I had a problem. No matter how I looked at it, no matter how I crunched the numbers, I didn’t have the money. I was going to need at least an extra thousand bucks or touring Japan by Bicycle wasn’t going to happen. Second job? With only four months to go before departure, that wasn’t going to work. Credit cards? I’d rather not add a big chunk to what I’d been working to pay off. Lottery? Yeah, right.
Then it came to me. Those ads I’d seen on the subway, when I was unemployed and desperate. “Why Not Volunteer? Receive up to $4000! Clinical Trials! 18+.” At the time, they had been both tempting and ominous – what do they do to you for four thousand bucks? But now, given my present situation, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt, and get some more information. And that is how I ended up doing drugs to feed my travel addiction.
The Low Down
The clinical trial I did was with a company called Algorithme Pharma, or Algopharm, here in Montreal. Their studies generally pay between $700-$4000, dependent on the length, # of blood draws, restrictions, etc. The average compensation is about $1400. Algopharm specializes in phase I and bio-equivalence trials. Phase I trials are first-in-human trials on healthy subjects (i.e. not the final users of the drug) designed to verify the drug’s safety and identify side-effects. Bio-equivalence trials (the kind I did) compare a drug on the market with a drug in development that is believed to act the same. Usually, the first drug is an established brand name formulation, and the second is a generic, up-coming formulation.
For me, from pre-screening to the final follow up visit the process took 2 months, and involved two 48-hours stays at the clinic 28 days apart. It also involved me getting a whole lot more comfortable with needles, because while the drug itself was just a pill, there was a total of around 30 blood draws, which is how they monitor the drug in your body.
Final payout:$1200
That’s it about clinical trials for now. I made it out unscathed… or did I? Keep an eye out for Part 2, where I discuss the pros and cons of making travelling money through drug testing, describe my stay from start to finish, give a couple tips to prospective volunteers, and talk about how convenient my new third arm is!
Dylan is an applied linguist, an enthusiastic cyclist, and at least 33% of the Japan by Bicycle team. Meet the whole team here.
Just realized I misspelled my email.
Thanks again for the article!
I will definitely be reading your follow-up. I commend you for your efforts, the thought of needles make me cringe and I surely would not be able to endure the trial like you did.
Did you take pictures from your trip?
I have heard of some interesting ways to make money and this one surely ranks up there. Glad to hear you were able to accomplish your goals with no side effects to the drugs.
It does sounds scary but it is a great way to seek for treatments or cures if you have a particular illness or if you are a patient they need.
It all sounds so scary but to tell you the truth, it isn’t. I have been doing this for the past 3 years and nothing serious happen to me.
Cheers!
Great insight Kelli. What sort of trials have you participated in ?
Interesting story, I gotta tell you though clinical trials scare me. I don’t know how comfortable I would feel about doing clinical trial. We see so many drugs at least here in the US that make it to market only to find out later that they have serious consequences. It’s a scary proposition.
I’d like to hope that it would be difficult for the drug to do any significant damage, even if there had been some awful mistake in the formulation, since for the purpose of the trial we only take one subclinical dose. But that being said, there is still a good deal of faith and trust that goes into the process, which is a bit unsettling.
When Dylan told me he was doing drug testing to help fund the bicycle trip I thought it was a joke. Like you, Scott, I also have an aversion to such tests. Maybe it’s just the image though, because what Dylan described in the article and to me on Skype is quite innocuous.
Sidenote: maybe my gravatar settings aren’t enabled. Were you surprised that your avatar didn’t show?
Awesome title!
Interesting way to earn some extra cash. Now afterwards, do you think it was worth it?
This is Andrew for Dylan (he’s fairly infrequent to the internet and I talk with him regularly as we plan our Japan by Bicycle trip). He’s currently working on an article about the pros and cons of the experience, but I think he would affirm that drug testing was worth it since it’s funding his plane tickets from Canada to Japan and back.
Thanks for the comment! Always good to hear from As We Travel!
I’m on the internet more often than not, but I have an antisocial, lurking habit I’m trying to overcome…
Some time in the next 24 hours I’ll have the second article up with my thoughts about the experience, but as Andrew said, money is a nice thing to have.