Left Field by Patricia Nell Warren

Don’t look now, but your right to consent to anything relating to your personal health is going away.
Oh sure, they’ll tell you that nobody has the right to rape you if you scream “no.” And you’re supposed to “just say no” to drugs. But when it comes to any medical treatment that our infinitely wise government has decided is necessary for you (usually at the urging of pharmaceutical companies who will make added billions off the drugs and services used in your treatment), the direction of federal policy and even criminal law is going more and more against the grain of consent.

Minors, of course, already don’t have a bit of say about personal treatment. Kids are expected to say “no” to unwanted sex and illegal drugs, but they can’t say “no” to unwanted prescription drugging. Just a few weeks before I wrote this article, a Virginia judge ordered sixteen-year-old Abraham Cherrix to report to a hospital for resumption of a Hodgkin’s disease treatment that he stopped because he says it makes him feel very ill. Instead Abraham wants to pursue an alternative treatment chosen for him by his parents, who insist it has helped him, and have pursued a long and bitter legal battle with local authorities and Children’s Services over their son’s case. So far, they’re losing—as are many other parents and older minors around the country.

When it comes to mental health, just watch what’s happening in the states that have climbed aboard the federal government’s wonderful new TeenScreen program for the nation’s K–12 kids, which is to have their schools diagnose them from a list of 300-plus different “mental disorders” by means of a simple computer Q & A. These tests are done without parental or student consent; they’re not even administered or interpreted by competent therapists. Yet if you flunk the test, you’re marched off to treatment by an array of expensive psychotropic drugs. If you refuse, or your parents refuse, you’re grabbed by Children’s Services and put in a group home where you’re forcibly medicated. TeenScreen is going to be a bonanza for the companies manufacturing these types of drugs. Not surprisingly, the lawsuits by angry parents are already starting in Indiana and other states where TeenScreen is now the law.

If you’re a prisoner, forget it. The government’s Institute of Medicine (IOM) now recommends that inmates can be used in clinical trials for experimental drugs. Scandals and abuses in prison clinical trials put a stop to them three decades ago, but now they’re creeping back. And no wonder—the three million inmates in the U.S. penal system constitute a vast new market for the pharma industry. After testifying in recent hearings, the Alliance for Human Research Protection commented that the IOM “voted shamelessly to recommend violating the Nuremberg Code (1947) and the federal restrictions (1978) on...the use of prisoners in medical experiments—because such experiments constitute an exploitation of prisoners who are precluded by their status from saying no to high risk medical experiments.”

In the AIDS world, earlier this year, informed consent took another step towards vanishing there, too. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention plan to recommend that routine HIV testing be bundled with all the standard tests, like blood pressure and glucose levels, in all doctors’ offices and clinics, and that it be done without counseling or the formalities of written consent. A little fifth-grade number-crunching reveals that this is probably the most profitable scheme yet, at so much a person for the testing and so much a year for drugs, for the drug companies to make a lot more money. Not surprisingly, the outcry over potential abuses has already been raised by privacy advocates.

Supporters of all these policies insist that they’re “for our own good.” They assure us that the destruction of consent is necessary in order to ensure the greatest possible “good.” The problem is, that the people who decide what’s “good” for us are the same people who are enriching themselves with this “good.” Pharmaceutical companies may have to spend billions to fight lawsuits like the ones in Indiana, but in the end the deep pockets will win, because legal and court costs will be covered by the trillions of gross profits from new sales.

Last but not least, the gradual stripping of Americans’ right to consent also strips the mere ability to consent. It leaves us less and less educated and sensitive about what “consent” really is, and why it’s a precious human right. The ability to weigh a choice and say yes or no is like a muscle—if you can’t use it, it atrophies. When that happens, you’re unable to say “no” when it really counts.

Author of fiction bestsellers and provocative commentary, Patricia Nell Warren has her writings archived at www.patricianellwarren.com. Reach her by e-mail at pnw@patricianellwarren.com.

Copyright (c) 2006 by Patricia Nell Warren. All rights reserved

September 2006