Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials

[TC]

Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials
NYTIMES
PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 7 — An influential federal panel of medical advisers has recommended that the government loosen regulations that severely limit the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates, a practice that was all but stopped three decades ago after revelations of abuse.

The proposed change includes provisions intended to prevent problems that plagued earlier programs. Nevertheless, it has dredged up a painful history of medical mistreatment and incited debate among prison rights advocates and researchers about whether prisoners can truly make uncoerced decisions, given the environment they live in.

...



Until the early 1970’s, about 90 percent of all pharmaceutical products were tested on prison inmates, federal officials say. But such research diminished sharply in 1974 after revelations of abuse at prisons like Holmesburg here, where inmates were paid hundreds of dollars a month to test items as varied as dandruff treatments and dioxin, and where they were exposed to radioactive, hallucinogenic and carcinogenic chemicals.

In addition to addressing the abuses at Holmesburg, the regulations were a reaction to revelations in 1972 surrounding what the government called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, which was begun in the 1930’s and lasted 40 years. In it, several hundred mostly illiterate men with syphilis in rural Alabama were left untreated, even after a cure was discovered, so that researchers could study the disease.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/us/13inm...serland&emc=rss

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This is being "recomended" by the pharmaceutical companies, the people who would stand to make a profit from it. There is no such thing as 'consent' in prison, because the entire population is being held against their will to begin with, none of them consented to the situation of their confinement so any consent within that environment is the product of coercion as their mere presense and availability is the result of coercion. To take advantage of a population so vulnerable that they can neither represent themselves and their interests in public, have normal legal recourses if abuse occurs, or have normal oversight of people in public view, is truely totalitarian. And in America its also fundementally racist and shows an utter disregard for the humanity and individual worth of the prison population, which is severely disproportionately black and hispanics.

[Body Count]

What exactly are the inmates supposed to get out of this?

But researchers at the Institute of Medicine said their sole focus was to see if prisoners could benefit by changing the regulations.

....sure

[somebodywhowantedtoleaveandnotcomeback]

Good to hear pharmaceutical companies are so concerned with the wellbeing of prison inmates

[Raisa]

Thats very holocaust like. Testing their drugs on prison Inmates.

They should test their drugs on their own shit children.

Desgusting capitalist devils.

[liberationjunky]

Originally posted by Raisa@Aug 16 2006, 03:19 AM
Desgusting capitalist devils.

[QUOTE]

You said it best. Drug companies dont care about peoples health, just their own greed and wealth.

[Rhyknow]

Correction my friend... No company cares about people's health... it's a typical example, to me, of how capitalism puts money infront of people's wellbeing. Which is a pity since we won't do any good continuing down this path.