The poor and ignorant are the best guinea pigs. India and some countries in Africa and Latin America have often provided unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies with human material upon whom to test untried drugs. Things seem to have improved with exposés by committed activists and a slight heightening of awareness. The West’s offloading of discredited, banned or still untested techniques on poorer countries, especially among the women, had become one of the major subjects of protest for women’s rights groups, and Indian activists have taken a leading part in this. To find that 790 women in West Bengal have been used again for illegal testing of erythromycin as a trans-cervical contraceptive is deeply disheartening. The tests were done between 1999 and 2002, at two private clinics in Calcutta and South 24 Parganas, and were conducted by two doctors who have been caught doing similar illegal trials before. In the Nineties, they had been using the anti-malarial quinacrine as a chemical sterilization method, till that was stopped. Apparently, the same doctors had also conducted similar trials with tetracycline on women in the Eighties.

The story is revealing on a number of counts. It is remarkable that doctors, who have been proven to be completely unethical, conducting tests at the behest of pharmaceutical companies on human beings before the drugs have gone through the proper protocols of animal testing, should have been free to continue with their activities with some other drug. This in itself indicates the low priority given to illegal testing of drugs on women, while suggesting also a local nexus of interest which encourages cheap sterilization methods. It is a test case for the status of women’s reproductive rights in India. Women in a developing country are less educated and less informed and than their male counterparts. The consequent lack of decision-making authority over their own bodies is used to advantage. The gainers are not only the pharmaceutical companies anxious to beat their rivals in a life-and-death competition to evolve newer, more convenient drugs with the least expense, but also local agents equally anxious to make a quick buck. The use of an untested drug puts women at high risk. It is astonishing that the administration should remain insensitive to the consequences of the crime in spite of the revelations that activists have made in the past few years. It is now clear that erythromycin fails as trans-cervical contraceptive. It is also clear that the crime was discovered when everything was over — nothing disrupted the process of testing.