health risks, having a C-section decreases a woman's chance to become pregnant again and doubles the risk of an unexplained stillbirth in later pregnancies. In 2 to 6 percent of cesareans, a doctor accidentally cuts into a baby. Babies born from an elective C-section are twice as likely as babies born vaginally to end up in neonatal intensive care.

The widespread use of labor-inducing and painkilling drugs is another by-product of what Wagner sees as the rampant medicalization of American births. According to Listening to Mothers II, four labors in ten were started artificially. The most common method used (80 percent) was synthetic oxytocin, more commonly known as Pitocin. There is no disputing that induced labors can be medically necessary. But they also are done at the request of anxious mothers who are so exhausted by their pregnancies that they just want to be done with them. In theory, there is nothing wrong with trying to jump-start labor; since human life began, women have been walking, squatting, rubbing their nipples, swallowing castor oil, snorting sneezing powders, and having sex to give their babies a nudge. But nearly 20 percent of the women in the study who were induced said that they felt pressured by their doctors.

The problem with using Pitocin is that it makes contractions more painful and creates a snowball effect that often leads to pain medications such as epidural blocks, which spur their own set of complications. According to Wagner, a quarter of women who receive an epidural experience side effects such as fevers, urinary incontinence after delivery, headaches, temporary and permanent paralysis, and even death. Because a woman who has had an epidural cannot feel or move her lower body, she has to give birth lying on her back, which is less efficient than upright positions such as squatting or standing.

When Wagner challenges doctors who use Cytotec, he's told that if they were to wait for FDA approval, they would be stalling the medical progress of their field.

This arrogance, Wagner warns, is endemic in the practice of medicine. He urges his readers to push past unfounded fears about safety to realize that 80 percent of births don't need medical interventions. But while Wagner blames the medical establishment, a roundtable discussion in the journal Birth (Sept. 2006) takes a wider view that implicates our panicky, instant-fix culture. "We are a terrified, risk-aversive society," writes Michael C. Klein, professor emeritus of family practice and pediatrics at the University of British Columbia, who believes that we want the easy solution in all aspects of our lives. "[We] pop a pill and carry on being fat and out of shape, while [we] expect to die suddenly at age 90 in the middle of sexual intercourse. We demand it of society, the medical profession, ourselves."

In their indignation, critics of the current birth system tend to overlook the fact that despite its myriad shortcomings, there have also been considerable advances in the way we give birth, and that birth fads and trends are products of their time and culture. Tina Cassidy's Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) is a fascinating tour through the dark days of craniotomies (puncturing the fetal skull to remove babies who were stuck), cesareans without anesthesia, and "Twilight Sleep," a method developed in Germany in 1914 in which women were drugged into a semiconscious state, strapped to their beds, and then had their ears stuffed with cotton so they wouldn't be awakened by their cries of pain. Indeed, a fair number of women giving birth today were born to mothers who were unconscious. Fathers were routinely banished from delivery rooms until the 1970s, and newborns slept down the hall in nurseries and were fed formula on rigid schedules.

Most new families today spend the night together in the same hospital room because activists in the 1960s and 1970s demanded that birth become a more human, family-centered experience. Now, a new breed of agitators are starting to take matters into their own hands. In a December 2006 Boston magazine article, Cassidy details the efforts of Boston-area women who are fed up with unwanted C-sections, false positive prenatal screening tests, scant breastfeeding support, and incorrect predictions from doctors about dangerously large babies. The members of this "mommy uprising" are hiring hands-on midwives instead of obstetricians and are insisting that they be allowed to have a doula -- a supportive labor coach -- present at the birth. Some are passing on the hospitals altogether in order to give birth in the familiar comfort of their own homes. But while studies have shown that home births are as safe as hospital deliveries for low-risk pregnancies, most doctors oppose them. In some states, attending a home birth is illegal, and home birth midwives and their clients (not "patients") have been driven underground.

Wagner argues that midwives are key to fixing our broken maternity system and that they should be given the primary responsibility for women with low-risk pregnancies. (Obstetricians can be responsible for women with serious medical complications.) He envisions a system in which most maternity services are located in neighborhoods and not hospitals. If the United States had a national health care system, American obstetricians would no longer be able to maintain their monopoly on the birth industry. He also calls for doctors and hospitals to be more transparent, providing information about not only their C-section rates, but also rates of maternal and infant mortality, uterine rupture, and adverse drug reactions.

Of course, there are thousands of obstetricians who provide expectant and laboring mothers with compassionate, ethical, and medically first-rate care. And there are plenty of midwives who in their fervent belief in the rightness of their approach display the kind of arrogance Wagner ascribes to his fellow doctors. To make its way into the mainstream, midwifery needs to move beyond its earth mother image and take a more tolerant view of American women's fear of excruciating physical pain. In her book Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (Doubleday, 2001), Naomi Wolf articulates this challenge. Describing the difference between the alternative birth center and the maternity ward at her Washington, D.C.-area hospital, she writes that "the contrast between the two delivery floors seemed to sum up a failure to give women decent choices in childbirth. I did not understand why the polarity was so stark: the beautiful floor with its rigid set of options regarding pain, or the slaughterhouse atmosphere of the regular birthing rooms where I could receive medication for the body if I needed it, but nothing for the soul. My heart longed for the alternative birth center, its beauty, the openness. But could I stand the pain? And would my labor go so smoothly that no complications would arise to get me sent to the warrens down below?"

As anyone who has read Misconceptions knows, Wolf was indeed shuttled out of the birth center when her labor failed to progress according to her nurse's time line. After Pitocin and an epidural, Wolf was rushed into an operating room for an emergency C-section. It's a scenario, she later found out, that is all too common among American women giving birth. To paraphrase Wolf's critique of the popular pregnancy manual that in her view encourages women to passively accept overly medicalized births, she did not get what she expected when she was expecting.

Elizabeth Larsen is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis. She has given birth twice in a hospital assisted by midwives and is grateful that they didn't shame her when she demanded pain relief.



We Didn't Really Say "No" to Missile Defence

Canadian complicity and participation in BMD continues
By Richard Sanders
From CCPA Monitor
2006

Contrary to a widely popular feel-good myth, Canada did not reject participation in the U.S.-led "Ballistic Missile Defence" (BMD) weapons program. Unfortunately, BMD is still very much alive and well and thriving in Canada. In fact, Canada has been complicit in BMD for many years. Our contributions to BMD have even surpassed the efforts of many other nations that have, at least, been honest enough to admit their involvement.

So, although Canada has not "officially" joined this "Coalition of the Willing," it has long been deeply engaged in creating, designing, researching, developing, testing, maintaining, and operating numerous crucial BMD systems. Billions of Canadian tax dollars have been spent aiding and abetting domestic war industries, government scientists, and military personnel that are thoroughly embedded in U.S., NORAD, and NATO-led BMD efforts.

Since February 2005, when the corporate media parroted our government's nice-sounding but completely meaningless proclamation against BMD, this myth has been repeated ad nauseum by a compliant media, and, sadly, by some key peace movement activists. In fact, our government never actually did a thing to prevent Canada's further entrenchment in the biggest weapons-development program in world history. Neither have any steps been taken to slow down, let alone halt, these ongoing Canadian examples of complicity in BMD.

NORAD
Since August 5, 2004, when Canada initiated an amendment to the NORAD treaty, we have supported this pact's BMD mission with money and armed forces personnel. However, the NORAD link to BMD is probably the least offensive of Canada's many contributions to this weapons program. In fact, NORAD's BMD efforts help to trick the public into supporting BMD by deceiving them with the myth that these weapons are for defending North America from attack by terrorists and rogue states.

NATO
Far more troubling is Canada's little-known contribution to NATO's BMD efforts. Just weeks after Canada’s spurious "no" to BMD in February 2005, the media all but ignored NATO's announcement that it was building its own Theatre BMD system. The bigger story, also still ignored by the mainstream media, is that Canada was among the handful of nations leading NATO's decade-long BMD efforts through projects called CAESAR and MAJIIC. These efforts to increase “interoperability” among NATO's leading military nations have repeatedly used simulated data from Canada's RADARSAT-2 satellite during major BMD war-games, in preparation for future war-time use of BMD technologies.

Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT)
Two days after Canada "just said no" to BMD, then-Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew told CBC Radio that Canada supported America’s “missile defence” choice. Furthermore, he said he would “be very pleased” for Canadian companies getting BMD contracts. For many decades, DFAIT has proudly helped Canadian corporations obtain billions in lucrative U.S. war contracts.

Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
The CSA funds Canadian industries involved in militarizing space, including BMD efforts. Its crowning achievement was sponsoring the $600-million RADARSAT-2 for launch this December. Unique technology aboard this space-based radar was developed by Canadian scientists in collaboration with America's Ballistic Missile Defence Organization (BMDO). Top U.S. war-fighters consider it the "Holy Grail" for future Theatre BMD applications and eagerly await using its targeting functions in pre-emptive, first-strike attacks against alleged “enemy” missile sites.

Industry Canada (IC)
This department has handed $5 billion to Canadian war industries, including some involved in BMD. At a 2004 war industry conference/arms bazaar in Alberta, IC's “senior investment officer [for] defence industries" ranked BMD as first among five “strategic business opportunities," and gave industry delegates the name and e-mail of IC's “BMD officer.” While Industry Minister David Emerson (now International Trade Minister) spoke glowingly of BMD's corporate benefits in 2000, he was a director of MacDonald Dettwiler & Assoc. (MDA), then owned by major BMD rocket-maker America's Orbital Sciences. When Canada's billion-dollar RADARSAT program was privatized to MDA, its data was sold to Pentagon and CIA buyers by another Orbital subsidiary run by retired U.S. military men who had spent decades promoting BMD weapons.

Department of National Defence (DND)
A jointly-funded DND-Dutch program has created an infrared weapons sensor called SIRIUS that firmly wedges Canada’s foot in the BMD door. DND wants SIRIUS aboard Canadian warships to ensure deeper integration into the U.S. Navy's AEGIS system, the backbone of America's sea-based BMD weapons.

Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC)
For decades, our government has spent billions funding military scientists developing technologies to fulfill our allies' military needs. At DRDC's six world-class laboratories, our war scientists work closely with their U.S. counterparts on important BMD projects like infrared sensors, high-frequency radar, and RADARSAT-2 data exploitation.

National Research Council
Scientists at this Crown corporation collaborate with U.S. BMD agencies on cutting-edge, space-based Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors that enable BMD weapons to distinguish between missiles and decoys.

Canada Pension Plan (CPP)
The CPP still forces Canadians to invest billions in many of the world’s top weapons producers, including “The Big Four” BMD contractors: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.

Corporations
Most, if not all, of the following Canadian war industries involved in the BMD weapons program have enjoyed extensive financial support from our government:

ATCO Frontec Corp.: Arctec Services (a jointly-owned creature of Calgary’s ATCO Frontec and Alaska's Arctic Slope World Services) does all the "operations and maintenance" support services for the world’s most important BMD radar stations. This U.S. network, called the Solid State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS), is used to track, assess, and target ballistic missiles. There are five SSPARS facilities in three countries: the U.S. (California, Massachusetts, Alaska), U.K. (Fylingdales) and Greenland (Thule). Since 1999, the company has received $41 million annually “to manage, operate, maintain, and logistically support” these SSPARS sites.

AUG Signals Ltd.: Toronto-based AUG Signals produces signal image and data-processing equipment for target recognition. A 2002 issue of Micronet News said AUG’s equipment is used for “early missile warning, detection recognition, and tracking, [and] anti-ballistic missile defense.” AUG has received funding from four Canadian government agencies: the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council, Defence Research and Development Canada,

the Department of National Defence, and the Canadian Space Agency. Its president, George Lampropoulos, was described by Ottawa Life Magazine as being "well known in certain circles for having developed high-precision multi-sensor systems for military [and] homeland security. . . applicable to maritime surveillance [and] battlefields” (March 2005).

Bristol Aerospace Ltd.: Bristol Aerospace of Winnipeg, a part of Magellan Aerospace Corp., produces target rockets, including Excalibur and Black Brant, for testing two major U.S. BMD-weapons systems and training the army units that fire them. Since 1999, Excalibur, a two-stage rocket, has been used in U.S. "live-fire" BMD war-games to test advanced Patriot missile systems that detect, track, and classify ballistic missiles. In 1999, Excaliburs were used at NORAD’s “Roving Sands Air Defence Firing Exercise” in New Mexico in “the first-ever Theatre Ballistic Missile target engagement.” They have been used in annual BMD exercises ever since. In 2002, Bristol designed a new Excalibur motor and announced a renewed five-year contract for U.S. Army tests.

Bristol was first contracted to create the Black Brant rocket in 1957 by a government agency called the Canadian Armaments Research and Development Establishment. The Black Brant has since been used by the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force. Since 1998, the U.S. has used Black Brants to collect data on tracking and targeting BMD weapons called Theatre High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD). Black Brants have been regularly used in tests funded by the BMDO at New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range. They were also used at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia (2002-2003) to test air-, land-, space-, and sea-based sensors for future BMD weapons being developed by the U.S. Missile Defence Agency (MDA).

CAE Ltd.: Since 2002, CAE of Montreal has had a BMD contract with Boeing to make computer-simulation products called STRIVE, ITEMS, and RAVE. Boeing, the “lead systems integrator” for the entire U.S. “missile defence” weapons program, is using CAE's products to design, create, assess, test, evaluate, and develop BMD weapons. This "simulation based design" or "computational prototyping" has put Canada at the leading edge of a global revolution in industrial design which, in this case, is fuelling the very creation of BMD weapons.

Probably best known as the world’s top war-technology simulation company, CAE makes synthetic environments for training war-fighters to use virtually every major weapons system in the U.S. arsenal. For this, CAE has been heavily subsidized by Canadian taxpayers, including at least $200 million from Industry Canada.

One top CAE executive, Donald Campbell, joined the company after 36 years in Canada’s DFAIT, where he was Liberal Deputy Foreign Minister, a Deputy Minister for International Trade, Jean Chrétien’s representative at G-8 Summits, and ambassador to Korea and Japan.

Another former CAE executive, and major cheerleader for the BMD-weapons program, is Derek Burney, a former Canadian ambassador to the U.S. who was Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s chief of staff.

CMC Electronics Cincinnati (CMC EC): Located in Mason, Ohio, this company makes “infrared detectors, imaging sensors, missile warning systems, space-launch vehicle products, and spacecraft electronics” (C4ISR Journal, June 21, 2004). Since at least 1998, it has been a supplier of electronic components for rockets used to test BMD-weapons. Between 1988 and 2004, CMC EC was owned by CMC Electronics of Montreal (formerly the Canadian Marconi Company). During that time, CMC EC and its parent company were controlled by Onex Corporation, Canada’s fourth biggest company.

Gerry Schwartz, the billionaire chairman, president, and CEO of Onex (which still controls CMC Electronics) was Paul Martin’s top fund-raiser, bringing in $11-million for his leadership campaign, including $4 million during one dinner in 2003 that CTV called “the largest political fund-raiser in Canadian history” (Dec. 10, 2003).

Cognos Inc.: Ottawa’s Cognos has, since 2001, provided "business intelligence solutions" for Boeing, which oversees the whole corporate BMD program. Cognos software handles “all aspects” of Boeing’s “financial and manufacturing operations,” including “cost management,” “financial planning,” “staffing,” and “factory management” (Cognos media release, Oct. 22, 2001).

Some may say that Cognos isn't strictly a war industry, and--technically--that's true. But Cognos does ensure that Boeing can smoothly manage such a colossally-complex industrial enterprise as the BMD weapons program. During World War II, International Business Machines wasn’t really a war industry, either, but it helped the Nazi war machine all the same. IBM supplied the "business intelligence solutions" that allowed Germany to identify millions of victims to be targeted, transported, and exterminated. Without IBM, the Nazis’ "final solution" would not have been possible. Similarly, Boeing could not possibly oversee the entire “missile defence” weapons-development program without the latest "business intelligence" from Cognos.

COM DEV Ltd.: In its 2004 annual report, fully loaded with images of smiling parents and babies, and ethnically-diverse classrooms with happy children, COM DEV proudly listed “missile defence” as one of the uses of its products. No, this Cambridge, Ontario, high-tech firm doesn't really make anything related to kids. COM DEV is actually a major producer of satellite-communications equipment. For example, it makes key components for the Advanced Extremely High Frequency Military Satellite Communications program, to which the former Liberal government allocated some $554 million. This program is essential to nuclear-war fighting and the use of “missile defence” weapons.

COM DEV was the only Canadian company acknowledged in U.S. Space Command’s mission statement of 1997, Vision for 2020, which infamously outlined American ambitions to create space weapons -- not for defensive purposes, but explicitly for fighting future resource-based wars on Earth.

DRS Technologies Canada Inc.: DRS of Carleton Place, near Ottawa, produces a “Naval Infrared Missile Defence System” called SIRIUS. This infrared sensor can detect Theatre Ballistic Missiles (TBMs) at launch hundreds of kilometres away, or as they re-enter the atmosphere at an altitude of 70 km. These qualities make SIRIUS extremely useful for targeting “missile defence” weapons. Since 1995, DRS (then Spar Aerospace Ltd.) has played a central role in creating and developing SIRIUS sensors for the Canadian and Dutch governments, for use aboard these governments’ warships. The Canadian government estimates that, by 2009, it will have spent $270 million to develop SIRIUS.

Mark Newman, the company’s CEO, has noted that DRS is “a key supplier of systems for missile defence that are critical for Canadian and allied international fleet operations” (Business Wire, May 2, 2000). DND will purchase SIRIUS sensors for our warships so the Canadian Navy, if requested, will be able to participate in U.S.-led “missile defence” operations.

Scientists at three DRDC facilities have earned their government pay-cheques by working on SIRIUS technology.

EMS Technologies Canada: The Space and Technologies branch of this company, based in St. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, makes electronic subsystems for the world's biggest BMD weapons contractors. The company was recognized for this crucial work by the influential business magazine Forbes (August 2001). Forbes highlighted three firms that it said would benefit most handsomely from President George W. Bush’s ardent support for the “missile defence” weapons program:

1) DRS Technologies (whose Canadian subsidiary builds SIRIUS), 2) L-3 Communications (which has since bought CMC Electronics), and 3) EMS Technologies. Forbes noted that the Quebec branch of EMS Technologies makes “hardware for space and satellite communications, radar, surveillance, and military countermeasures.”

The EMS website lists only four clients for its “Space & Technology” products. These clients are none other than the “Big Four” prime contractors for “missile-defence” weapons: “Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman rely on EMS to provide critical components for radar, secure communications, and electronic warfare systems.”

In 1998, EMS (then Spar's Satellite Products division) won a $90 million contract from MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) for the Synthetic Aperture Radar antenna and radar electronics package for RADARSAT-2, a Canadian satellite with "missile defence" applications.

ITS Electronics Inc.: Since at least 1998, ITS Electronics of Concord, Ontario, has built “low-phase noise amplifier products” for at least two major “missile defence” weapons: The ExoAtmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) and Theatre High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD). And, since 1999, when DRDC gave ITS about $200,000, the company's role in the development of these BMD-related products has been directly--and proudly--supported by the Canadian government. The DRDC Annual Report for 1999-2000 notes that this DND R&D agency's projects “have resulted in” the ITS targeting products being used in both EKV and THAAD. These are the most high-profile, land-based “missile defence” weapons systems.

Nine of ITS's top 13 corporate clients are BMD-weapons contractors.

Over $1 million in government financing has flowed to ITS through at least three Canadian government agencies: DRDC, Industry Canada’s Technology Partnerships Canada, and NRC.

Lockheed Martin Canada (LMC): LMC is a subsidiary of the world’s biggest war industry, and the second biggest “missile defence” contractor. Its facilities in Ottawa and Montreal produce VISTA, an interactive weapons training and simulation system. Since 1998, LMC has been the sole-source supplier of VISTA to the U.S. It is used to train personnel on Lockheed Martin’s AEGIS Weapons System, which forms the backbone of the U.S. Navy’s entire “missile defence” weapons program.

VISTA was originally paid for with $90 million from Canadian taxpayers, for use aboard Canadian warships. It is now also used by Japan, Norway, South Korea, and Spain, whose navies are preparing for integration into U.S. “missile defence” operations. Like Canada, they have acquired BMD-compatible technologies and are taking part in BMD wargames. Although for many years Canada has also been doing all this, and much more, at least these other governments have admitted their part in the BMD “Coalition of the Willing.” Canada's government, however, is still in the closet and belongs instead to the “Coalition of the Unwilling-to-Admit-Involvement in BMD.”

MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates (MDA): MDA is the Vancouver-based company that took control of RADARSAT when the Liberal government privatized this satellite program. RADARSAT is probably Canada’s largest single contribution to the militarization of space and to U.S. war-fighting. It started under the Conservatives in the 1980s as a U.S.-Canadian government effort. Since then, Canadian taxpayers have paid almost 90% of $1.15 billion bill for these two satellites.

One of RADARSAT-2's future roles, once it is launched in December of this year, will be to target alleged ballistic missile sites for first-strike attacks by U.S. weapons. Such pre-emptive "counterforce" operations of Theatre Missile Defence will feature largely in future wars.

Meggitt Defence Systems Canada: For the past eight years, this Medicine Hat, Alberta company (formerly called Schreiner Target Services Canada) has been exporting its Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles to the U.S. military. These drones, called “The Vindicator II,” are used as targets in U.S. war-games staged to test the accuracy of the U.S. Navy's AEGIS BMD-Weapons Systems and their radar-tracking systems. Since 1999, Meggitt Canada’s targets have been used in at least 17 of these BMD weapons tests, which it calls “tracking and missile firing events.” These BMD "events" were conducted at U.S. weapons-testing ranges in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, California, and Virginia.

NovAtel Inc.: Between 2001 and 2003, NovAtel had three Advanced-Technology-Development contracts to export “Missile and Space Systems” to the U.S. government for the “Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation” of BMD-weapons systems. Novatel produces Global Positioning Systems (GPS). In its 2003 annual report, NovAtel revealed that its GPS technology was being used “in many military applications such as training, logistics, and missile tracking.”

Not surprisingly, much controversy has surrounded the U.S. MDA's use of targets containing GPS beacons. This is simply because, as a Pentagon official reluctantly admitted to Defense Week in 2001, “real warheads in an attack would not carry such helpful beacons.” Although in 1996, California-based physicist Nira Schwartz blew the whistle on U.S. war-industry giant TRW for faking “missile defence” tests, and was promptly fired, BMD testing still involves GPS beacons.

Since 1998, NovAtel has been owned by CMC Electronics. In 2001, controlling interest in CMC and NovAtel was taken over by ONEX Corp. This is the company run by Gerry Schwartz, a top Liberal party fund-raiser and advisor to Paul Martin.

In 2002, Industry Canada (IC) invested $17 million in CMC to assist its GPS program. Over the past three decades, IC programs have awarded over $100 million to CMC and its predecessor, Canadian Marconi, the parent company of Novatel.

QWIPTECH: Although QWIPTECH is a California-based company, it is wholly owned by Canada's QWIP Systems in Edmonton, Alberta. QWIPTECH makes Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors (QWIPs). QWIPs are extremely useful for targeting BMD weapons because they can detect missiles in space. Most importantly, space-based QWIP sensors can distinguish between real missiles and the decoys used to foil BMD weapons-targeting systems.

Dwight Duston became QWIPTECH’s chief scientist in 2000. He had worked for U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative Organization and its successor, the BMDO. NRC’s Dr. H.C. Liu also joined QWIPTECH in 2000, when he was appointed to its “Scientific Advisory Board.” Liu and other Canadian scientists at NRC and DRDC began working on QWIPs with their colleagues in the U.S. BMDO during the late 1990s. Since 2001, QWIPTECH has had “an exclusive worldwide license” for BMDO-funded QWIP detectors developed by NASA.

Telemus Inc.: Among the electronic-warfare instruments produced by Ottawa’s Telemus is something called the “Coho simulator.” This product is used in the design and testing of BMD-warhead targeting systems. Telemus has bragged on its website that this “Radar Target and Electronic Countermeasures simulation” equipment has been used in “applications in the development of seekers for ballistic missile defence.” "Seekers" are the homing or targeting systems used in the warheads of smart missiles. The Coho simulator is used by weapons designers who are developing targeting devices for the nose-cones of “missile defence” weapons. This Telemus equipment mimics the kind of radar signals emitted by the ballistic missiles that are to be targeted.

Telemus owes its very existence to the Canadian government's military agency DRDC, which funded its initial contracts in the mid-1980s. DRDC was then generous enough to hand over to Telemus the rights to various profitable patents and licensing agreements for publicly-funded war technology. Telemus is now owned by Northrop Grumman, the world’s fourth-largest BMD contractor.

Obviously, Canada is very involved in the BMD weapons program. The Canadian government's sham “no” to BMD was a duplicitous, hypocritical PR ruse cleverly designed, like a sleight-of-hand trick, to hide its BMD collaboration, defuse protests, quell internal Liberal Party dissent, and temporarily boost a faltering minority government.

Eager to claim victory, the NDP and some naive peace activists immediately welcomed the government's "no" without bothering to verify whether it had any substance. Since then, they have continued to spread the false but feel-good report that Canada rejected BMD. This trusting naiveté undermined and all but eliminated opposition to BMD in Canada.

To resuscitate Canada's anti-BMD movement, we must face the government's lie and stop living in myth-shrouded denial.

Until the mythology of Canada’s supposed rejection of BMD is thoroughly exposed and debunked, Canadians will have absolutely no chance of slowing down, let alone halting, Canada’s deep complicity in the offensive, war-fighting, BMD weapons program.

(Richard Sanders is the coordinator of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade [COAT] and editor of its magazine Press for Conversion! This article summarizes some of his original research on Canada’s complicity in “missile defence,” which has been published in the last three issues of the COAT magazine. For subscriptions, please phone 613-231-3076, e-mail overcoat@rogers.com, or write to COAT, 541 McLeod Street, Ottawa, ON K1R 5R2. Check the COAT website, and the online slideshow about Canada's role in BMD, at http://coat.ncf.ca.)