Drugs were once tested on prisoners. Now they're tested on poor people

Up until the 1970s, around 90 per cent of pharmaceutical drugs in the U.S were tested on prisoners to determine their safety before going to market.

The documentary Bodies for Rent highlights how drug trials now exploit volunteers who are risking their health to earn a living. But using vulnerable populations for medical research is nothing new: inmates in Canada and the U.S. were once tested with all manner of drugs and compounds, says one expert.

"You can monitor and control everything about them: their diet, their exercise, their sleep — everything about them," said Carl Elliott, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota and author of The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No. For researchers, it was the perfect captive population for their tests. 

However, Elliott said, it led to notorious scandals in the '60s and '70s. "Probably the most famous prison scandal is at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia," he said. "Those studies did the most unimaginably horrible things that you can think of to prisoners there.

"For example, they injected inmates with herpes; they injected them with asbestos; they even tested chemical warfare agents on them."

Public outcry resulted in federal regulations in the 1970s that made drug testing in prisons much more difficult. But pharmaceutical companies had already largely stopped the practice, having found another group that would take part in their trials. 

"The answer is poor people," Elliott said, referring to companies that set up trials offering a payout to healthy volunteers. "Largely, you're talking about people who [are] kind of living on the margins and have decided, 'This looks better than punching a clock at McDonald's.'"