It's not quite that simple.

In antiretroviral (ARV) therapy, it is not (nor was it ever) a matter
of using patients as "guinea pigs."  We knew that there are certain
physiologic processes critically important to HIV-1's ability to re-
produce, and that if we could find chemicals that screwed up those
processes, we could reduce the bug's ability to do damage.  Right
now, we go after three key enzymes in the HIV-1 bug's "attack"
on human cells.  The testing on humans involves issues like dosing
(what's too much?  what's not enough?), synergies (if we use X and
Y and Z together, will they work better than just X, or just Y, or
just Z alone?), adverse secondary effects (especially those occurring
chiefly in certain sectors of the population), and so forth.  

We try to *harvest* information on each and every patient with
chronic HIV infection (even the ones who don't manifest AIDS)
in order to continue building our fund of knowledge on the subject.
It enables the treating physician today to more readily distinguish
problems and more effectively handle disease management.  But
to say that every patient with chronic HIV infection is a "guinea
pig" is too damned simplistic.  

As for  "Hugo Chávez and Robert Mugabe," what gives you
cause to fantasize that murdering, thieving, parasitical career
politicians of their ilk can "invent" anything but more ingenious
ways to ruin their polities' economies, raise ever-greater piles
of corpses, and destroy the clinical utility of the ARV drugs
so painstakingly developed by private sector R&D companies
in countries outside these bastards' twitching, bloody grasp?

------------------
People should not be afraid of their governments.
Governments should be afraid of their people.

    -- Andrew & Larry Wachowski (screenplay)
       *V for Vendetta* (2006)

Nope.  As I'd said, I'm a primary care grunt.  I'm not the kind
of doctor that the pharma manufacturers look to "influence" in
the sorts of interesting ways covered by the OIG guidance (see  
http://oig.hhs.gov/authorities/docs/03/050503FRCPGPharmac.pdf)
uttered a couple of years ago.  You didn't bother to read that
before shoving your comment into my post, but then, of course,
you're an idiot.  

What you're reading into the cut-and-pasted article and the suc-
cessor post of "ritameetr" are both the poster's and the original
writers' own prejudices as well as the unsupported assertions
of prosecuting U.S. Attorney Sullivan, who would happily
accuse Serono of having engineered the anthrax attacks of Sep-
tember 2001 if he thought he could get away with it.  That's
what prosecuting attorneys do for a living.  They fling as much
sh.t as they can lift and try like hell to make something stick.  

What's the old saw?  "A conservative is a liberal who's just
been mugged, while a liberal is a conservative who's just been
indicted."  

I'd like you to look into the *Federal Register* reference I've
just given you (above) for the final guidance uttered by the
Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services - and bear in mind that the
elaboration of guidances like these have been slurping out
of the DHHS since 1972 without providing more than the
most nebulous and befuddling instructions (altogether typical
of federal regulations in general) affecting the health care
sector of the U.S. and world economies in general and the
pharmaceuticals industry in particular.  

Find something in there that calls into question - even retro-
spectively - the actions undertaken by Serono in offering those
infectious diseases (ID) specialists a trip to Cannes as par-
ticipants in a medical conference on the basis of their having
established their expertise in the use of somatropin in a minimum
number of HIV-related wasting cases.  Now find something
there - or in any other part of Title 21 Code of Federal Regula-
tions (21 CFR) - that speaks to any sort of criminality on the
part of any physician who takes up Serono's offer to transport
them to Cannes for that conference, to pay for their board and
lodging, and to otherwise facilitate their discussions with col-
leagues both foreign and American in addressing some pretty
goddam knotty problems in the management of patients with
chronic HIV-1 infection.  

Put up, please, or do kindly STFU.  

I'll admit that I'm envious of the specialists who get invited to
these sorts of conferences.  It's not because they get to travel
to the French Riviera, as I have no more desire to deal with
francophone tourist trap operators than I have with regard to
visiting Disney World or Las Vegas. They're destinations for
mundanes, and the mundanes can have 'em.  What I would
have *very* much enjoyed would have been the opportunity
to speak directly and at length with some of the world leaders
in AIDS treatment and research - guys like Soriano and
Moyle and the rest of the IAS crowd - for a week-end.

Primary care grunts like me don't get much opportunity
for that sort of interaction, no matter how long we've been
treating cases of GRID ("gay-related immune deficiency,"
as we used to call it up until 1982).  We're not the glamour
boys of the profession, and we're okay with that.  Most
of us hold with Heinlein's dictum to the effect that "speciali-
zation is for insects."  

We also accept the fact that to most of the marketing clowns
in the pharma industry, we're not worth much in the way of
their promotional budgets.  The perqs go to the guys who
write for tons of high-dollar medications, not to those of us
whose scrip pads get whittled down renewing prescriptions
for hydrochlorothiazide, metoprolol, and lovastatin.

But there's not enough *Schadenfreude* in the average
GP's makeup give us cause to exult when some idiot writes
that he would "... be just fine with prosecuting the doctors
who took the kickbacks" in a situation such as that under
current discussion.  We all know - on the basis of both
professional training (medical jurisprudence) and experience
- that it is entirely too damned easy for a physician to become
entangled in the chaos of regulation dumped all over the
profession by politicians and bureaucrats at every level of
civil government in these United States, and that prosecutors
like Mr. Sullivan would just as eagerly come after *us* as
they delight in clobbering high-profile targets like the pharma
companies.  

In the Serono situation (insofar as I've been able to determine)
the physicians "induced" by Serono to incorporate somatropin
in the management of patients with HIV-related wasting were
not given supplies of Serostim by the manufacturer to be ad-
ministered and then billed to HCFA (now CMS) as if the
doctors had sustained the cost of purchasing the drug (which
is what TAP had done in their "promotion" of Lupron), so
the docs didn't defraud Medicare or Medicaid (or any other
third party payer) in any way whatsoever.

So to what extent have any of the American doctors partici-
pating in that conference put a foot wrong with regard to U.S.
regulations governing their conduct?  In what way have they
even skated close to violating the AMA Code of Medical Ethics
(http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/2498.html)?

Bear in mind that I don't have to prove (or even argue) that "...it
was OK for those doctors to accept kickbacks from the drug
company" in the case under discussion.  The burden is on *your*
shoulders (and those of government thugs like Mr. Sullivan) to
establish a claim either that "kickbacks" were given or received
*or* that the acceptance of the perquisites attending upon the
medical conference held in Cannes constituted a violation of either
administrative or criminal law on the part of the physicians who
accepted Serono's offer.  

So just how the hell *do* you justify the indictment, prosecution,
or conviction of any of these physicians, you stupid, self-righteous
sonofabitch?

---------------
Let them then own land or factories as much as they please.
The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is
supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or
workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our Socialism goes
far deeper... What are ownership and income to that? Why
need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize
human beings.

    -- Hermann Rauschning (Berlin, 1940)