I watched The Constant Gardener after a number of friends raved about it when it first came out. I enjoyed it and put on my list of things to do: Find out the facts behind the Constant Gardener.

Well I finally got around to it and read up on the sad but true story that the movie is based on. I fear too often we watch something like that and it just becomes another piece of Hollywood for us, rather then affecting our lives and encouraging us to take action against the atrocities we see in the film.

From
‘The Constant Gardener’: What the Movie Missed

The plot couldn’t be more timely. According to a May 16 report in USA Today, giant drug outfits are outsourcing increasing numbers of drug trials outside the United States and Europe. Merck is now conducting 50 percent of its trials outside the United States. By 2006, 70 percent of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals trials are expected to occur offshore. Across Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa, the sick are abundant, desperate and doc-trusting, and so recruitment into clinical trials is rapid. As one executive from an outfit specializing in running drug trials in Asia put it, patients in developing countries are “more willing to be guinea pigs.”

And from
As Drug Testing Spreads, Profits and Lives Hang in Balance (washingtonpost.com)

A Washington Post investigation into corporate drug experiments in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America reveals a booming, poorly regulated testing system that is dominated by private interests and that far too often betrays its promises to patients and consumers.

Experiments involving risky drugs proceed with little independent oversight. Impoverished, poorly educated patients are sometimes tested without understanding that they are guinea pigs. And pledges of quality medical care sometimes prove fatally hollow, The Post found.