‘Professional guinea pigs’: Inside the world of clinical drug trials

Being a part of a clinical drug trial can pay very well—up to several thousand dollars. And many people need that cash and are desperate to participate. Some of them do it again and again, renting out their bodies for use on drugs that are in development.

Rob Cribb is the director of the Investigative Journalism Bureau at the Toronto Star. 

“There has been the submergence of privately run and operated clinical testing facilities in Canada,” said Cribb. “It’s actually difficult to know what percentage of it is happening in these private clinical trials because Health Canada itself openly concedes that it doesn’t know.”

When someone’s desperate for that money, they’ll cut many corners: lie to be accepted, fail to report adverse reactions or other complicating factors and skip the mandatory recovery time between trials.

When that happens, it can throw everything off, including the data that Health Canada may be relying on to approve these drugs for all of us to use.

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