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A Nation of Guinea Pigs

"Are patients here more vulnerable?" asks Brijesh Regal, CEO of the New Delhi-based firm Apothecaries, which runs clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies. "Obviously. They're poor. They're illiterate." Nonetheless, he argues, most of the problems can be attributed to the growing pains of a new industry. He points to the thalidomide fiasco in the 1950s - women who were given the drug for morning sickness delivered children with severe birth defects - as evidence that every developing industry has problems. "Why are we so concerned about India?" he asks. "If problems happened everywhere else, they will happen here. We are a massive country without a lot of regulatory infrastructure."

Regal's willingness to accept collateral damage may seem chilling, but it has some historical precedent. The path of medical progress is strewn with cases of questionable ethics, desperate practices, and misguided experimentalism, if not outright exploitation. And since patients with the fewest options are invariably the ones most likely to try (or be forcibly volunteered for) risky new treatments, be it an artificial heart, an unproven pill, or a radical lobotomy, they're also the ones who bear the brunt of medicine's experimental nature. In this light, outsourcing trials to a country where decent medical care is scarce, and medication scarcer, is just the globalization of an old equation. 

 Robert Scheer: Top Spy’s Story on Prewar Intel Is Finally Told

Perhaps most damning is an interview, added for the broadcast version, with Tyler Drumheller, a CIA veteran of 26 years’ service who was the agency’s top spy in Europe until his retirement a year ago. According to him, before the war Hussein’s foreign minister had been “turned” and was talking secretly to U.S. intelligence. At first excited by this rare inside look at Hussein’s regime, the top dogs at the White House dropped the issue like a hot rock as soon as his information contradicted their overheated rationale for “preemptive” war. “The policy was set,” Drumheller told CBS correspondent Ed Bradley. “The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.” 

Saved the Whale 

If you read the front page story of the SF Chronicle on Thursday, Dec 14, 2005, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso and a line in her mouth. A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farralone Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help.

Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so badly off that they must act immediately. The only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her, a very dangerous proposition. Just one slap of the tail could kill a rescuer. They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually she was freed.

When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around, she was thanking them.. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth says her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same."

joshua tree desert 102

Click graphic for a larger size at flickr. The quote is from James Madison and reads,

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. 

Punishing Whistleblowers 

Jason Vest has a profile in Government Executive about Torin Nelson, a military interrogator who was one of the whistleblowers alerting officials to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. And where is he now? Struggling to find contract work with the military. "They're saying there's no blacklisting policy, but there's clearly a blacklist." It sure seems that way. Here's what someone who does the right thing can look forward to these days:

    All Nelson did was pass on what little he had heard and had been able to document. And as far as he was concerned, he'd already paid a fair price for doing the right thing. It was bad enough that word of his meeting with investigators leaked almost immediately at Abu Ghraib. The ostracization that followed was far from pleasant. Worse were the thinly veiled death threats that convinced even as formidable a man as Nelson that he had no choice but to flee not just Abu Ghraib, but Iraq.

    Comparatively speaking, Nelson hasn't had the worst of it. Darby [the main whistleblower at Abu Ghraib] and his family, for example, had to be taken into protective custody after receiving death threats. After Provance [yet another whistleblower] spoke to the media about Abu Ghraib and the Fay investigation, his superiors ordered him to cease contact with the press, and subsequently suspended his security clearance, reassigned him and demoted him. Through the graces of Provance's home state senator, torture opponent Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Provance did address a congressional subcommittee on whistleblower protection in February.

Nelson, by the way, is now running for congress in Utah.

Life isn't supposed to be like high school. Violations of U.S. obligations to the Geneva Convention are pretty serious legal and moral violations. It is a little disconcerting that those that would report a crime are then treated like criminals.  

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