Ethics and Drug Testing in Human Beings

Abstract

In late May 1984, Irish citizens were perturbed to hear that a thirty-one year old man died while participating, as a paid volunteer, in a clinical drug trial at the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology in Dublin. At the inquest, held in September 1984, the State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison, affirmed that the cause of death was the reaction of the trial drug Eproxindine 4/0091 with a major tranquillizer which had been given less than fifteen hours earlier as part of regular treatment for a psychiatric disorder. The mixture of the two drugs, he went on to say, increased their effect by between twenty and thirty times their normal strength, and the volunteer had died of cardiac depression.