Testing drugs on prisoners: The easy out

[PTO-29412]

THE PRESTIGIOUS Institute of Medicine has recommended that federal rules be altered to allow drug testing and other experimentation on prisoners.
Under the institute's proposal, reported this week in The New York Times, three-decade-old bans on prisoner experimentation would be replaced with more relaxed rules similar to those surrounding the booming industry of experimentation on children.
The equation is problematic. Researchers experiment on children despite their developmental incapacity to give informed consent because only by understanding how drugs work in their physiologically unique bodies can proper treatments be devised. No such argument can be made about prisoners, who are physiologically more or less similar to those of us on the street. They just happen to

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