Westport restaurant stirs trouble with cocktail named for Tuskegee Experiment

The Westport restaurant 323 Main served itself a heaping glass of controversy by inventing a cocktail named after a notorious racially motivated medical experiment.

According to the dining website Eater, 322 added a drink to its cocktail list called “The Tuskegee Experiment” that featured Myers dark rum, Malibu, pineapple juice, fresh lime, pineapple and jalapeño mash, and a dash of tabasco. The inspiration for the drink was the infamous research experiment run by the U.S. Public Health Service and formally called “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” which tracked syphilis among rural African-American men between 1932 and 1972. The men, who were falsely informed they were the recipients of free health care, were never given access to penicillin to treat the syphilis. The experiment resulted in the syphilis-related deaths of 100 men, while 40 of the wives of the men became infected and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.

323 Main pulled The Tuskegee Experiment drink after a restaurant patron posted a photo of the menu on Facebook last week. Among the other fancifully named cocktails that 323 Main was serving were the Sucker Punch, the Capetown Transfusion, The Cold War Margarita and the Queen Bee.