Jim Hightower

Have you been chipped?

In another cabal of corporate and governmental officials, there’s been a steady push during the past few years to authorize and market microchip devices to be implanted into humans. An outfit named VeriChip Corporation is the chief pusher, asserting that implanting one of its radio frequency ID chips into your upper arm can be a medical boon to you. These electronic capsules transmit a unique code, says VeriChip, and if something happens to you, hospital staff can run a scanner over your chip, get your code, and activate a database containing your medical history.

VeriChip envisions a market of at least 45 million Americans sporting their very own RFID codes. But – oops – one bit of info the corporation never mentioned to customers or federal regulators is that several studies have found that these implants have induced malignant tumors in lab mice and rats. As one eminent cancer expert said after reviewing these studies, “There’s no way in the world that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members.”

Where were our so-called regulatory watchdogs? Too busy cheering on the chippers to ask tough questions about side effects. Tommy Thompson, the Bush appointee who oversaw the agency that approved VeriChip for use in humans, has been a vigorous promoter of such electronic medical technologies. Five months after Thompson resigned his cabinet position in 2005, guess where he went? Right – onto the board of directors of both VeriChip and it’s parent corporation, where he was paid $40,000 a year and given about a million dollars-worth of stock.

Interestingly, while Thompson once told an interviewer that he would “absolutely” be willing to have a VeriChip implanted in his own arm, he never did. Maybe he felt that an injection of VeriChip cash would be better for his health.