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Jump to full article: Ha'aretz Daily, 2003-09-16
Author: Akiva Eldar, Haaretz Correspondent
Intro: At least 4,000 Israelis, including well-known personages like former defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, took part in an experimental program to quit smoking run by doctors who in effect broke the most basic ethical rules - and based their program on a single medical article by a doctor serving time in America for prescribing dangerous drugs.
A Health Ministry probe, prompted by a Haaretz query in January of this year, found that a clinical test with 20 participants turned into an anti-smoking treatment offered at the Rabin Medical Center (Beilinson Hospital) in Petah Tikva that was taken by some 4,000 patients, mostly sent by their HMOs.
The doctors did not ask the patients to sign a waiver regarding testing on humans, even though the treatment was offered on the basis of a research proposal to the Helsinki Committee, which must approve any testing on humans. The proposal to the Helsinki Committee was based on a single publication, "which itself was not very convincing and raised a lot of questions," said the ministry probe. . . .
The hospital said the project was based on a 1986 article by Dr. Nicholas Bachynsky in the International Journal of Addiction, in which he describes an effective anti-smoking "cocktail" consisting of low dosages of atropine and scopolamine, usually used to slow down heart rates and as an antidote for gas poisoning, with chlorpromazine, a psychiatric drug that can have an impact on judgment.
An Internet search would have revealed to the hospital that in 1997, the year the anti-smoking workshop opened at Beilinson, Bachynsky was released after eight years in prison. Bachynsky had headed a chain of weight-loss clinics
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