Having access to human testing subjects is of the utmost importance to the pharmaceutical industry. In order to ensure that new drugs to treat physical and mental problems are safe to use, extensive experiments must be completed; it is not enough to test these medicines in a laboratory setting, or on non-human species, because the FDA will not approve drugs unless proven safe for human consumption.
Most pharmaceutical users would agree that this is a good set of rules; drug companies should not be allowed to market dangerous products. But where do these human testing subjects come from?
Patients with a variety of diseases, such as cancer and AIDS, will often volunteer to take an experimental drug specifically tailored to treat their condition. For these test subjects, the risk of ingesting a new medicine is outweighed by the potential benefit of the drug. Typically, these patients-turned-test-subjects receive the drug, and all follow up medical care, either for free or for a drastically reduced price; creating yet another incentive to undergo the experiment.
There is, however, another kind of test subject which, up until 30 years ago, was commonly used in drug trials: Prisoners. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, after World War II American medical research companies engaged in prison drug research on a large scale; testing products such as cosmetics, syphilis treatments and even hallucinogens.
As might be expected, numerous abuses occurred in the prison testing environment. At the Holmesburg prison in New York, inmates were exposed to carcinogens and radioactive material; in one study of a largely African-American prison population suffering from syphilis, the prisoners were left untreated so that researchers could observe the disease. The DOE notes that in 1972 almost 90 percent of new drugs were tested for safety on prisoners before being released for testing on the general public. Luckily, in 1978, regulations were passed severely limiting what kinds of tests could be administered to the prison population.
This month, the Institute of Medicine (a group that works under a federal program designed to advise the government on scientific issues) decreed that regulations on prison drug research, which currently state that inmates may only be exposed to substances with “minimal” risk, should be loosened. The IoM’s report states that because there is currently a lack of test subjects, and because a large proportion of the prison population tends to suffer from disease, it will benefit both pharmaceutical companies and sick prisoners if tests
are conducted.
The federal government ought to seriously question the value of the IoM report, because history has shown us that mixing drug tests and prisons can produce a dangerous combination. Prisoners are more likely to be coerced into potentially dangerous tests, whether through the promise of money, or even a reduced sentence. Overseeing inmate testing is more difficult, because of the quarantined nature of prisoners. The prison population also tends to be under-educated, and therefore less able to make safe, informed decisions concerning drug testing.
There is no need to change testing regulations that were created for an important reason, and have done much good in stopping the abuse of prisoners. To follow the Institute of Medicine’s recommendations would be to move backwards, and that is not the direction in which our nation ought to go.