Tuskegee Redux?

Rinku Sen

This morning I was in the elevator at work with two 20-something men, one
white, one ambiguous. They started talking about a man they had seen at a
Wal Mart while they were on the road recently. After speculating on the
guy’s appearance (“Was that a toupee he had on? He had serial numbers
tatooed on his neck.” ), one asked , “Which WalMart was that?” The other
replied: “Tuskegee, where that movie was made.” I don’t think he meant the
movie Miss Evers’ Boys, an HBO movie about Black sharecroppers who were
enrolled without consent in a study of the effects of syphilis. Even after
penicillin was discovered as a cure, doctors didn’t treat these 400,
letting them die or go mad instead.

Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that a federal panel of medical
experts are arguing that we should loosen the rules that prohibit testing
drugs on prisoners. There are lots of benefits, the panel said, both
individual (Try the newest form of Ambien!) and social (No more suicide for
rich kids on anti-depressants!). Prisoner rights advocates protested that
prisoners don’t truly have choice, that informed consent is a joke among a
trapped population. They cited not just the Tuskegee study, but also
Holmesburg, where prisoners were exposed to radioactive and cancer-causing
materials and hallucinogenics in exchange for some hundreds of dollars each.

The panel called for independent review of all studies, but the whole idea
makes my skin crawl. Even if prisoners do consent, the conditions hardly
constitute "free will." If we think it's wrong to permit harvesting organs
from poor people to sell on the black market, why is it all right to have
prisoners sell their bodies to the pharmaceutical industry?

This story reminds me that there's a great deal more to fight about on health care than
simple access, which is important but not enough. And that many people do
see today's prisoners as slaves. If the drugs have so many potential
benefits, why not rely on the open market to entice testers?

Posted at 11:19 AM, Aug 23, 2006 in Prisons | Permalink | View Comments