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the US government sprayed some 20 million gallons of herbicides and defoliants over vast areas of South Vietnam (and to a lesser extent in Laos, Cambodia, and even, marginally, North Vietnam), in “Operation Trail Dust.” Some 95% of the herbicides were sprayed by the US Air Force flying C-123s as part of “Operation Ranch Hand.” Fitted with specially developed spray tanks with a capacity of 1000 gallons of herbicide, the planes typically sprayed a 14 kilometer (8.5 mile) swath of land in about 4 ½ minutes. The remaining 5% were sprayed by backpacks, hand, helicopters and trucks around US military installations by the US Army Chemical Corps and allied forces. The herbicides sprayed were up to 50 times the concentration that would have been used for normal agricultural use.
In a three year study, 70 volunteer prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia were subjected to tests of dioxin, the highly toxic chemical contaminant in Agent Orange. Lesions which the men developed were not treated and remained for up to seven months. None of the subjects was informed that they would later be studied for the development of cancer. This was the second such experiment which Dow Chemical undertook on "volunteers" who did not receive the information which the world proclaimed was necessary for "informed consent" at Nuremberg. [Note: Dow/Corning manufactured and sold artificial breast implants even after the health risks of the implants became known. [The massive class action lawsuit was only recently settled].