Panel Recommends Inmates for Drug Trials

A federal panel of expert medical consultants is recommending that the government’s strict restrictions regarding pharmaceutical testing on prison inmates be loosened in a new report outlining the proposed regulation changes.

The current regulations, introduced in the 1970s to prevent abuse problems associated with prisoner clinical trials, severely limits companies from testing products on inmates.

These restrictions stem from a painful history of prisoner abuse and medical mistreatment that raised concerns among researchers and prison rights advocates as to whether inmates can make unforced decision to undergo clinical trials given their environment.

According to prison officials, approximately 90 percent of all pharmaceuticals were tested on prisoners until 1974 when revelations of medical mistreatment and prisoner abuse were brought to the forefront. In prisons such as Holmesburg, inmates were given money to test all kinds of products that exposed them to hallucinogenic, radioactive, and carcinogenic chemicals.

The current regulations, passed in 1978, allow prisoners to enroll only in federally financed medical trials that pose no more than a small risk to participants.

As the biomedical industry faces a shortage in testing participants, the medical panel recommends new provisions that would loosen the current restrictions and allow the 2.3 million prison population to participate in all federally funded clinical trials.

However, critics are skeptical of the panel’s main objective. According to Dr. A. Bernard Ackerman, a dermatologist who worked at Holmesburg during the trials in the 1960s, “what started as scientific research became pure business, and no amount of regulations can prevent that from happening again.”

While researchers and the panel claim their only focus for changing regulations is to help prisoners get access to revolutionary drugs and products that could benefit them, others have similar concerns regarding the financial stake in biomedical 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 the Prison Legal News. “I have to imagine there are larger financial motivations here.”

Daniel S. Murphy, a criminal justice professor at Appalachian State University in N.C., who spent five years in prison in the 90s for growing marijuana, believes that changing the restrictions would be a huge mistake.

“Free and informed consent becomes pretty questionable when prisoners don’t hold the keys to their own cells,” he said. “And in many cases they can’t read, yet they are signing a document that it practically takes a law degree to understand.”

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