NY Times on Drug Testing in Prisons.

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August 23, 2006 Editorial Safe Drug Testing in Prisons Entire article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/23/opinion/23wed1.html?_r=1 & th & emc=th & oref=slogin Prisoners’ rights advocates are understandably worried about an advisory panel’s recommendation that the government overhaul the rules for testing drugs on prison inmates. The advocates fear a return to the medieval situation of just 30 years ago, when inmates were often subjected to dangerous and unethical experimental procedures. Some were infamously exposed to radioactive, carcinogenic and hallucinogenic chemicals at the

Holmesburg prison in Philadelphia. This shameful history makes it imperative that any change in testing policies be accompanied by oversight regulations far stronger than those now in existence. That said, a new report from the Institute of Medicine offers a possible outline for moving toward a system of testing that could benefit both the population as a whole and prison inmates, who tend to be among the sickest, most disease-prone people in society. The report calls for greatly expanding the protections given to subjects of medical research who are imprisoned or under other forms of correctional supervision. It also calls on the government to strengthen federal oversight of these kinds of studies and to rewrite a set a vague regulations that don’t actually protect the rights of medical research subjects within the corrections system. The new arrangement would minimize inmate

risk by limiting drug trials to the final, therapeutic stage, after researchers have already determined that drugs look safe and potentially effective. Instead of loading up studies with captive subjects, as was commonly done in the past, prison inmates would not be permitted to make up more than half of the subjects of a test. No research can ever be seen as legitimate without informed consent of the participating subjects. Critics of the new report argue that there can be no such thing as informed consent in the coercive environment of a prison. "Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit." - Aurobindo.

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