Undertaking ethical psychiatric research in the global south’s prayer camps – is that even possible?

Psychiatrists associated with elite institutions in the global north teamed up with counterparts in Ghana with a view to determining what impact the use of gold standard of care drugs plus ‘faith healing’ protocols would have vs ‘faith healing’ only. The venue of their research was an evangelical prayer camp where the ‘faith healing’ protocol consisted in keeping many psychiatric patients in chains, making them pray and making them fast. [i]

[This man lived in a Prayer Camp – he is drinking from a dirty container which staff put water in for him to drink. He slept, ate, and defecated beside the tree where he was chained ((c) 2012 Nick Loomis/Human Rights Watch] 

 

The randomised trial discovered that those patients who were subjected to mainstream drugs did better than those who received only ‘faith healing’. The results, ultimately, were not overwhelmingly positive for patients in either group, which may have had to do with the short duration of the trial and/or the lack of efficacy of some of the mainstream drugs used. There were some improvements in the group provided with drugs, but apparently that had no impact on the amount of time they spent chained to the floor in said ‘faith healing’ facility. 

Let me say at the outset that I do think the researchers went into this research project with the best of intentions, likely hoping they would be able to show that more patients would improve faster if they received mainstream psychiatric drugs when compared to ‘faith healing’ only. In turn that should have led to the unchaining of more such patients than if they were subjected to ‘faith healing’ only. It should have also impacted positively on what is offered to patients like them, going forward. They were clearly aware of the problems to do with undertaking a clinical research project ethically under the circumstances, ie psychiatric patients chained to the floor in a ‘faith healing’ facility. The objective of this Editorial is not to castigate them as irresponsible researchers exploiting a small group of chained-up psychiatric patients in Ghana.

Several ethical issues arose, based on their own reporting of their trial method and the difficult circumstances under which they proceeded with their trial. They claimed essentially that the trial participants were volunteers who had entered the prayer camp voluntarily and who had given voluntary first-person informed consent to trial participation.  A neutral observer can’t help but wonder, to what extent a psychiatric patient chained to the floor is truly able to give voluntary consent to anything. It turns out, by the researchers own (honest) reporting, there were some patients who were apparently unable to respond to their questions. Clearly those patients then were also unable to consent to trial participation, and yet, some of them were apparently enrolled regardless. One has reason to doubt that they entered the facility voluntarily. 

Given that a significant number of trial participants were reportedly illiterate, the information was read to them, and their consent (bar that of those deemed unable to provide first person informed consent) was then taken to be sufficiently informed. Apparently, nobody validated whether those patients had a reasonable understanding of the trial method and of their options vis a vis their participation. Apparently, when family ‘consent’ (aka authorisation) was sought this occurred often by phone. No paperwork existed that would have validated that authorisation. No record exists to evaluate the interactions between the researchers or their intermediaries and the people on the other end of the phone line, people they took to be family members. 

Of course, another issue is the existence of, effectively, a placebo arm (ie the ‘faith healing’ arm) when a gold standard of clinical care was provided as part of the trial (ie the active agent in the other arm). These issues have been litigated elsewhere, so I will not repeat those arguments on this occasion.

When I read about this trial I couldn’t help but wonder whether ethical research is possible under circumstances this academic situated in the global north considers barbaric. On the one hand, it’s a fact that in the global south many such prayer camp equivalents exist, and the care provided to – often impoverished – psychiatric patients is indefensible on professional grounds, and yet, that is also all there is. 

Anybody concerned about the well-being of psychiatric patients finding themselves in such facilities, voluntarily or by coercion, should be supportive of research aimed at improving their lot. And yet, there are obvious questions about the how-to in terms of how this research team went about recruiting trial participants. I have flagged some of those questions. The broader question is though, whether ethical research is possible in such contexts at all.

UDO SCHUKLENK

[This is a draft version of an Editorial that is going to be published in Developing World Bioethics 2019; 19(4)]

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[i] Ofori-Atta, A, Attafuah, J, Jack, H, Baning, F, and R Rosenheck. 2018. Joining psychiatric care and faith healing in a prayer camp in Ghana: randomised trial. British Journal of Psychiatry 212: 34-41.

VW, Mercedes, BMW and those experiments

So, the three largest German car manufacturers are for obvious and for good reasons targets of everyone's scorn these days. VW in particular is known to have manipulated its diesel engine equipped cars so that when they were tested the engines were relatively clean as far as their nitrogen   oxide pollution is concerned. Once on the road these cars actually generated more pollution than many trucks. In 2012 reportedly over 72 000 Europeans died prematurely because of nitrogen oxide pollution caused by these cars. No argument there.

VW, BMW and Mercedes (Daimler) set up a research outfit designed to investigate the impact of this pollution on humans and the environment. As is the case with these sorts of agitprop outlets, they have an impressive name. The European Research Group on Environment and Health in the Transport Sector it was. The cigarette manufacturing industry had a similar research institute, its aim was, of course, to show that cigarettes have not been shown to cause cancer, and to produce citable evidence (ideally published in scientific leading journals) for the industry's lobbyists.

As is usually the case, there was a whole gaggle of university professors more than willing to lend their names to that enterprise, and so were prestigious research institutes, attached to universities. They accepted contracts from the German car industry research outfit. Among their research were two kinds of trials that are widely condemned today, albeit for reasons that are not quite obvious, at least not when it comes to the trial involving human participants.

The first kind of trial include 10 monkeys. They were put in an airtight room  where they watched cartoons. Meanwhile exhausts from a manipulated VW Beetle with a diesel engine were pumped into the room.  That was then compared against the missions of a 1999 Ford engine.  The finding propagated at the time by the industry research outfit: Diesel engine exhausts, even in high concentrations, do not cause lasting damage to monkeys.

The main criticism mounted against this research (apart from the obvious question whether it is ethical to subject monkeys to that kind of research in the first place - a very reasonable criticism that I think is persuasive) seems to be that we knew already that these exhausts are dangerous, so the companies should have better focused on reducing emissions rather than on trying to show that they're not a health risk.

In any case, the research was based on a fraudulent set-up, the monkeys were subjected to nitrogen oxide concentrations far below what VW diesel engines emitted at the time in the real world. It is unlikely that the researchers who were contracted to undertake this research were aware of the manipulation. The research was undertaken at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in the United States.

The main criticism here should be that highly evolved non-human animals were utilised for research purposes that were not even research purposes. The health impact of a 1999 Ford exhaust was compared against that of a non-existent (aka manipulated) 2012 VW diesel engine. These monkeys were subjected to the risk of bodily harm for no scientific reason at all.

Well, it does not end there. The European Research Group on Environment and Health in the Transport Sector commissioned another experiment, this time involving 25 or so health volunteers at a German university hospital. The study received ethics approval, no VW diesel engine was thankfully involved on this occasion, manipulated or otherwise. The researchers aimed to determine what the health implications of different levels of nitrogen oxide concentrations in the workplace environment/air would be on those trial participants. The trial participants were subjected to those nitrogen oxide concentrations for 3 hours. The study concluded that there were no significant health implications. However, the authors of this study were also quite explicit  about the limitations of their findings. Their summary contains a longish list of caveats, including the warning that a 3 hour test tells us nothing about the effects of chronic exposure (ie the real world).

This study received the required ethics approval, the trial participants were healthy volunteers who gave first person informed consent to trial participation. It is unclear to me here why German politicians and board members of VW, BMW and Mercedes are falling over one another to condemn this research. It seems to me that no fraud was committed, and the question seems scientifically sound.

Future Infectious Catastrophic Disease Outbreaks: Ethics of Emergency Access to Unregistered Medical Interventions and Clinical Trial Designs

The mass media excitement about Ebola has receded. The 2014-2015 West African outbreak has been brought under control not thanks to the deployment of successful treatment regimes, because there are none that are known to work. I participated recently in an international meeting of experts debating the ethical and methodological issues pertaining to trial designs for emerging infectious diseases like Ebola. It was both astounding and also immensely frustrating that to a large extent the controversies that exercised the minds of the delegates of this meeting exercised the minds of many an AIDS activist and clinical trials’ expert prior to the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy, a good quarter of a century ago.[1] [2]Are placebo controls an ethically defensible methodological tool when patients face a terminal illness? Different alternative trial designs involving placebo controls, adaptive trial designs, and multi-stage approaches involving active controls were discussed during the meeting. The heated nature of some of these debates reminded me strongly of the passion that was on display during the early HIV trials. It turns out, despite decades of informed debate about these issues, a number of significant normative questions have not been settled.

A cluster of difficult ethical questions that engendered justifiably a lot of debate has to do with the use of placebo controls in trials involving patients facing a very high mortality risk (some in excess of 90%) and a fast-acting infection resulting in the death of these patient within 2-8 days after admission to a treatment centre. This scenario mirrors the sobering reality faced by a subset of Ebola Virus Disease patients. This issue was already highly contentious during the early HIV trials, and then patients and clinical investigators were faced with a virus that was nowhere near as fast-acting as the Ebola virus. The ethical conflict that arises here is this: We know that those randomized into the placebo arm face the same greater-than-90%-risk of death within a few days as those who receive the standard of care treatment. In some trial design the placebo control arm could be identical to the gold standard of (unsuccessful) clinical care provided in a particular clinical setting. Given that those who are randomized into the arm featuring the unregistered medical intervention might do better, or might do worse, or might do roughly as badly as those in the placebo control arm, the ethical question remains whether a trial design featuring a placebo control is ethically justifiable, given the almost certainty of imminent death faced by those randomized into the placebo arm. During the meeting I alluded to earlier a fairly contentious debate arose also over the question of whether trials producing less reliable results than placebo controlled trials might be acceptable under such circumstances.

What exacerbates the ethical challenges for those who undertake such trials is that their trial participants are arguably not true volunteers. Their – dying - trial participants are not given the opportunity to choose between participating in the placebo controlled randomized trial versus accessing the unregistered medical intervention on their own volition outside the trial process. It is perfectly conceivable that some patients might choose to participate in such trials in order to facilitate the development of a successful intervention capable of helping future patients like them. Or they might accept that there exists true clinical equipoise between the trial arms and they might be volunteering to be randomized under such circumstances. In the absence of alternative access routes to the unregistered medical intervention, we can never be certain that the patients agreeing to be randomized are not simply responding to what constitutes a coercive offer.

Clinical investigators colluding in this process, and arguably benefiting from it, are not absolved of their ethical responsibilities because they did not create the regulatory frameworks that gave rise to the problem. It is true that they did not create the regulatory framework under which they operate, but they undoubtedly benefit from its existence. We could respond to this kind of argument by pointing to the societal need for sound trial designs and the detrimental impact of permitting patients to access unregistered medical interventions outside the clinical trials’ system. The likely impact of permitting patients access, as a senior biostatistician attending the workshop rightly pointed out to me, would be a significant slowing-down in the trial recruitment process. Some trials might never be able to recruit sufficient patients, because most patients might be voting with their feet and opt to take their chances with the unregistered medical intervention. Surely that is not quite what is in the best interest of any society battling an emerging infectious disease such as Ebola. Does this justify coercing dying people into particular trial designs? I do not think so, but this is a contentious issue where reasonable, well-informed people can justifiably differ. A WHO panel looking at this question argued that while it would be ethically defensible to offer emergency access to unregistered medical interventions to Ebola patients, this should be subject to that emergency access not slowing down trial recruitment.[3] The panelists (not featuring a single expert or disease survivor from the affected countries) took a policy line here that mirrors US regulations. Other countries, including Canada and South Africa do not make this a threshold condition for emergency access. As it is with these sorts of panels, the advice it rendered on this controversial topic is not actually reasoned for, so policy makers and regulators as well as patient rights advocates aiming to balance the competing interests of access versus trial recruitment in a fair manner will be left wondering about the ethical reasons for this policy stance taken by the WHO panel, assuming there are any.

There are other ethical issues that arise in this context: Some experimental agents existed at the time only in insufficient quantities, for instance ZMapp, an unregistered medical intervention composed of monoclonal antibodies, was only available in very limited quantities. In light of this situation, is it acceptable to prioritize patients in comparable clinical circumstances who are willing to be randomized in a placebo controlled trial over patients clamoring for direct emergency access, given that the available quantities of this unregistered medical intervention would have been used up in the placebo controlled trial?

And here is another difficult question: While the AIDS activists of days gone by were highly educated about their disease and about the available unregistered medical interventions considered for expanded access programs, this is not quite the case with regard to the average West African Ebola patient. These patients were unlikely able to provide valid first person informed consent, because they were unable to demonstrate a reasonable person understanding of what was known about the unregistered medical intervention, about their options and so on and so forth. This is the case both because of educational limitations as well as disease progression. Are short-cuts to informed consent ethically justifiable under such circumstances? Given that time is of the essence and proxy consent might not be feasible due to family members being deceased or in a far-away village, are our informed consent requirements reasonable under such emergency circumstances?

The WHO panel suggests that evidence from nun-human primate experiments might be sufficient to justify offering a particular unregistered medical intervention for emergency access. Is that an ethically justifiable stance, given the high mortality rate and fast-acting nature of the infection?

Let me leave you with a final difficult question to ponder: Imagine you were running a medical NGO providing access to unregistered medical interventions to patients you care for in your emergency medical centre. By some fluke your unregistered medical intervention permits some of your patients to survive, but that survival comes at a high price, debilitating after-effects of the Ebola virus as well as of the unregistered medical intervention. Given concerns about your patients’ capacity to provide valid informed consent, should you accept responsibility for the patients’ future care and upkeep, given the lack of state infrastructure to assist these patients? If you accept responsibility for their care, say, by taking out an insurance package from some provider for them, you will expend a fair amount of donor monies on these patients (potentially for decades) that you cannot use to assist patients also facing life-threatening illnesses in other parts of the world. In other words, you face another ethical challenge, a resource allocation challenge. How should that medical NGO go about addressing this challenge?

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[1] U Schuklenk, C Lowry. 2009. Terminal illness and access to Phase 1 experimental agents, surgeries and devices: reviewing the ethical arguments. British Medical Bulletin 89: 7-22.

[2] U Schuklenk, C Hogan. 1996. Patient access to experimental drugs and AIDS clinical trial designs: ethical issues. Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics 5: 400-409.

[3] WHO. 2014. Ethical considerations for the use of unregistered interventions for Ebola virus disease.  WHO: Geneva 2014: p. 5.

Could Canadian patients be prevented from accessing experimental Ebola drugs, too? You bet they could!

Ok, so I'm a tad bit lazy. Sections of the post below are actually a few months old and I'm re-posting them here, because of the current debate about access to the experimental drug deployed in the case of the two Ebola missionaries in the United States. 

First things first though, on the current debate: There has been a bit of a storm in a teacup about the question of whether or not it is just to provide an experimental treatment for Ebola to two sick missionaries who returned home to the United States from West Africa while denying it to dying Africans. Art Caplan has provided a reasonable analysis of the issues in a Washington Post OpEd. I disagree with him on the reasons for why the agent cannot be produced now in larger quantities and shipped to West Africa (poor start-up company and all that jazz). There is no reason to accept an artificial scarcity (i.e. human regulation made) as a kind of natural law, inevitable and beyond our control. Still, Caplan is right, it would be difficult to provide the medication locally in West Africa where it's needed, due to the relatively fragile nature of the experimental agent (it needs special handling, be kept in a freezer and whatnot). And yes, imagine the drug actually was a dud, potentially doing more harm then good. The same professional do-gooders shouting now racism and demanding delivery of the medication to Africa would turn around before you can say 'ouch' and excitedly shout 'exploitation' and 'African guinea pigs' and, yes, 'racism', because that charge usually sticks. 

From the published reports about the experimental agent it's unclear - to me - at what stage in the R&D process it is. It seems to me - I might be mistaken here - that the drug hasn't undergone phase 1 clinical trials (i.e. how dangerous to human health is it?). From the experience with the two missionaries it seems at least as if it ain't too toxic. Still, two folks count for all scientific intent and purposes as an anecdote. Not a big surprise though, that proper trials have not been undertaken, given how quick people die, and in what locations they usually die. Doing placebo-controlled studies - no doubt the methodological gold standard under the circumstances - also seems a dicey proposition seeing the high mortality rate among infected people. 

Fundamentally though, the question is whether knowledgable patients suffering from catastrophic illnesses should be permitted to access experimental drugs. Ebola is just the latest disease triggering this debate. It turns out, the situation the African patients find themselves in isn't that different to the situation faced by Canadians suffering from other catastrophic diseases.  It's here where my mentioned older post kicks in...

Imagine you suffer from a catastrophic kind of illness, an illness that’s invariably going to kill you in the near future. Everything that you and your doctor know about the illness suggests that your death will be anything but peaceful. Doctors can deal with some of your symptoms and palliative care can address some of the pain you are experiencing. But that’s about it.

Sadly this scenario isn’t unrealistic. Many Canadians face this sort of situation today.

During a scheduled visit to your specialist doctor you learn that there’s a brand-new drug currently being tested that might just save your life, if it worked that is. The doctor has already inquired with the researchers testing the drug in a phase-three clinical trial and you would be eligible to participate in that trial.

Phase-three clinical trials are trials at which stage in the drug research and development process we know what its safety profile looks like and we have pretty good evidence to think that it’s effective to some extent. That is so because during earlier trials, involving initially animals and eventually other patients, sufficient evidence has been accumulated to justify letting the phase-three trial go ahead. Now the doctors are trying to recruit a fairly large number of patients in order to establish whether the drug is as good as they thought it is. The nature of your disease is such though that there is no standard therapy around to assist your struggle for survival. The trial design in such cases demands that the experimental agent is tested against a placebo control, a dummy pill. That’s done because we need to know, before doctors can confidently prescribe the drug to patients like yourself, that the drug is doing better than what is the status quo – ie no drug. It’s always possible that an experimental drug actually does worse than the dummy pill.

Now, ask yourself, if you were that patient: Would you be willing to participate in a last-chance clinical trial where you’d have a 50:50 chance of getting a dummy pill? You know already what the dummy pill would achieve: your death. Would you trust the investigators to pull the plug quickly enough for you to survive if they discovered that the experimental drug actually works? In case you want to get a better handle on how it feels to be faced with this sort of decision, check out this blog (adriennes.blog.com) by a Toronto-based melanoma patient.

Many people suffering catastrophic illnesses flat-out refuse to participate in research that’s designed as I have described it. Their argument is not about the trial methodology, it is sound. Their argument is about the ethics of providing dying people with a coercive offer: join my clinical research project on my conditions or die a predictably horrible death.

The good news is that the story doesn’t end here. It has been recognized by regulators both in Canada and elsewhere that such coercive offers to people fighting for their very survival are incompatible with the fundamental values of liberal democracies. We must not reduce patients suffering catastrophic illnesses to mere means to achieve our research objectives. While that’s nothing much other than an honorable principle, there’s also a more pragmatic reason for this. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Health Canada actually permits people who suffer catastrophic illnesses to access drugs that are in the clinical trials system, and they can do so without actually participating in the clinical trials I mentioned earlier. The agency runs a Special Access Program for these sorts of patients. The program permits patients to access the experimental agent without trial participation. In return they promise to have their doctors monitor the impact of the drug carefully and report it back to the manufacturer or whoever runs the clinical trial. One of the ethical reasons for this I have just mentioned. The pragmatic reason for this solution is this: it was discovered during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when no life-preserving medication existed, that patients who are coerced into placebo controlled trials will simply cheat in order to get access to the actual experimental drug. HIV-infected people enrolled in ostensibly placebo-controlled trials and then took their drugs to chemists to find out who did and who didn’t get the active agent. They then started sharing the actual drug and dumped the placebo. That, of course, rendered the trial pretty useless. True volunteers would have accepted the uncertainties and volunteered to test whether the experimental agent is any better than the placebo control.

The problem patients with catastrophic disease who wish to access experimental drugs through our Special Access Program face today in Canada is two-fold: Health Canada leaves it up to pharmaceutical companies to decide whether or not they provide drugs to eligible patients. Manufacturers who have trouble recruiting sufficient numbers of patients into their trials could deny patients access to the experimental drug to encourage them to join the trial on their conditions. They might also have other reasons for refusing to provide catastrophically-ill patients with access to an experimental drug. Either way, we are back to square one: a coercive situation. This problem occurs more frequently in Canada than you might think. Here is a heart wrenching appeal (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olwDT7NPSsM) from one such patient, who has since died. A Toronto paper contacted me about another case recently, both cases interestingly involved pharmaceutical multinational Bristol Myers Squibb refusing to provide an experimental drug that the company is testing in a phase-three clinical trial right now. This issue should be addressed by Health Canada as a matter of urgency. The other problem is that manufacturers are permitted to charge for their experimental drug. That is unreasonable. It costs typically cents to produce such medicines – I am not talking research and development costs but actual production costs. There is no reason whatsoever why pharmaceutical companies should profit from experimental drugs. They should be compelled by Health Canada to provide such agents to clinically eligible patients, while the clinical trials are ongoing and the drug isn’t formally approved as a for-pay prescription medication. If Health Canada were to address these shortcomings of the present Special Access Program it would ensure that catastrophically ill patients are given a fairer shot at actually accessing these experimental drugs.

Udo Schuklenk holds the Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics and Public Policy at Queen’s University, he tweets @schuklenk

We argue in Nature today that recent FB research wasn't obviously unethical

Michelle N. Meyer, John Lantos, Alex John London, Amy L. McGuire, Lance Stell and I argue in today's edition of Nature that the recent, much condemned Facebook research wasn't obviously unethical. Our arguments are here, a list of supporters including luminaries like Peter Singer and Dan Brock can be found here. 

Let the argument begin!

Fighting for survival in the clinical trials' system

This weekend's column in the Kingston Whig-Standard.

 Imagine you suffer from a catastrophic kind of illness, an illness that’s invariably going to kill you in the near future. Everything that you and your doctor know about the illness suggests that your death will be anything but peaceful. Doctors can deal with some of your symptoms and palliative care can address some of the pain you are experiencing. But that’s about it.

Sadly this scenario isn’t unrealistic. Many Canadians face this sort of situation today.

During a scheduled visit to your specialist doctor you learn that there’s a brand-new drug currently being tested that might just save your life, if it worked that is. The doctor has already inquired with the researchers testing the drug in a phase-three clinical trial and you would be eligible to participate in that trial.

Phase-three clinical trials are trials at which stage in the drug research and development process we know what its safety profile looks like and we have pretty good evidence to think that it’s effective to some extent. That is so because during earlier trials, involving initially animals and eventually other patients, sufficient evidence has been accumulated to justify letting the phase-three trial go ahead. Now the doctors are trying to recruit a fairly large number of patients in order to establish whether the drug is as good as they thought it is. The nature of your disease is such though that there is no standard therapy around to assist your struggle for survival. The trial design in such cases demands that the experimental agent is tested against a placebo control, a dummy pill. That’s done because we need to know, before doctors can confidently prescribe the drug to patients like yourself, that the drug is doing better than what is the status quo – ie no drug. It’s always possible that an experimental drug actually does worse than the dummy pill.

Now, ask yourself, if you were that patient: Would you be willing to participate in a last-chance clinical trial where you’d have a 50:50 chance of getting a dummy pill? You know already what the dummy pill would achieve: your death. Would you trust the investigators to pull the plug quickly enough for you to survive if they discovered that the experimental drug actually works? In case you want to get a better handle on how it feels to be faced with this sort of decision, check out this blog (adriennes.blog.com) by a Toronto-based melanoma patient.

Many people suffering catastrophic illnesses flat-out refuse to participate in research that’s designed as I have described it. Their argument is not about the trial methodology, it is sound. Their argument is about the ethics of providing dying people with a coercive offer: join my clinical research project on my conditions or die a predictably horrible death.

The good news is that the story doesn’t end here. It has been recognized by regulators both in Canada and elsewhere that such coercive offers to people fighting for their very survival are incompatible with the fundamental values of liberal democracies. We must not reduce patients suffering catastrophic illnesses to mere means to achieve our research objectives. While that’s nothing much other than an honorable principle, there’s also a more pragmatic reason for this. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Health Canada actually permits people who suffer catastrophic illnesses to access drugs that are in the clinical trials system, and they can do so without actually participating in the clinical trials I mentioned earlier. The agency runs a Special Access Program for these sorts of patients. The program permits patients to access the experimental agent without trial participation. In return they promise to have their doctors monitor the impact of the drug carefully and report it back to the manufacturer or whoever runs the clinical trial. One of the ethical reasons for this I have just mentioned. The pragmatic reason for this solution is this: it was discovered during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when no life-preserving medication existed, that patients who are coerced into placebo controlled trials will simply cheat in order to get access to the actual experimental drug. HIV-infected people enrolled in ostensibly placebo-controlled trials and then took their drugs to chemists to find out who did and who didn’t get the active agent. They then started sharing the actual drug and dumped the placebo. That, of course, rendered the trial pretty useless. True volunteers would have accepted the uncertainties and volunteered to test whether the experimental agent is any better than the placebo control.

The problem patients with catastrophic disease who wish to access experimental drugs through our Special Access Program face today in Canada is two-fold: Health Canada leaves it up to pharmaceutical companies to decide whether or not they provide drugs to eligible patients. Manufacturers who have trouble recruiting sufficient numbers of patients into their trials could deny patients access to the experimental drug to encourage them to join the trial on their conditions. They might also have other reasons for refusing to provide catastrophically-ill patients with access to an experimental drug. Either way, we are back to square one: a coercive situation. This problem occurs more frequently in Canada than you might think. Here is a heart wrenching appeal (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olwDT7NPSsM) from one such patient, who has since died. A Toronto paper contacted me about another case recently, both cases interestingly involved pharmaceutical multinational Bristol Myers Squibb refusing to provide an experimental drug that the company is testing in a phase-three clinical trial right now. This issue should be addressed by Health Canada as a matter of urgency. The other problem is that manufacturers are permitted to charge for their experimental drug. That is unreasonable. It costs typically cents to produce such medicines – I am not talking research and development costs but actual production costs. There is no reason whatsoever why pharmaceutical companies should profit from experimental drugs. They should be compelled by Health Canada to provide such agents to clinically eligible patients, while the clinical trials are ongoing and the drug isn’t formally approved as a for-pay prescription medication. If Health Canada were to address these shortcomings of the present Special Access Program it would ensure that catastrophically ill patients are given a fairer shot at actually accessing these experimental drugs.

Udo Schuklenk hold the Ontario Research Chair in Bioethics and Public Policy at Queen’s University, he tweets @schuklenk

On HuffPost Live on 1971 Toronto Marijuana Research

Just click the image to the left to get to the video.

Table of Contents Bioethics 2013; 27(2)

Bioethics © Blackwell Publishing Ltd Volume 27, Issue 2 Pages ii - ii, 59 - 116, February 2013 The latest issue of Bioethics is available on Wiley Online Library EDITORIAL Saving Lives (page ii) Ruth Chadwick DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12014 ARTICLES USE OR REFUSE REPRODUCTIVE GENETIC TECHNOLOGIES: WHICH WOULD A ‘GOOD PARENT’ DO? (pages 59–64) JANET MALEK DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2011.01890.x THE ETHICS OF UTERUS TRANSPLANTATION (pages 65–73) RUBY CATSANOS, WENDY ROGERS and MIANNA LOTZ DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2011.01897.x STIGMATIZATION AND PUBLIC HEALTH ETHICS (pages 74–80) ANDREW COURTWRIGHT DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2011.01904.x WELLBEING, SCHIZOPHRENIA AND EXPERIENCE MACHINES (pages 81–88) DAVID RHYS BIRKS DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2011.01894.x UNCERTAIN TRANSLATION, UNCERTAIN BENEFIT AND UNCERTAIN RISK: ETHICAL CHALLENGES FACING FIRST-IN-HUMAN TRIALS OF INDUCED PLURIPOTENT STEM (IPS) CELLS (pages 89–96) RONALD K.F. FUNG and IAN H. KERRIDGE DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2011.01896.x OVERSTATING VALUES: MEDICAL FACTS, DIVERSE VALUES, BIOETHICS AND VALUES-BASED MEDICINE (pages 97–104) MALCOLM PARKER DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2011.01902.x IS PAYMENT A BENEFIT? (pages 105–116) ALAN WERTHEIMER DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2011.01892.x