An extreme case of questionable ethics 
Debate on the morality of the tests in prisons unfolded in the shadows. 

Mike Blanchfield and Jim Bronskill 
The Ottawa Citizen
28 September 1998
The Canadian debate over using prison inmates as guinea pigs took place much like the tests themselves -- behind closed doors and with little public attention. On an unusually mild November morning in 1975, dozens of doctors, criminologists and social scientists filed into the Donald Gordon Conference Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston to discuss the weighty ethical questions surrounding a practice that had gone on for years. A short walk from the conference, behind the walls of Kingston-area prisons, hundreds of male and female inmates had quietly served science and industry.  As a Citizen investigation has revealed, federal prisoners were test subjects throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Volunteers took part in trials of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, other unproven pharmaceuticals and food additives, as well as in sensory deprivation research and pain studies. Drug companies were welcomed into various prisons to conduct trials, but some of the research was funded or sponsored by federal agencies, including the Health Department and the Solicitor General. The experiments -- and the ethical debate they spawned -- unfolded privately, among the scientific and policy elite. Now, with these new revelations, the discussion has moved out of the shadows. And ethicists are questioning whether researchers, particularly those who did commercial drug studies on prisoners, should have known better.  “I think it reflected an ethical insensitivity on the part of the companies,” said Arthur Schafer, director of the University of Manitoba’s applied ethics centre. Michael McDonald of the University of British Columbia recently helped develop a new Canadian code to guide researchers working with humans -- a policy he believes would rule out pharmaceutical trials on inmates.  Some of the prison research that took place in the 1960s and ‘70s was unfortunate “even given the context of the times,” said Mr. McDonald, director of UBC’s Centre for Applied Ethics. “I do think there were norms out there, perhaps more quoted than observed, that would have indicated serious problems with just this kind of experimental work.” 
By the early 1970s, the use of prisoners in research had already created a public outcry in the United States. Newspaper and magazine accounts drew attention to prison experiments ranging from sloppy drug trials to infection of inmates with the malaria virus. The U.S. Senate held public hearings into research on humans, including inmates, who had become a convenient test pool for pharmaceutical companies and others with untried products. After several years of negative publicity, prisons and companies stopped the practice altogether. 
In Canada, a parallel debate was taking place. But it was occurring out of the public eye. At the 1975 conference in Kingston, academics and health professionals met to discuss the legal, ethical and moral dimensions of the medical treatment of prisoners. It was an exclusive gathering, closed to the media and other members of the public. John Deutsch, the conference chairman, noted at the time that privacy was desirable as participants would be examining various “real-life” cases involving legal and ethical problems. “Whether the outcome of our deliberations will subsequently warrant any public statement will be at the discretion of the solicitor general.” Though delegates discussed an assortment of issues, the ethics of experimenting on prisoners was perhaps the most contentious matter at the three-day conference. Archival documents show participants debated the issue of “free and informed” consent to take part in research, and the boundary between “innovative therapies and experimentation.” 
One government account of the proceedings said: “It was the opinion of the assembly that the matter of experimentation in all its aspects, as “guinea pigs’ was of major importance.” However, delegates couldn’t agree on whether the practice should continue. 
Some were concerned about inmates being coerced or exploited into serving science. Others felt prohibiting clinical trials would deprive prisoners of the redemptive aspects of participating in a “social contract” with the broader community. In early 1978, after more than two years of post-conference deliberations, the Canadian penitentiary service banned the use of inmates for research unrelated to their specific health needs. Fifteen years earlier, the prison service had developed guidelines governing inmate participation in research. The policy stressed the need for voluntary consent, justification for the experiment, the safety of the subject and the approval of projects by senior officials.  The guidelines were modelled after the Nuremberg Code, an international convention drafted in the late 1940s to prevent a repeat of Nazi atrocities. It was the result of the Nuremberg Trials, which exposed the horrifying human experiments by doctors of the Third Reich. The code said in part that human research subjects “should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other form of constraint or coercion.” As ethicists such as Mr. Schafer point out, the edicts of Nuremberg did not penetrate the Cold War medical and psychiatric ethos.  “Cultural practices change slowly. The culture of medicine -- medical research -- has a long history, not just in Germany, of treating research subjects with not much respect,” said Mr. Schafer. “Simply passing the Nuremberg Code, notwithstanding the shock and horror of the medical experiments - and having it filed on your shelf didn’t mean that the culture of medical research automatically changed everywhere, instantly.” 
Earlier this month, Canada’s major research councils issued an extensive new policy on human experimentation, the product of a three-year effort by UBC’s Mr. McDonald and others concerned with ethics. The policy stresses free and informed consent must be voluntarily given, without manipulation, undue influence or coercion. It says the voluntariness of prisoners and regimented organizations such as the military and police “may be restricted because their institutional context implies undue pressure.” The goal of the new guidelines, the first revision of existing policies in more than a decade, is to prevent a recurrence of past abuses. But McDonald warns there are no guarantees each fresh set of rules will be followed.  “I’m not trying to be sanctimonious about it,” he said. “We may be doing things that the next generation is going to look askance at, too.” 

CORRECTIONS CANADA HIRES ETHICIST TO STUDY PRISON LSD TESTS:
Subject of 
1960’s tests says move is intended to delay compensation
Mike Blanchfield

offering advice on how to approach former inmates who were part of the study (Only two of the 23 women could be located by the writers of the report.) 

providing guidelines to assess the long-term effects of LSD. 

providing a professional opinion on whether the ethical standards of the day were respected regarding the administration of LSD 

 

Government accused of withholding files on prison LSD testing
Question of relevance: Lawyer planning to launch class-action suit
Jim Bronskill and Mike Blanchfield 
Southam News and Ottawa Citizen 
December 08, 1999

OTTAWA - The lawyer for a woman who was given LSD while she was imprisoned in the 1960s accused the federal government yesterday of holding back key files. James Newland, who represents former inmate Dorothy Proctor, argued in Ontario Superior Court that the government has withheld “innumerable documents” relevant to the matter. A total of 23 female inmates were given LSD as part of a 1961 study at the federal Prison for Women in Kingston, Ont. Mr. Newland also told the court he intends to pursue the matter as a class action. 
Linda Wall, representing the federal government, said the documents Mr.  Newland wants on the record are either irrelevant or cannot be disclosed because they are private medical files. Master Robert Beaudoin, the court official who heard the arguments, reserved judgment.  Ms. Proctor is suing the government and Correctional Service officials for giving her LSD, saying it caused brain damage and terrifying hallucinations. Another of Mr. Newland’s clients, who wishes to remain anonymous, approached corrections officials last year after they invited participants in the LSD study to come forward. She says the officials repeatedly asked her in the autumn of 1998 to submit to a battery of psychological tests as part of their examination of her claims. The government argues the hallucinogen was administered to female prison inmates with the aim of “promoting the health of individuals”—not for experimental purposes. 
A Correctional Service board of inquiry had recommended that Ms. Proctor receive compensation and a formal apology. However, the government last year referred the matter to McGill University for further study, prompting Ms. Proctor’s lawsuit. A subsequent investigation by Southam News and the Ottawa Citizen showed that hundreds of federal inmates were used as test subjects in scientific experiments.  Prisoners took part in trials of untested pharmaceuticals, spent days in dark cells as part of sensory-deprivation research and received painful shocks in studies of cigarette smokers. 
The revelations sparked an extensive federal effort, not yet complete, to determine the full scope of the prison programs and analyze the implications. Researchers have so far compiled thousands of pages of archival records, internal memos and medical journal articles. However, not all of these records were forwarded to Mr. Newland.  He argued in court yesterday that the government “has quite clearly failed to produce a substantial volume of documents.” He only became aware of the missing material when the Correctional Service publicly released hundreds of pages under the Access to Information Act. 
As an example, Mr. Newland cited correspondence from 1958 indicating officials considered administering LSD to inmates at the now closed B.C.  Penitentiary. He argued the letter was relevant to Ms. Proctor’s lawsuit and should have been disclosed by the government as part of the court process. “That was one document, among many, that was not produced.” Other material located by the Correctional Service shows the 1961 LSD study prompted a flurry of questions from senior government officials in the late 1960s. The matter hit the Toronto newspapers in 1968 when Christine Bauman, one of the 23 women in the LSD test, discussed the experience. Ms. Bauman was acquitted of stealing a sweater from a Toronto store partly on the strength of testimony that she may have been impaired by lingering effects of the LSD she received seven years earlier in prison. 
The press reports prompted the solicitor general’s office to demand a report from the commissioner of penitentiaries in early 1968.  The archival records also show prison psychiatrist George Scott, who oversaw the female LSD study, supervised administration of the hallucinogen to two male inmates in Kingston penitentiaries. 
According to one memo, an unnamed man at Collins Bay Penitentiary received LSD twice in April, 1965, while a prisoner at Kingston Penitentiary was given the drug on two occasions in February, 1962.

Experiments in pain
by
Jim Bronskill and Mike Blanchfield
The Ottawa Citizen
How medical researchers subjected volunteer prisoners to pain, isolation
and shocks in 20 years of secretive tests
26 September 1998

For more than a decade, Canadian prisoners served as guinea pigs in the name of commerce and medical science. A Citizen investigation has discovered that federal inmates were test subjects in numerous questionable experiments, including trials of unproven pharmaceuticals, sensory-deprivation research and pain studies employing electric shocks. The tests, conducted quietly behind prison walls throughout the 1960s and well into the 1970s, involved hundreds of male and female convicts across the country. The research—sponsored by drug companies, universities and the federal government—has received scant attention over the years, despite a public furore more than two decades ago about similar experimentation in the United States. 
Until now, it has been widely assumed that such experiments were restricted to prisons south of the 49th parallel. The Canadian government is currently facing a lawsuit from an inmate subjected to a 1960s LSD-25 experiment aimed at rehabilitating addicts at the Prison for Women in Kingston. Dorothy Proctor says federal officials, the prison and its staff were “callous and reckless” in administering the drug to her. Archival documents, journal articles and correspondence show the LSD trial was just one of many experiments in which prisoners made their bodies available to researchers. Inmates took part in clinical trials of pharmaceuticals including penicillin products, sedatives and anti-bacterial agents. Some ingested pesticide traces to better understand how the body processed them.  The protocol for 1963 tests of a new drug listed only as W-327 noted subjects could expect diarrhea, dizziness, nausea and vomiting. 
Academic investigators saw prisoners as useful subjects for exploring the nature of various addictions, homosexuality, genetic makeup and social isolation. In particular, the cluster of institutions in and around Kingston piqued the interest of several researchers. In one sensory-deprivation study, 10 Kingston Penitentiary inmates spent seven days in dark isolation cells to help researchers determine the effects on their desire for visual and auditory stimulation. One prisoner began to panic after four days. Another hallucinated during the final two days, seeing spiders and the face of his dead brother.  In another test, inmates experienced terrifying shocks through electrodes attached to their forearms to see if the jolts would discourage smoking. 
Records indicate that prisoners volunteered for the experiments, but some ethicists question whether people locked behind bars can truly offer informed consent to such tests. “You have to be extra careful when you’re in these circumstances,” said Michael McDonald, a University of British Columbia professor who recently helped develop a new national policy for human experimentation. Beginning in late 1963, researchers and prison officials were expressly forbidden from promising inmates rewards, such as reduced sentences, for taking part in studies. But Mr. McDonald questions whether prisoners would take such a declaration at face value: “Are there pressures to participate that can’t be seen?” he asked after reviewing records of the Canadian prison studies. “I do have real concerns about some of the intrusiveness of some of the (experimentation), worries about the voluntariness of it, and the protections given to people to avoid exploiting their institutionalized circumstances.” 
The use of prisoners to test pharmaceuticals appears to have petered out in the mid-1970s as the ethical storm in the United States reached a crescendo. The Canadian penitentiary service issued medical policy guidelines in early 1978 banning clinical trials and other investigative procedures unrelated to specific health needs of Canadian inmates. Many of the medical directors who planned trials for drug companies in the 1960s have retired or died, said Robert Dugal, director of university and scientific affairs with the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Canada. But Mr. Dugal said current medical directors of member companies feel clinical testing of drugs on prisoners is unethical. “We can say, in general terms, that it was seen as being acceptable at the time and no longer is, as many things are today,” he said. “The science of ethics is a new one, and has evolved considerably in the last 20 years.” Mr. Dugal said association members do not test pharmaceuticals in prisons today, an exception being voluntary trials of new AIDS drugs designed to treat HIV-positive inmates. 
Mr. McDonald, director of UBC’s Centre for Applied Ethics, says Canada’s new guidelines for tests on humans would effectively rule out performing tests on prisoners: “I think research ethics boards would be loath to pass something where a pharmaceutical trial was done on those populations.”  In the 1960s, federal prisons were fertile testing grounds for both U.S. and Canadian branches of large drug companies. Fifty inmates from Collins Bay penitentiary in Kingston took part in an October 1967 study by Bristol Laboratories of Syracuse, New York, to compare the pain caused by different intramuscular injections of Rolitetracycline, an antibacterial drug. The test “evidently caused considerable pain around the area of injection,” said an account of the experiments in the Federal Corrections journal. Present for the experiment were prison psychiatrist George Scott and Dr.
G.S. Varnam, medical director of Bristol Laboratories of Canada. But Dr.  James Taggart, from Bristol’s clinical research branch in Syracuse, headed the study. In an interview, Mr. Scott, 83, had trouble recalling pharmaceutical tests, but said plainly, “Never was there anything unethical.” 
Evidence of U.S. influence can be seen as early as 1963 in a letter from the Upjohn Co. of Canada to Dr. Louis Gendreau, director of medical services for the federal penitentiary service. It noted Upjohn’s desire to undertake a project at Kingston Penitentiary as soon as the company’s research laboratories in Kalamazoo, Michigan, indicated their plans.  A handwritten postscript to the letter suggests Dr. Gendreau read an article in that week’s Saturday Evening Post—with comedian Jack Benny on the cover—about U.S. prison trials. 
U.S. prisoners took part in a wide range of experiments, involving everything from testing toothpaste and mouthwash to injection of cancer cells and exposure to intense radiation. The U.S. projects—involving more than 3,000 inmates annually by the early 1960s—included infecting Atlanta prisoners with malaria, prompting intense fevers and chronic aches. Inmates of the Federal Reformatory in Chillicothe, Ohio, were given strains of live polio virus with the aim of developing an oral vaccine. Pharmaceutical companies saw prison trials as a cheap and easy means of vetting new drugs. One Michigan state prison had its own test facility built and run by pharmaceutical firms. Criticism of the practices, notably Jessica Mitford’s 1973 book KIND AND USUAL PUNISHMENT, focused public attention on the ethical dimensions of inmate testing. Some argued inmates were incapable of offering voluntary consent because prisons are inherently coercive environments. Others said medical research should not be conducted on the backs of disadvantaged people such as prisoners. Hearings led by U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy delved into the subject of human experimentation, including prison testing. 
In the early 1960s, however, Canadian justice officials pointed to the U.S.  prison trials as a good reason to allow the same sort of studies. A July 1963 memo by Dr. Gendreau stressed the “highly important medical research and valuable results” stemming from the malaria and polio vaccine work. But the Canadian prison research differed from the U.S. programs in at least one respect. Canadian officials decided early on that paying prisoners for their participation—common in the U.S.—should be discouraged.  But ethical considerations weren’t the main reason—at least not initially. The prison service objected to inmates being paid for participating in a 1956 study of alcoholism because they would then routinely expect to receive money from future researchers.  A technician who assisted in a 1967 drug trial recalls being advised not to reward the prisoners. “We never gave them one bloody penny,” he said. “I know that for a fact.” Instead, officials encouraged donations to each prison’s inmate welfare fund.  Participants in the 1967 Rolitetracycline study received cigarettes, soft drinks and sandwiches. In addition, Bristol’s U.S. lab sent a cheque to purchase a television for a Kingston hospital that treated inmates. 
Interest from pharmaceutical companies in prison research increased after the federal Health Department’s Food and Drug division insisted in 1963 that new drugs, even those used in other countries, be subject to clinical trials on human beings to demonstrate their safety. The intent was to avoid another Thalidomide tragedy, which caused deformities in the children of mothers who took the sedative in pregnancy. “Penitentiaries, which contain a regimented and controlled (at times) population, have been considered as a potential source of assistance in this work,” Dr. Gendreau wrote to the prisons commissioner. “More and more requests will be made, supported by the fact that many such experiments are permitted and being carried on in United States federal and state prisons.” 
In September 1963, the prison service issued an ethics policy to be “rigidly applied and observed” for medical and psychological research.  The detailed policy, modeled largely on the Nuremberg Code—written after the Second World War atrocities of the Nazis were revealed—stressed the importance of voluntary consent, the justification for the experiment, the safety of the subject and approval of the project by the commissioner and his medical staff. 
It appears most countries, other than the United States, interpreted the Nuremberg Code provision concerning the ability to “exercise free power of choice” as precluding the use of prisoners in experimentation. “It should be noted that the use of prisoners as research subjects seems to have been a uniquely American practice in the years following World War Two,” said the 1995 report of U.S. Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.  It’s now clear that Canada could have been added to the list. 
In her book, Ms. Mitford said observation of the Nuremberg Code “would end altogether the practice of using prisoners as subjects.” The ethics policy of the Canadian prison service said all necessary precautions must be taken to protect subjects from even remote possibility of any harmful consequences. “The utmost consideration must be given to the avoidance of any suffering either mental or physical,” read a provision of the code.  But, on the surface, some of the experiments seem to have clearly violated the edict by their very design.  One test, carried out by researchers from Queen’s University involved administration of what male penitentiary inmates described as “painful, and even terrifying” electric shock to determine whether the stimulus would encourage smokers to quit.  The findings, published in a 1968 edition of Canadian Psychologist, noted evidence of reduced smoking levels more than two years later among those who received the worst shocks. 
In the days before the U.S. tests generated intense criticism, Canadian officials perceived the effects on inmate volunteers as positive.  “It provides for them an opportunity to identify themselves with society, whose laws they have violated,” Dr. Gendreau wrote in a 1963 memo. “It gives participating inmates a feeling of self-respect. It builds up the self-esteem of those who have a low opinion of themselves; they know they can become useful to millions of people.” 
An account of a 1965 Manitoba prison study to discover a serum to prevent miscarriages suggests the appeal to prisoners’ sense of worth was persuasive. “The inmates selected, while skeptical at first, willingly signed the paper permitting the use of their bodies when it was mentioned that it might help preserve the life of an unborn baby,” said a Federal Corrections article. However, even in the 1960s, not everyone in the prison community agreed with testing on inmates. 
Dr. Guy Richmond, a former senior medical officer with the British Columbia Corrections branch, wrote in his 1975 career retrospective, Prison Doctor, that research on prisoners for commercial or military purposes should be forbidden. “I also disapprove of experiments which might prove harmful to the inmates, even if they volunteer or are promised rewards such as money or remission of sentence,” wrote Dr. Richmond, stationed at B.C.’s Oakalla prison until 1969, when he retired. “We had requests from drug companies to try products of theirs not yet on the market which required more testing for side effects. Since we felt such experiments were undesirable the requests were denied.”  Dr. Richmond, though, performed some research involving prisoners, studying the sex chromatin of male and female homosexual offenders in 1956. He looked for abnormalities that might explain their sexual preference, but found none. 
Records on the nature and number of tests conducted in the Canadian prison system are scarce. There is little readily available information on the outcome of many studies, nor data on whether any prisoners suffered ill-effects.  Still, the commissioner of penitentiaries’ annual report for 1967-68 suggests the practice of testing new drugs had become commonplace as the end of the decade neared. “A number of pharmaceutical firms have carried out research using inmates to determine what the effects of some of their marketable drugs could be—this after they had agreed to comply with the rules and regulations governing such research and had received the approval of the commissioner.”  
In 1972, plans for a Quebec study of three penicillin preparations rankled prison officials when the firm organizing the tests struck Leclerc institution’s in-house doctor from the ethics committee reviewing the experiment. The prison doctor had been replaced by a University of Montreal professor. However, federal officials let the study proceed. Under the heading “adverse effects,” the experiment protocol said, “Untoward effects, either observed or volunteered, that would be considered drug-related should be reported.” 
Pharmaceuticals weren’t the only commercial products tried out on prisoners. Brands of shampoo and cigarettes were tested at Leclerc Institution. Nor were companies alone in their use of inmates. In October, 1967, the federal Health Department’s Food and Drug Directorate studied the absorption and excretion of acetylsalicylic acid, or ASA, when administered orally and rectally. Several blood and urine specimens were collected from the 10 Kingston-area prisoners who volunteered. In another study, researchers from Queen’s University teamed up with the Food and Drug Directorate to assess ways the human body alters and excretes chemicals such as agricultural pesticides and sweetening agents. A nervous Health Department official suggested publicizing the project “to prevent inaccurate, misleading and derogatory claims about it which we fear may appear in the lay press.” A draft news release prepared by the department stressed the “extremely small amounts” of the chemicals to be given to volunteers, the need to understand the body’s reaction to the substances and the “elaborate care” taken to protect subjects. 
University researchers in Halifax, Toronto and elsewhere also saw prisons as ready-made laboratories. Penitentiary officials frequently received requests from academics to perform tests—some related to correctional research, others with no apparent connection. In a study done before the penitentiary ethics code was drafted, several Prison for Women inmates dipped their arms in water full of ice cubes until they could no longer bear the pain to see whether drug addicts had lower tolerance thresholds than non-addicts. The experience may have been unpleasant, but was ultimately harmless, said James Inglis, the Queen’s University psychology professor who supervised the student conducting the research.  Mr. Inglis, now retired, believes such an experiment would still be allowed today. “I think it would probably get past an ethics committee without any bother, because there’s no question of hurting anybody or deceiving them.  They were told what was happening.” 
The attractive nature of the prison setting for academic researchers created tensions. Prison psychologist Mark Eveson, who administered the LSD trials, wrote the commissioner of penitentiaries in November, 1962, expressing frustration. Mr. Eveson believed university participation in research projects could be of assistance to the prison service, but only if federal officials retained “a strong measure of control” on the work done to ensure maximum practical value for correctional staff. “I do not feel we should encourage the kind of projects which appear in many theses in which the penitentiary populations are used as subjects merely because there are no other populations so permanent and captive in nature.” 

Last Updated June 6, 1999