arbi  
stripcreator donor

arbi says:

I was a guinea pig for big pharma, by Arbitrary Aardvark. Vernal Equinox 2016, Indianapolis. 08:04:02 PM Almost ten years ago, I was running out of the money my grandfather had left me after my dad died, but I didn't want to go back to the kind of shit jobs I'd had before, and I wasn't ready mentally to try to be a lawyer, which is what I went to school for. In school, I had done a few medical experiments. The first one, the payment was that I got curried egg salad sandwiches, helping a grad student study whatever it was. The second one paid $300 for two weekends at a place called ABC labs, that isn't there anymore. They put a tube in my wrist, gave us a pill, and took blood samples through the tube. It seemed like easy money. A year later in Kansas I signed up for one that was going to pay $5000, but a week into it my liver enzymes were all wrong, and they took me out of the study but kept me at the site, because I was very sick. It turned out I'd come down with mono just before going in the study. Probably from eating dumpster food – I've been freegan since before there was a word for it. And then I got shingles, not fun. So I moved to Indy, first place I'd passed the bar, and though no more about medical experiments until about 10 years later. I'd spent 3 years trying to be a lawyer and failed. I'd worked in a warehouse, as the dalai lama's nephews headwaiter, as a courier and a temp. Lost money day trading and then in real estate. I was ready to try medical experiments again. I tried 3 times to get in at Eli Lilly but never did. Lilly no longer does it own clinical trials after a girl killed herself during an anti-depressant study. They pharm out the studies to other research labs like covance. So I started researching online and found a site that listed all the clinics and how to sign up. That changed my life, and these days I volunteer as one of the moderators at the online forum on that site, as “vark”. Soon I was driving to kalamazoo or waukegan or madison or southern indiana, anywhere there was a lab that was recruiting. I set a goal to make $10,000 that first year, and if that worked out I'd give it 3 years before becoming a recruiter. I made $17K that first year, a bit of beginner's luck and a lot of driving and learning how to play the game. If you keep good records, you can write off $17K in expenses and end up not owing taxes. Good record-keeping is essential to that approach, otherwise you'd better set aside at least 15% because the IRS considers you a self-employed independent contractor. I write a daily comic that helps me keep track of where I am and what I'm spending or making. [aside to editor: can run a comic or two on the page if you want. http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/arbi/586316# for example] In a typical study, you stay in the lab for two weeks or so. During that time they give you a medicine, usually a pill, and they take your blood a lot. You might be pissing in a jug or getting hooked up to an ekg machine or whatever the study design calls for, and they take your blood pressure and temperature pretty often. You don't leave, you eat what they give you – it's not vegetarian – and you get ordered around a good bit. When it's over, you might have to come back for a follow up visit in a week or two, then you get a check. Typically $2000 to $5000 depending on factors such as how long the study lasts. Then you take a month off while you line up the next one, so that your system is clear. Some of these places are nice, like a luxury hotel. DaVita in Denver is the best. Some of these places are dumps, where you get crowded into a bunkroom, and spend you days sitting on a hard chair while the TV blares at you and you can't reach an outlet for your laptop, and your fellow lab rats are just out of jail or rehab. Arkansas Research was like that but it went under. Who can do these studies? If you are 18-45, very healthy, not taking any medications or using drugs or tobacco or a raging alcoholic, your chances aren't bad, maybe 50-50%, of being able to get into studies. You might turn out to have high blood pressure or a bad heart or a gland problem, something that won't kill you but can keep you from doing studies. If this sounds like the life for you, drop me a line,and I can be your study broker for 15%. I'm getting too old for this, and I'm ready to teach my tricks to a new generation. If you have a real job, that pays a living wage, do that instead. But if like me you are a slacker who doesn't quite fit in anywhere, this might be the gig for you. Don't bother contacting me if you smoke or can't piss clean – these aren't the kind of tests you can fool. However, here's another dirty little secret of the trade. The less honest you are, the more money you can make as a lab rat. I've become pretty cynical about some of the things I've seen. I'm not telling anyone to lie – doing so could be unsafe. I'm saying you'll be competing to get in with people who are going to tell the recruiters what they want to hear, and that's a bit of an art, so don't volunteer a lot of extra information they didn't ask for. You aren't, mostly, doing this for science. You are doing this to generate the paperwork the companies use to get regulatory approval for their new drugs. Or you may be testing a generic version of an old drug, or maybe they want to reissue the drug as an oval instead of a round pill, or some marketing change like that. If you are getting $5000 to be in the trial, the company is probably getting $50,000 for your part of it. This stuff is big business. How do you get in? First there's a screening, it's like an audition or a job interview. Well, before that there's a phone call. You spend about 20 minutes answering questions about your medical history and such. Blow one question and you don't get in. The usual answer is “no”. Then you go screen. You'll fill out forms, more forms, piss in a cup, get your blood drawn, get hooked up to an ekg machine and have your blood pressure taken, and maybe get a 45 second physical from a doctor. Always ask for a copy of your screening data – you just got $1000 worth of medical tests for free so get your copy. There's another form to fill out. Maybe a week later they call and you got in or you didn't. This week I'll be screening in Missouri and Nebraska. It's a lot of time on the road. I've gone through 5 cars. It's a lot of cheap hotels or couchsurfing.com or sleeping in the back of the volvo wagon. It works better if you can bring a friend or two to screen with, and whoever gets into the study pays the gas and hotel and such, once they get their check. So this is the life of the high tech migrant worker. My dad got his phd, then worked 30 years for one company, retired and died of cancer. Today's economy doesn't work that way for everyone. I had the usual 20 different jobs before I was 30, never lasting very long in any of them. Now I'm old and tired and in a rut, so I live in a house I paid for with a couple of studies, and I'll keep doing studies until I can't make $10,000 a year anymore, because it's what I know. Sometimes I convince myself that one of these years I'll get my act together and go back to being a lawyer, but hat remains elusive. Medical studies are the day job that keep me keeping on. Other times, I think I'll take a quick class in phebotomy and wind up working on the other end of the needle. I get asked, isn't it dangerous? My usual answer is that the dangerous part is all that driving, especially on the way there when I can't have coffee. Coffee makes my ekg too jumpy, so I save it for the long drives home. Not all of these places will treat you fairly. I got effectively banned from the Covance chain when I asked them to follow their own written rules, so they said I was a troublemaker and blacklisted me. I did a study at Abbvie that involved them shoving a bullet-tipped plastic tube down my nose into my intestines. It was the most painful thing I've been through in my adult life. When I warned other people not to do that study, they banned me for life, and they don't answer my letters or return phone calls. That cut my income in half, losing those two sites, and now I have to look harder and drive farther to find work, and sometimes I go months with no gig. This is an industry where you have to save half what you make, in order to get through the slow times. Not everybody has that kind of self-discipline. Although I've had many good experiences, I've become used to being lied to, threatened, blacklisted, and treated unfairly. I'm a middle aged white guy, not unskilled in asking for my legal rights. Some of the people who do these studies are less able to respond if mistreated. Although one purpose of these trials is to find out if there are side effects which would make the drug unsafe to sell, many of the participants are afraid to report side effects, worried that they'll be sent home without a full paycheck, or banned from future studies. That's bad science. It's bad worker relations. And it's how the game works at places like Covance and Abbvie. If any of the clinics where I work read this article, I'm likely to get banned. I just have this crazy streak where sometimes I feel a need to speak truth to power. If this is how they treat me, imagine how they are treating the animals in their labs. I don't know if the covancecruelty.com site is still up. It used to expose how they treated their lab animals. One time I was checking into Abbvie, and since I'd walked a few miles from the train station, I dropped off my bag at the clinic before walking a mile further to my hotel. When I came back the next day, they called the bomb squad and blown up my bag, thinking it might have been left by animal rights activists. I'm not a bomb thrower. I prefer words. -30- 09:29:49 PM
posted Mar 20th, 2016 ( permalink )