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InvisibleDiploidM
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Prison Inmates To Be Used In Medical Experiments
    #5959527 - 08/13/06 03:11 PM (17 years, 5 months ago)

(08-13) 04:00 PDT Philadelphia -- 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 sparked debate among prisoner-rights advocates and researchers about whether prisoners can truly make uncoerced decisions, given the environment they live in.

Supporters of such programs cite the possibility of benefit to prison populations, and the potential for contributing to the greater good.

Until the early 1970s, 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 in Philadelphia, 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 1930s 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.

"What happened at Holmesburg was just as gruesome as Tuskegee, but at Holmesburg it happened smack-dab in the middle of a major city, not in some backwoods in Alabama," said Allen Hornblum, a Temple University urban studies professor and the author of "Acres of Skin," a 1998 book detailing the Holmesburg research. "It just goes to show how prisons are truly distinct institutions where the walls don't just serve to keep inmates in, they also serve to keep public eyes out."

Critics also doubt the merits of pharmaceutical testing on prisoners who often lack basic health care.

Alvin Bronstein, a Washington lawyer who helped found the National Prison Project, an American Civil Liberties Union program, said he did not believe that altering the regulations risked a return to the days of Holmesburg.

"With the help of external review boards that would include a prisoner advocate," Bronstein said, "I do believe that the potential benefits of biomedical research outweigh the potential risks."

Holmesburg closed in 1995 but was partly reopened in July to help ease overcrowding at other prisons.

Under current regulations, passed in 1978, prisoners can participate in federally financed biomedical research if the experiment poses no more than "minimal" risks to the subjects. But a report formally presented to federal officials on Aug. 1 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences advised that experiments with greater risks be permitted if they had the potential to benefit prisoners. As an added precaution, the report suggested that all studies be subject to an independent review.

"The current regulations are entirely outdated and restrictive, and prisoners are being arbitrarily excluded from research that can help them," said Ernest Prentice, a University of Nebraska genetics professor and the chairman of a Health and Human Services Department committee that requested the study. Prentice said the regulation revision process would begin at the committee's next meeting, on Nov. 2.

The discussion comes as the biomedical industry is facing a shortage of testing subjects. In the past two years, several pain medications, including Vioxx and Bextra, have been pulled off the market because early testing did not include large enough numbers of patients to catch dangerous problems.

And the committee's report comes against the backdrop of a prison population that has more than quadrupled, to about 2.3 million, over the past 30 years and that disproportionately suffers from HIV and hepatitis C, diseases that some researchers say could be better controlled if new research were permitted in prisons.

For Leodus Jones, a former prisoner, the report has opened old wounds. "This moves us back in a very bad direction," said Jones, who participated in the experiments at Holmesburg in 1966 and after his release played a pivotal role in lobbying to get the regulations passed.

In one experiment, Jones' skin changed color, and he developed rashes on his back and legs, where he said lotions had been tested.

"The doctors told me at the time that something was seriously wrong," said Jones, who said he had never signed a consent form. He reached a $40,000 settlement in 1986 with the city of Philadelphia after he sued over the experiments.

"I never had these rashes before," he said, "but I've had them ever since."

The Institute of Medicine report was initiated in 2004, when the Health and Human Services Department asked the institute to look into the issue. The report said prisoners should be allowed to take part in federally financed clinical trials so long as the trials were in the later and less-dangerous phase of Food and Drug Administration approval. It also recommended that at least half the subjects in such trials be nonprisoners, making it more difficult to test products that might scare off volunteers.

Dr. Bernard Ackerman, a New York dermatologist who worked at Holmesburg during the 1960s trials as a second-year resident from the University of Pennsylvania, said he remained skeptical.

"I saw it firsthand," Ackerman said. "What started as scientific research became pure business, and no amount of regulations can prevent that from happening again."

Others cite similar concerns over the financial stake in such research.

"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," said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, an independent monthly review. "I have to imagine there are larger financial motivations here."

The demand for human test subjects has grown so much that the so-called contract research industry has emerged in the past decade to recruit volunteers for pharmaceutical trials. The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, a Boston policy and economic research group at Tufts University, estimated that contract research revenue grew to $7 billion in 2005, up from $1 billion in 1995.

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

The pharmaceutical industry says it was not involved. Jeff Trewitt, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug-industry trade group, said that his organization had no role in prompting the study and that it had not had a chance to review the findings.

During the Holmesburg experiments, inmates could earn up to $1,500 a month by participating. The only other jobs were at the commissary or in the shoe and shirt factory, where wages were 15 to 25 cents a day, Hornblum said.

On the issue of compensation for inmates, the report expressed concern about "undue inducements to participate in research in order to gain access to medical care or other benefits they would not normally have." It called for "adequate protections" to avoid "attempts to coerce or manipulate participation."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/08/13/MNGFMKHJ7S1.DTL


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Republican Values:

1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you.
2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child.
3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer.

4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.


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OfflineSneezingPenis
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Re: Prison Inmates To Be Used In Medical Experiments [Re: Diploid]
    #5961772 - 08/14/06 03:48 AM (17 years, 5 months ago)

"I saw it firsthand," Ackerman said. "What started as scientific research became pure business, and no amount of regulations can prevent that from happening agaian."

well put. This is the worst idea. Might as well re-enslave the negro's to lower crime.


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OfflineSeussA
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Re: Prison Inmates To Be Used In Medical Experiments [Re: SneezingPenis]
    #5961813 - 08/14/06 04:23 AM (17 years, 5 months ago)

> This is the worst idea.

I donno... the Nazi's learned quite a lot experimenting on prisoners...


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Offlinetwiggedoubt
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Re: Prison Inmates To Be Used In Medical Experiments [Re: Seuss]
    #5968065 - 08/15/06 11:17 PM (17 years, 5 months ago)

Who the hell is anyone to tell what prisoners can or can't do to their bodies. They live in a shit environment, if anything if people really care about inmates they should preach better treatment ahead of testing drugs on inmates. This is a good way to improve medicine, and help some prisoners get some dough for drugs. Why should only people outside of jail benefit from such programs, this should be left to people in prison, not people that haven't been to prison.


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OfflineKonnrade
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Re: Prison Inmates To Be Used In Medical Experiments [Re: twiggedoubt]
    #5968559 - 08/16/06 02:42 AM (17 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

twiggedoubt said:
Who the hell is anyone to tell what prisoners can or can't do to their bodies. They live in a shit environment, if anything if people really care about inmates they should preach better treatment ahead of testing drugs on inmates. This is a good way to improve medicine, and help some prisoners get some dough for drugs. Why should only people outside of jail benefit from such programs, this should be left to people in prison, not people that haven't been to prison.




The problem is that in the past the inmates tended to have no say in whether or not they were experimented upon.

The capacity for abuse is high. The money involved is significant, the businesses involved have massive clout, and to be quite honest very few people give a shit about prison inmates.


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I find your lack of faith disturbing


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OfflineSeussA
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Re: Prison Inmates To Be Used In Medical Experiments [Re: twiggedoubt]
    #5968592 - 08/16/06 03:51 AM (17 years, 5 months ago)

> Who the hell is anyone to tell what prisoners can or can't do to their bodies.

I'm not a prisoner and the government puts huge restrictions on what I can do or cannot do with my body.

Konnrade summed up my positiion very well...


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InvisibleDiploidM
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Re: Prison Inmates To Be Used In Medical Experiments [Re: twiggedoubt]
    #5968727 - 08/16/06 06:03 AM (17 years, 5 months ago)

Who the hell is anyone to tell what prisoners can or can't do to their bodies.

It's not so much a question of telling them what they can't do as being concerned that a prisoner in for 10 years may be given 5 years off if he'll test a new, potentially dangerous, experimental drug.

A civilian can just say no to the money and go get a job, prisoners are stuck in a system that could, and has in the past, abuse them as black people were in the Tuskegee study cited in the article above.

This could work, but it would need extremely close, independent ethical monitoring. Even so, I'm wary as the pharmaceutical industry has a long history of greed.


--------------------
Republican Values:

1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you.
2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child.
3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer.

4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.


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