[zo1]

Am I the only one that sees the beauty and simplicity of a world that allows drug research companies to pay giant piles of money to people for them to agree to be test subjects for new treatments? The equalizing effect this could potentially have over wealth inequality across generations is arguably staggering. Some days it feels like our nobility and pride and respect for life are just ideals we claim on paper but end up just being huge shackles that keep us from preventing suffering in the now. We allow huge amounts of actual suffering and denigration of life to happen right under our noses.

[tsimionescu]

Your imagination has veered into the entirely wrong direction.

If such a thing were legal, human test subjects would be the lowest classes, who would accept a pittance to support their family, or worse, who would sell their children for drug testing to score another hit. The vast majority of early drug trials cause extreme harm, so in essence any such contract would be a game of Russian roulette, except bullets to the head are a quick death. The extremely powerful incentive for companies would be to misrepresentat the risks and pay a pittance for the earliest trials, since these are the least likely to lead to profitable new medications.

Not to mention, if we were to replace mouse models with human subjects, the cost to develop new drugs would skyrocket, as even the least pittance afforded to some slave laborer in the this world would be more expensive than a mouse.

[zo1]

I share your concerns about it, and there is definitely potential for it to be abused and for it to create an underclass. But even for those, why not at least explore the option and at the same time use regulation to make it safe and not open for abuse? We're perfectly fine doing all sorts of games of wack-a-mole with other areas that we're trying to regulate but the free-market is constantly working around, so why not here too?

[tsimionescu]

But this is what we've done, right? Drugs are tested on people, but only after they've been proven to be (a) somewhat promising and (b) somewhat safe in animal models. This helps make human trials safe.

Secondly, we've removed the profit motive, so that people are not allowed to be coerced by money into trying out someone's drug, and drug companies are not incentivised to test their drugs exclusively on the poorest people - this helps prevent abuse.

[staticassertion]

Unfortunately when money is an incentive, and money is also a requirement for life, you're not far from threatening to kill people if they don't take your experimental drugs. This is already an ethical concern with human drug testing.

Also, one benefit of mice is, morbidly, that you can immediately kill and autopsy them after treatment. I hope we can all agree that this would probably not be the right call for humans.

[reducesuffering]

Tally up another reason for UBI, where such undertaking will now be for voluntary luxury rather than survival desperation.

[raxxorrax]

You are sadly not the only one, but this could only be ethical in a completely affluent society.

Simplicity can be elegant, but it can also be foolish. As a mechanism to combat wealth inequality the term foolish is probably even a bit euphemistic.