French Drug Trial Leaves One Brain Dead and Five Critically Ill (theguardian.com) 232
jones_supa writes: One person is brain dead and five others are seriously ill after taking part in a phase one drug trial for an unnamed pharmaceutical firm at the Biotrial clinic in France. In medicine, phase one entails a small group of volunteers, and focuses only on safety. Phase two and three are progressively larger trials to assess the drug's effectiveness, although safety remains paramount. The French health ministry said the six patients had been in good health until taking the oral medication. It did not say what the new medicine was intended to be used for, but a source close to the case told AFP that the drug was a painkiller containing cannabinoids, an active ingredient found in cannabis plants. Mishaps like this are relatively rare, but in 2006 six men fell ill in London after taking part in a clinical trial into a drug developed to fight auto-immune disease and leukaemia. All trials on the drug at the French clinic have been suspended and the state prosecutor has opened an inquiry.
Naughty cannabis (Score:2, Insightful)
Waiting for all the morons to blame cannabis. It's Friday, work's done, I'm stoned. Love you all x
Re:Naughty cannabis (Score:5, Informative)
The article clarifies:
Touraine said the drug was meant to act on the body’s endocannabinoid system, which deals with pain. Earlier reports had suggested that the drug contained cannabinoids, an active ingredient found in cannabis plants, but the minister said it did not contain the drug or any derivatives of it.
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That's been proven SAVE for centuries....
Re:Naughty cannabis (Score:5, Funny)
It appears to alter the subject's ability to spell simple words, even when the word is emboldened and all caps.
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Re:Naughty cannabis (Score:5, Insightful)
Or Slashdot could step into the 21st century and provide an edit mechanism.
Even if is timed to a few minutes, it would be very helpful.
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Even if is timed to a few minutes, it would be very helpful.
Actually, timed edits never help. The amount of time needed to proofread your post is invariably "time of the edit function + 1 second". All timed editing does is frustrate you.
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Re:Naughty cannabis (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what preview is for. A timed edit doesn't help anything other than those who are in such a hurry to reply they don't actually read their post in the preview pane. And someone that careless should be allowed to demonstrate it.
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I think Scots sound like Scots because they're also kinda stoned.
Re:Naughty cannabis (Score:5, Informative)
Why not just let people consume the plant pretty much in its natural state?
Because that the endocannabinoid system can't be fully manipulated in all ways possible by just using naturally occurring stashes of THC.
The brain contains two primary receptors (CB1 and CB2) and a few minor G protein receptors as the trigger points of the endocannabinoid system.
The remainder of that system is the parts of the brain that generate THC to fill those receptors.
The system as a whole has a cascading effect on things in the brain everywhere from pain control to required memory forming processes to mood control.
Cannabis as found in plants is of forms not generated in the brain, and typically only stimulate one of the two major receptors, and rarely the G protein receptors at all.
From those that enjoy THC use recreationally, CB1 stimulation manifests as a "sleepy relaxed pain-killing high" where CB2 stimulation manifests as a "creativity and energy boost high"
But other than various amounts of receptor stimulation and thus various "how high" levels, you don't get much more out of it than that.
There are fully synthetic versions of chemicals designed specifically to stimulate both CB1 and CB2 (sometimes completely) as well as designed to hit the G protein receptors in various ways and by various methods.
These chemicals are usually called "THC equivalents" but the vast majority are anything but equivalent when looking at what they do and how they go about doing it in comparison to natural THC.
Did you know if you stimulate CB2 at 95%+, CB1 at anything over 50%, and block GPR18 uptake from the brains natural sources, you can induce a full sensory pathway failure for a few minutes?
The chemical JWH-210 was designed to do just this, and in effect causes a 10-15 minute "trapped in" coma with all the effects of sensory deprivation and decoupling the differentiation between sensory input and your memories of past sensory input.
The recreational crowd usually describes this as forced lucid dreaming.
The chemical AM-2232 stimulates CB1 partially and completely overloads CB2 beyond 100%, while also doing "something" to the Ki receptors previously thought unrelated to THC usage.
It has been described as "Imagine the highest high you have had, and multiply that by a hundred. Once you are high enough, keep going because it doesn't stop there"
The idea of AM was to provide pain control on the level of opiates, but without the dependency and withdraw issues opiates have. That part didn't quite work out in earlier versions of the chemical however (the withdraws were quite different from opiates, but there were still withdraws) and the chemical made a schedule 1 banned substance before further research could be done.
None of this is possible to obtain from THC in naturally growing plants.
The brain is much more complex than that, and can be "hacked" in many more ways and combinations using chemicals designed for that explicit purpose that have no naturally occurring equal.
If you'd like to kill a couple days with further reading, I submit to you the following research:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JWH-018 [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JWH_cannabinoids [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AM_cannabinoids [wikipedia.org]
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The post you replied to claim that it is the later versions of "spice" that lands people in hospital (if they make it there - some die quickly).
Re:Naughty cannabis (Score:5, Insightful)
Lighten up Francis. It may be psychotomimetic for some, but those sensations go away when the user comes down. If you experience this, then the simple solution is to not consume cannabis again.
As for psychological dependency, many things can lead to that. Typically people that become burnouts already had the type of personality to begin with. There are many brilliant people that use cannabis without issue.
Oh, some people are allergic to marijuana to the degree that smelling second hand smoke can kill them.
You need to provide a citation for this. You are not going to be able to find a report of someone dying from inhaling second-hand weed smoke because it doesn't happen.
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Now where's the money in that?
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Quick Bing search: http://www.druglibrary.org/sch... [druglibrary.org]
That article asserts that the first recorded use of cannabis is in ancient China 10,000 years ago.
Re:Naughty cannabis (Score:5, Informative)
Contrary to several reports in the French news media, the drug was not a cannabis-based painkiller, Ms. Touraine said.
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As with all synthetic cannabis, side-effects may include death... :(
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You really think that facts mean anything when it comes to drug hysteria? C'mon, how long have you been around?
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Not all cannabinoids are THC. In fact There is a whole market for synthetic cannabinoids as legal substitutes for marijuana, most of them much more dangerous than the real thing and usually made illegal as they gain popularity.
Additionally, because THC is a well known natural substance, it is not patentable and the pharmaceutical industry doesn't like it. Should they make a drug containing cannabinoids, they are more likely to use a molecule that can be patented.
Coming to a Headline Near You (Score:3)
Waiting for all the morons to blame cannabis.
API: Dozens of school children were murdered by a deranged gunman in YourCity, USA earlier today. Governor Dumbshit (R|D) deplored the loss of life, but reminding voters that "at least we can rest easy in the knowledge that the gunman's second amendment right to bear arms was in no way abridged." Early reports that the bullets contained cannabis, and that medical marijuana lies at the heart of the tragedy, have been debunked, although Governor Dumbshit (D|R) has promised voters a thorough investigation "to get to the real facts." After wiping drool from his chin, the Governor went on to say, "If cannabis bullets weren't responsible for the loss of life, then why did investigators feel the need to deny cannabis was involved? Clearly, where there's smoke, there's cannabis."
Re:Naughty cannabis (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Naughty cannabis (Score:5, Interesting)
It offers incredible potential for modulation, far beyond what cannabis can do, and I for one welcome our Pharma Overlords to throw their resources at these problems.. provided that they don't botch things up like this, for fucks sake.
That's great in the meantime I wish we could get nice legal packaged THC/CBD products to market. Its clear of the centuries (maybe longer) of not exactly controlled application of these compounds on human test subjects they are pretty darn safe, and at least not chemically habit forming. They are also at least somewhat effective in many people with a wide variety of chronic pain conditions.
Meanwhile our various overloads continue pushing a condition where the widely available strong pain killers are opiate. Which are highly habit forming, tend to negative side effects for the liver and kidneys when over used and have a much much narrower therapeutic dose than THC/CBD. So we have all kinds of people over dosing on them all the gwad damn time, others becoming addicts and shifting to their street drug relatives when they can no longer get them and subsequently over dosing on those. In short the irrational resistance to cannabis is killing lots of people.
As a libertarian I am generally in support of letting people do what they want. Letting a doctor prescribe medical cannabis is a no brainier. I have some reservations about it being totally legal for recreational use although I lean in favor; at the vary least it should be fully decriminalized. Being caught with or even selling weed should be like getting a parking ticket.
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I have had a cannabis prescription for over 3 years now (in the Netherlands) and it's far from optimal as analgesic medicine, especially in crude form when vaporizing or even smoking the flower or concentrated "oil". Distilling the good bits and selectively hitting the relevant receptors sounds promising to me, and I appreciate that the development of such a distillate takes time because there is a lot of unknown terrain involved.
Re:Naughty cannabis (Score:5, Informative)
System working as planned. (Score:5, Insightful)
>> 1 dead 5 wounded in a drug trial
That's why they call it a trial and limit who can be in it (so it's not 1,000 dead and 5,000 wounded).
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I will be curious to hear some real facts come out about this ... brain death isn't a small mishap, it's a pretty serious reaction.
One wonders what they were really given.
If you have 90 random people smoke or ingest cannabis, I bet none of them would end up brain dead.
Facts would be welcome (Score:2)
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TFA is short on facts, the claim it was cannabis derived is being rejected.
Short answer, it doesn't look like anybody has said anything meaningful yet about the actual drug in question.
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And they probably won't either, in order to protect the investment they've put in it so far..
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I also believe BIA 10-2474 is the compound based on what I've been able to piece together via web searches.
Here are the sources I located:
http://www.biocentury.com/prod... [biocentury.com] http://www.insurancejournal.co... [insurancejournal.com]
This is truly tragic, God help the people affected.
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At least not from a single dose.
I do know a few potheads, though, and "brain dead" is a pretty good description....
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If one of them is allergic it could happen. It may be what killed this brave* test pilot.
(* I really think he/she was, taking a risk for potentially improving the world)
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Duuuuude, if you can still walk after smokin the blunt... go out in the kitchen, there's gotta be some cheetos left, can ya fetch some?
Re:System working as planned. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly right. And its also exactly right that the prosecutors office investigate to make sure that all protocols were followed.
This sort of thing is rare because the protocols to get a drug approved for human testing generally work. We know occasionally there will be events like this and its a risk we take. But in an event like this we need to establish that nobody was playing fast and loose with the protocols. Make sure data wasn't faked, make sure anything that might have predicted this wasn't suppressed or concealed, make sure the test subjects were being properly monitored, etc.
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This sort of thing is rare because the protocols to get a drug approved for human testing generally work.
They work well enough that I'd be surprised if this was the result of corner-cutting on the research. I think it's more likely that something went wrong in the preparation.
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Though no one wants to be the one who dies in testing, bringing effective drugs to mass market years, or even months faster could save many more lives than they cost in riskier testing.
That's a utilitarian argument. Morally, justifying something by putting the good of mankind over an individual leads to all kinds of truly ugly nastiness.
There are situations, of course, where people need to be sacrificed for the good of others, or the good of all, but in my opinion they are the exception.
And medical testing in particular preys on those who are desperate, or financially in need already. They may not have a gun to your head, but in most cases its not like they'd be taking the drugs if they h
Re:System working as planned. (Score:4, Interesting)
Morally, justifying something by putting the good of mankind over an individual leads to all kinds of truly ugly nastiness.
Bullshit [yourlogicalfallacyis.com]. As a society, we routinely engage in self-sacrificing activities for "the good of mankind". We donate our time to charities. We donate money. We even donate our very blood, which can have some serious (though rare) consequences.
It's a matter of risk perception. Donating time or money are perceived as being no risk, even though charities are very often the target of homocides and other violent attacks, and monetary donations have an obvious economic detriment for the donor. Blood drives make a big show of their safety procedures, and continuously promote the benefits that are enabled by such donations. There are no advertising campaigns for clinical trials, though.
Stories like this play on fear, promoting the idea that pharmaceutical companies are careless and cavalier about running harmful clinical trials, when the reality is that of the tens of thousands of drug trials run every year, this one is notable specifically because it had a bad outcome.
And medical testing in particular preys on those who are desperate, or financially in need already. They may not have a gun to your head, but in most cases its not like they'd be taking the drugs if they had better choices.
Also bullshit [yourlogicalfallacyis.com]. Medical testing "preys" on mostly-healthy individuals who meet a particular set of criteria and, most importantly, can be found. That last part is often the most difficult. VERY few people go to their doctors and ask what they can do to help others, except for folks who are looking for unconventional ways to make money. Pharmaceutical researchers usually go to hospital networks and run queries against the hospital databases. Those databases are huge, and not tuned for such queries, so the queries take several months. Ultimately, there are very few qualified candidates returned, and they can be approached and asked to participate.
Unfortunately, most patients, unless they actually need a treatment, will not join a trial. They're under the impression that trials are unnecessarily risky, and usually won't try to understand the risk analysis before rejecting it. Out of a few hundred candidate subjects in the US, only a few dozen will actually participate. Those who are "desperate, or financially in need" are the ones who have enough incentive to overcome the prejudice and consider the actual risks.
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As a society, we routinely engage in self-sacrificing activities for "the good of mankind".
There's big difference between voluntary and involuntary. And exploiting the desperate and sick while still calling it "voluntary" on their part is dishonest about the situation. At best its 'semi-voluntary'. If they wouldn't do it if they weren't sick or desperate than its not really completely voluntary. When I give blood, that's completely voluntary.
Stories like this play on fear, promoting the idea that pharmaceutical companies are careless and cavalier about running harmful clinical trials, when the reality is that of the tens of thousands of drug trials run every year, this one is notable specifically because it had a bad outcome.
I was specifically responding to a post wherein it was proposed that we take MORE risks with medical trials. The reason the incidence of these outcomes is so
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I was recently part of a clinical trial for a new type of mealtime insulin. This included, among other things, checking my blood sugar four times a day instead of the twice that my regular doctor needed, taking both the mealtime insulin and my regular daily Lantus, and regular visits to the study's doctor for blood tests. And, because of the way the new insulin acts, I had a large number of hypoglycemic e
Watched it today (Score:3, Funny)
"Just fix the fucking leak already, you blind bastard."
D.Troi, ST:TNG Thine Own Self
Re: System working as planned. (Score:4, Insightful)
Your implicit assertion is that it's fine to sacrifice the few for the many, anyway.
No. It wasn't. The opposite generally.
What is actually fair, just, free, and utilitarian is giving individuals the right over their own body to volunteer for drug trials for the compensation they demand.
Sure. But that's not reality. Negotiation is never on equal footing. The poor and sick don't have the freedom to just walk away from the table if their compensation demands aren't met... they don't have a gun to their head, but they do not have good options. They cannot negotiate good deals for themselves.
And worse, if negotiation itself isn't one of their skills, they lack the resources to hire one to represent their interests better than they could.
Meanwhile, the person on the other side of the table, still eats and lives if they don't close the deal; and in many cases recruitment is their actual job -- this act of negotiation is the specific thing they are trained to do, and they are successul at their job because they are good at it.
To call it a 'free, just, and fair' when one side is severely handicapped is ridiculous bullshit.
Might as well put a guy who only plays poker once a year and barely knows the rules against a guy who plays poker professionally. On top of that the casual player will lose his apartment or be forced to drop school if he doesn't take home some winnings so he's under a lot of pressure to win, to take unnecessary risks, while the pro is financially secure, doesn't need to win, and can easily afford to lose and can make the best decision based purely on the odds (which he actually knows, while the other party is just roughly guessing at them). That's a fair match right? I mean... the deck itself is only metaphorically stacked against the poor guy, its not literally stacked against him. So ... fair?
Bullshit.
And THAT is how fair the average negotiation between a poor person and a corporation is, for anything.. .a job, a dispute, a settlement, anything.
I'll give you a no strings attached voluntary negotiation between parties for compensation for medical testing or anything else, when it's actually a level field.
Worried that poor people will disproportionately sign up for
drug trials because it pays well? Poor people are already at higher risk for injury and death and so for them it makes financial sense to better their lives at a small risk compared to their overall risk due to poverty.
The point being that the risk small to sign up precisely because of the controls in place. If we removed those controls, the risk goes up. Given that the poor do not have good options in the first place, upping the risk just forces them to assume more risk. They don't have the bargaining power to negotiate for more compensation to offset that risk. That becomes exploitation.
Clearly (Score:2)
We can prevent this from happening again if we eliminate the onerous regulatory requirements to perform drug trials.
(note: joke)
No cannabinoids (Score:2)
"the drug was a painkiller containing cannabinoids" the french ministry of health says no cannabinoids was involved:
http://www.liberation.fr/franc... [liberation.fr]
The drug is about treating anxiety.
One thing's for sure (Score:5, Informative)
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You know the other 2 are suddenly REALLY happy they got the placebo
Expect that in Phase 1 trials, no one is given a placebo. The purpose of Phase 1 trial is testing for safety, not efficacy, and is given to a very small number of healthy test subjects.
Re:One thing's for sure (Score:5, Interesting)
You know the other 2 are suddenly REALLY happy they got the placebo
Expect that in Phase 1 trials, no one is given a placebo. The purpose of Phase 1 trial is testing for safety, not efficacy, and is given to a very small number of healthy test subjects.
It has been reported in several media outlets that 6 were given the trial medication and 2 were given placebos in this particular round. In all around 90 people have participated in the Phase 1 trial so far, The article in the summary specifically states that some of the 90 were given placebos while the rest were given differing strengths of the drug. Everything I've read states that this particular round used the highest concentration of the drug and implies that with the other rounds the dosage increased with each round. So sounds like they were trying to find a maximum safe dosage. Basically they were looking for side effect or potential harm, in which case you certainly need a placebo group in each round to determine a baseline. And I would say they were wildly successful at determining the dosage at which the drug is unsafe.
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Expect that in Phase 1 trials, no one is given a placebo.
This is entirely incorrect.
Dose-ranging [wikipedia.org] is usually a phase I or early phase II clinical trial. Typically a dose ranging study will include a placebo group of subjects, and a few groups that receive different doses of the test drug. For instance, a typical dose-ranging study may include four groups: a placebo group, low-dose group, medium-dose group and a high-dose group.
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According to French website Figaro [lefigaro.fr],
[C]es essais de phase 1, après avoir été menés sur des chimpanzés, ont débuté le 9 juillet 2015 dans les locaux de Biotrial. 128 hommes et femmes participent aux essais. 90 personnes se sont vu administrer cette molécule à des doses variables, les autres ont pris une dose placebo , a indiqué la ministre.
"The phase-1 tests, after having been done on chimpanzees, started on July 9 2015 at Biotrial. '128 men and women participated in the tests. 90 were administered the drug at different doses, while the others took placebo', said the minister (of Health, Marisol Touraine)"
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Very good translation. Not automated, I presume.
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You know the other 2 are suddenly REALLY happy they got the placebo
actually, they were all taking the placebo. the first person fell down a flight of stairs after "feeling dizzy" and four behind him suddenly felt dizzy too falling down atop the first. it seems odd and unbelievable until you find out they were all soccer players. [imgur.com]
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But mixing it with Old Lace is fine.
Blame... cannabis? (Score:3)
I thought it went "Blame Canada".
But if it was natural cannabinoids we have to "congratulate" the lab for producing something deadly from a relatively benign plant...
Also, I am curious how this can happen. Before starting such trials they are supposed to give huge doses of the "new" stuff to some unfortunate non-human mammals. I didn't know there could be a fatal compound that is non-fatal for e.g. rats in larger doses (if it was, it would have raised many flags I assume).
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And, really, if you're trying to test this ... do a bloody honest test.
You do an study in which one group is (placebo|synthetic) and another group which is (placebo|pot).
If you're trying to test a lab-made version of it, you should also be testing the real thing to prove you're doing better.
Nobody will let you run that test, but I'm betting anxiety among your group with the pot goes down, unless someone has too much and has an unpleasant ride. I'm also betting absolutely ZERO of your pot users end up brain
Drug trials (Score:2)
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Of course we do, all the truly effective ones now are opioids and they get you high, too, and our Calvinist morality and repressive drug control regime hates this, so we are desperately trying to find something, anything, that actually works as a painkiller without any euphoric side effects.
True, there are some alternatives, but all the really heavy anti-inflammatories have nasty cardiovascular risks and the others, like gabapentin do some nasty things to neurotransmitters and really only have marginal effe
Re:Drug trials (Score:4, Insightful)
> and our Calvinist morality and repressive drug control regime hates this
Oh please! Problem with all current pain killers is that they are NOT EFFECTIVE for chronic pain. Opioids require ever bigger dosage to get the same effect, and your plan to "monitor their therapies" just mean that if the source of the pain is not dealt with, treatment will not be effective. But sure, blame Calvinists.
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My understanding (and experience) with opioids is that the tolerance is mostly to the psychological effects, not the actual pain reduction.
This was also my personal experience after an accident ripped my hand up, requiring half of a finger to be amputated and a bone fusion in the other finger.
I got decent pain relief on a fixed quantity of oxycodone for about 4-5 months.
Not sure if that counts as "chronic pain" but without oxycodone, my hand hurt like crazy until it had sufficiently healed. Maybe it's diff
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I too am no doctor, but I have spent time under pain killers after surgery and if your case was anything like mine, the original source of pain became less and less intense. Like, if in the first week you would be on pain level 9 without medication, but after 10 weeks pain level would have dropped to level 5, and the required amount of morphine is the same, then you have developed some tolerance.
I had to use morphine for couple of weeks and didn't even notice any withdrawal, but what I have gathered (anecdo
Re: Drug trials (Score:2)
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It's easy money. I know poor people who do this. It's kind of fucked up, but that's how it is.
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I volunteered in a drug trial around 1995 or so. Back then, it paid NLG 100 per day, or EUR 70 corrected for inflation. When you're in college, that's a lot of money, especially since you can study your quantum mechanics at the same time. There was a guy who was participating in studies all the time.
It was a phase-2 trial though; the (benign) side effects were already known. Phase 1 and drugs with severe side effects paid better. And we were told what kind of medicine it was and what side effects to expect
Interesting reminder... (Score:2)
This is a pretty interesting reminder that many drugs' mechanism of action aren't fully understood. Even those that are well known operate solely by suppressing or enhancing some specific chemical reaction chain, so in reality they're pretty blunt tools. It's really interesting to think about the drug discovery process; everyone assumes that they at least won't die if the drug has made it to human trials, but apparently that's not the case!
Yes but how many were in the control group? (Score:2)
I know know, terrible insensitive joke.
Phase 1...? (Score:2)
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That was done in phase 0 testing.
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Perhaps it is just phase 1 human trials.
They might have already gone through all the phases of animal trials.
Would animal testing on chimps or monkeys help? (Score:2)
Do they do animal testing with drugs like this on chimps or monkeys to ascertain this kind of safety ahead of time before giving it to humans?
I would imagine they might have given it to rats just to make sure they didn't fall over dead immediately, maybe dogs, too, but I would expect that chimps would have a brain structure more similar to humans and might have been more revealing in safety of a drug like this.
I can appreciate where some chimp experiments might be a bit harsh, but a pain killer that you hav
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Then use lawyers and politicians.
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They would have to find some that weren't brain-damaged going into the trial.
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Do they do animal testing with drugs like this on chimps or monkeys to ascertain this kind of safety ahead of time before giving it to humans?
RTFA
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Correlation... (Score:4, Informative)
BIA 10-2474 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:BIA 10-2474 (Score:5, Informative)
This is still a speculation. The drug does seem to be called BIA 10-2474, according to recruitment materials from the drug testing company. There is only circumstantial evidence that this is a fatty acid amide hydroxylase (FAAH) inhibitor. The speculations are based on patent filings [freepatentsonline.com] by the pharmaceutical company which ordered the trial (Bial) and the general description that the drugs was "meant to act on the body’s endocannabinoid system". FAAH is an enzyme that among other things degrades endocanabinoids. The rational is that if you slow the degradation of endocanabinoids you will experience less pain (works on mice). So far nobody who is in position to know it has made a statement as to the specific mode of action of the drug or its chemical structure.
According to fairly vague statements it seems that they were doing a dose escalation study, where different groups of people are given increasing doses of the compound in order to determine the point where the side effects start to show up. The people who got injured were in the group that received the highest dose. Usually this is done very carefully so you can stop before the side effects become severe. However, the response to drugs is not always in linear relationship with the dose and a small increase over a certain threshold may produce very severe adverse effects. This is always worked out in advance on lab animals (mice, rats, rabbits, etc). In the patent application they only cite testing in mice. Subtle differences in the biology of lab animals and humans have caused at least one other clinical trial to turn into a disaster [nih.gov]. Of course there is always the possibility that somebody screwed up the dosing and gave them more than they should have received.
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Heavy Vaper only says that because they've never tried fuck spice. It'll blow your mind, and more.
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Also, any drug already on the market is unsafe if you take enough of it. Take a sufficient number of aspirin and it will result in illness or outri
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
That happened at a homoeopathic clinic once. Instead of getting 0.0 of the active ingredient they got 000.0.
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That happened at a homoeopathic clinic once. Instead of getting 0.0 of the active ingredient they got 000.0.
And they drowned?
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You can compensate a volunteer and still have them be considered a volunteer. What the hell are you talking about?
The military in any country which doesn't have mandatory service is a "volunteer army". But they sure as hell get paid for it.
You're making up a definition of volunteer which isn't real in this case.
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You can compensate a volunteer and still have them be considered a volunteer. What the hell are you talking about?
The military in any country which doesn't have mandatory service is a "volunteer army". But they sure as hell get paid for it.
You're making up a definition of volunteer which isn't real in this case.
In the general sense, volunteers are not compensated:
Volunteering is generally considered an altruistic activity where an individual or group provides services for no financial gain. Volunteering is also renowned for skill development, and is often intended to promote goodness or to improve human quality of life. Volunteering may have positive benefits for the volunteer as well as for the person or community served.[1] It is also intended to make contacts for possible employment. Many volunteers are specifically trained in the areas they work, such as medicine, education, or emergency rescue. Others serve on an as-needed basis, such as in response to a natural disaster.
Military volunteers are a special case:
A military volunteer is a person who enlists in military service by free will, and is not a mercenary or a foreign legionnaire. Volunteers often enlist to fight in the armed forces of a foreign country. Military volunteers are essential for the operation of volunteer militaries.
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basic english fail:
volunteer means to freely offer, NOT necessarily to offer without compensation, hence a volunteer can be paid, and often is (volunteer firefighter, eg)!
Unless these people are independently wealthy and have no need for money, they are not "freely offering". If you entice someone to do something with cash that they need or want, they are not volunteering, it's an exchange of goods or services -- they are offering their body for money.
If people aren't doing it for the money, then why do they get paid?
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Wrong. In an army, volunteers generally means those who are not conscripts. But both get paid.
You may want to google for terms like "false dichotomy".
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You joke but it's actually a serious problem in medicine that drugs aren't being sufficiently tested on female subjects.
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You joke but it's actually a serious problem in medicine that drugs aren't being sufficiently tested on female subjects.
I believe the problem is that because of various historic factors, but I suspect that there may still be normal to that specify healthy adult males as being the only suitable test candidates in phase 1 trails, partial because at that stage the researchers want to minimise possible complications including unknown / undisclosed pregnancies.
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