Friday, March 31, 2006

A controversial idea

The procedure that every successfully-tested medicine should undergo, in order to be able to appear on a drugstore’s shelf is, for understandable reasons, excruciatingly time consuming. It’s needless to say that how many patients lose their life or lead a miserable life during this approval period, which may take years even decades. And the most considerable obstacle is, as expected, the possible dangers and consequences of examining new drugs on human beings.

Now, what if we let those criminals who are passing very long term, even life sentences in jail, to introduce themselves as volunteers to be tested with new life-saving drugs, in exchange for paroles, proportional to the risk they are going to take.

Relax! I’m not suggesting a Nazi-style lethal experimentation on human beings. What I’m saying is, it won’t hurt if they are provided with this CHOICE of cutting down their sentences in exchange of serving to humanity and paying back their debts to the society, instead of pouring their years and the people’s tax money into the drain in enormously costly detention facilities. And since nobody is forcing them to do so, they can always ignore the chance and spent the rest of their lives in jail!

Strange maybe, unconventional perhaps, but inhumane, I don’t think so. Just think about all those lives that will be saved if we just could be able to speed up the drug-approval-process by years or even months. By the way, not only it can be helpful tackling the problem of over crowded prisons, but also the money, being used for building new prisons, can be used to prevent crime in the first place.

Just think about it.