Drug testing
Cycle of abuse on U.S. prisoners
By
LeiLani Dowell
Published Aug 22, 2006 9:44 PM
The federal Institute of Medicine recently
released a report recommending that regulations limiting federal biomedical
research on prisoners be relaxed so that inmates can participate in higher-risk
studies.
Current regulations allow prisoners to participate in federally
financed biomedical research only if the experiment poses “minimal”
risks to the subjects.
To support the recommendation to relax this rule,
the report also suggested that greater precautions be taken. The report brief
states: “Prisoners face restrictions on liberty and autonomy, limited
privacy, and potentially inadequate health care services. These factors can be
barriers to the prerequisites of ethical research, namely the acquisition of
voluntary informed consent, protection of privacy, and access to adequate health
care such that a choice between research participation and nonparticipation is
not simply a desperate action to obtain treatment.
“All of these
factors point to a population that is more vulnerable and requires stronger
protections than those inspired by the national commission in the 1970s.”
Recommended protections include enhancing the systematic oversight of
research involving prisoners, and universal regulations and oversight of all
testing, regardless of funding. Currently, all private and state testing on
prisoners is unregulated. (www.iom.edu)
Yet many find it hard to believe
that even with new protections, prisoners’ best interests and desires will
be considered if more risky testing is allowed. For example, des pite the
IOM’s stated concerns about prisoner well-being, it failed to recommend
full medical coverage and services for all prisoners.
Instead it suggests
relaxing the minimal risk provision if the “potential benefits ...
outweigh the risks.”
A New York Times report pointed out that the
current incarcerated population suffers disproportionately from HIV and
hepatitis C, which some researchers say “could be better controlled if new
research were permitted in prisons.”
Paul Wright of Prison Legal
News told the Times, “It strikes me as pretty ridiculous to start talking
about prisoners getting access to cutting-edge research and medications when
they can’t even get penicillin and high-blood-pressure
pills.”
Daniel S. Murphy, professor of criminal justice at
Appalachian State University, said, “Free and informed consent becomes
pretty questionable when prisoners don’t hold the keys to their own cells,
and in many cases they can’t read, yet they are signing a document that it
practically takes a law degree to understand.”
Murphy said the
recommended precautions were “also the parts of the report that faced the
strongest resistance from federal officials, and I fear they’re most
likely the parts that will end up getting cut as these recommendations become
new regulations.” (New York Times, Aug. 13)
Poor & oppressed
as guinea pigs
The use of poor people, particularly people of color,
as guinea pigs for pharmaceutical tests is nothing new.
For 40 years, the
U.S. government conducted an experiment called the “Tuske gee Study of
Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” ending in 1972. More than 400
mostly illiterate Black sharecroppers with syphilis were experimented on without
any treatment for the disease, even after a cure was discovered. Most had never
seen a doctor before, and all were lied to and told that they were receiving
treatment from the researchers.
At the end of the experiment, 28 of
the men had died from the disease, 100 had died of related complications, 40
of their spouses had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with
congenital syphilis. The experiment was conducted under the auspices of the U.S.
Public Health Service, with the U.S. Surgeon General assisting the lie by
sending the men certificates of appreciation. (www.infoplease.com)
Current
regulations on prisoner testing were created only after widespread abuse was
found in several prisons across the country. By 1972, the Food and Drug
Administration estimated that more than 90 percent of new drugs were tested on
prisoners first. (www.eh.doe.gov) Inmates were sometimes offered fees that were
coercive given their inability to earn any real income otherwise.
In 1974
allegations of abuse were exposed to the public—such as testing at the
Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia, where studies were conducted on inmates with
Agent Orange, psychotropic drugs, chemical warfare trials, and radioactive
isotopes from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. (New York Times)
A report
by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments of the Depart ment of
Energy points out: “The use of prisoners as research subjects seems to
have been a uniquely American practice in the years following World War II. ...
In other countries it seems that the first clause of the Nuremberg Code was
interpreted to preclude the use of prisoners in experimentation. This clause
begins with the assertion that the only acceptable experimental subjects are
those who are ‘so situated as to be able to exercise free power of
choice.’”
More recently, the pharmaceutical industry has taken
to exporting its tests to the poor and oppressed outside the United States. In
an Aug.30, 2005, article, The Nation magazine reported that U.S. drug producer
Merck was at the time conducting 50 percent of its trials outside the United
States, and Wyeth Pharmaceu ti cals was expected to have 70 percent of its
trials overseas by 2006.
The Nation reported that “ethical lapses
are strikingly common.” One example was the case of subjects of an HIV
vaccine test in Thailand who apparently were misinformed that the test would
protect them from the virus. The Nation reported that “placebo trials
among ailing AIDS patients,” similar to the Tuskegee tests, “are
frequently described in the medical press; when the subjects are poor Africans
or Asians, nary an eye is batted.”
The use of prisoners as human
guinea pigs is consistent with the overall treatment of working and poor people
in the prison-industrial complex. Rather than subjects of rehabilitation,
prisoners are considered dispensable, good only for work at slavery wages and
subject to torture, brutality and racism at the hands of the prison
guards.
Almost 7 million people are in U.S. prisons, jails, or on
probation or parole. The United States has the highest prison population rate in
the world, according to the International Center for Prison Studies at
King’s College London. (www.kcl.ac.uk)
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