Bodies For Rent

Bodies for Rent

BODIES FOR RENT takes us inside the hidden world of pharmaceutical drug testing.

Before a drug can be sold on the market, it has to be tested for safety on healthy people. Until the 1970s, pharmaceutical researchers in Canada and the United States conducted drug trials on inmates in prison. But after public outcry, drug companies had to scramble to find new “volunteers” for drug testing.

BODIES FOR RENT follows two people, “Franco” and Raighne, over the course of a year as they make their living renting out their bodies for drug testing. This dangerous job is filled by the poor, underemployed, desperate and, more than half of the time, people of colour.

With brutal honesty and unprecedented access, the subjects take us inside their world and reveal how the need for money often outweighs their concerns about their bodies. They expose a system in which marginalized and precarious subjects are incentivized to downplay or even ignore side effects as they participate in these drug trials. The film offers a peek into the flawed drug development process and the toll it takes on the human test subjects. It is a shocking indictment of a broken system in which poor “healthy” people test experimental drugs in exchange for money.

Co-produced with Akelo  Media

The world premiere broadcast is Wednesday September 25/2024 at 9pm on CBC’s Passionate Eye / CBCGEM