Spilled Expresso

An article in The New York Times discusses a debate on whether or not pharmacutical companies should use prision inmates as test monkeys for their drugs.
The practice used to be very common. Up until the 1970s drugs and medicines were tested on prisioners. The practice, however proved to be abusive. The article sights two examples of mistreatment of prisioners. Cases where prisioners were given dangerosu hallucinigenics and other dangerous chemicals. Even more sickening, is what happened in Alabama in the Tuskegee study of Syphilis. In this case, they used illiterate prisioners infected with syphilis to test various treatments. However, as the article explains, after a cure was found, they didn't give it to the prisioners. The medicine was with held in order to study the long term effects of the diesease.
This case was actually discussed during a lecture on experimental ethics in a couple of my psychology classes.
One doctor said that it was a mistake to do away with prisioner testing. He went on to admitting to using radioactive and other harmful chemicals, but in "low doses" which of course makes it okay. I realize that good things have come out of these experiments, but I can't help but find it nauseating to treat people in prision as less than human. I suppose many would lack sympathy for the rapists and murders, but many prisioners in jail for much lesser crimes, which dont make them deserving of being exposed, or possibly expossed to dangerous chemicals and medical procedures. I mean, even rapists, and murders, despite their heneious crimes, are still human. I mean, I know that people have to consent, but as one professor pointed out, the consent forms are writen in terms fit for a lawyer, and distributed to people who oftwen are hardly literiate.
In lot of ways, our world isn't progressing, it's back peddling.
But hey, maybe it's just me.