A medical expert is convinced that she has found a new aspect to the controversy around the treatment of the Norwegian divers that helped create Norway’s petroleum wealth beginning in the mid 1960s.

Medical director Kari Todnem at St. Olav’s Hospital believes North Sea divers were secretly and systematically drugged in pressure chambers during ascent in order to calm them and to spare diving gas, NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) reports.

Todnem has helped demonstrate nerve and lung damage among the pioneer divers, who are still trying to mount a lawsuit against the state for greater compensation. The divers argue that the state was aware of the dangers posed by their diving but so far the state has refused to accept legal responsibility, though some payments were approved by parliament in 2004.

Todnem has found the repetition of drugs such as Medrol and Valium in records, and this widespread sedation is a new discovery. Todnem has confirmed the drug use via interviews with surviving divers.

“I am completely shocked. The divers were just ordinary working people doing a job in an extreme situation. Medicating them like this is simply horrible,” Todnem told NRK.

“The only reason I can think of for this being done is a form of trickery, a way to decompress the divers without them getting symptoms of decompression sickness. This is criminal,” Todnem told NRK.

The letters the divers have acquired as evidence were marked top secret for an 80-year period in the future by Norwegian authorities, and reveal knowledge of the dangers involved with the type of repeated diving the men were doing.

In three months the state’s responsibility towards the divers will be tried in Oslo’s Court of Appeals. Progress Party leader Siv Jensen believes the new evidence indicates that parliament has been misled.

“I think this is extremely disturbing. It leans towards corruption. And now I think that Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg must show action and promise the government will investigate, because here there are ministers and former ministers that have something to answer for,” Jensen told news agency NTB.

Minister of Labor and Social Inclusion Bjarne Håkon Hanssen said that the new information should be aired in court, and that it would be good to get a legal rather than political interpretation.

Former Progress Party leader and current parliamentary vice-president Carl I. Hagen vowed to have the case reopened and reinvestigated, and also assumed that parliament had been misled in the matter.

Source: Aftenposten.no