Aw, snap- they’re making the Alamo references to Clinton’s Texas campaign already. And here I thought it’d wait until after Tuesday.

If this were a three-way race, it could be awesome to extend the metaphor. She could lose Texas, right, but wage a strong enough campaign that Obama would be diverted into spending too many resources there so that, like, John Edwards could win Ohio and thus the nomination. And then Ozzy Osbourne could pee on her.

Oy yoy yoy. I am in a clinical pharmacological research unit as of about five hours ago. It will henceforth be referred to as the study. What I am doing in here is taking drugs for money. Well, just one drug, and it’s expected to be a boring one.

They test drugs on people, obviously, before they’re approved for general use. It’s how they determine the appropriate dosage and the list of side effects that a cheerful-voiced announcer will rattle off at the end of a commercial that demonstrated how well you’d sleep or how big your boner would be if you were on it. But how do you find a statistically significant group of people to experiment upon? Appeal to their sense of civic duty? Find an appropriately-colored segment of the population and sneak it into their water? Hell no- this isn’t the fifties! We are a globalized, free-market society, and if you want people to test your drugs, you just pay them.

Me? I’m getting paid.

I’ve always found this line of work to be a bit of a moral quagmire- there is something inherently uncomfortable about an industry that thrives by finding desperate people and encouraging them to do potentially unhealthy things for money. But on the other hand, hell- if I were to get sick, I’d want the drugs on the market, you know? I tend to navigate this trench of uncertainty (doing a study always makes me feel a bit poetic) by mapping out an oft-confusing, but coherent-to-me, moral code. I won’t participate in a study that tests drugs that will be used in ways I find questionable- I have never done a study that involved anti-depressants or psychiatric drugs. I understand they have very real benefits and I’m not Tom Cruise or anything, but I’d rather not be a party to kids who don’t need them getting prescribed them by impatient parents. Preference is given, when available, to studies that test drugs for conditions that my friends and family may suffer from- I’ve done several diabetes studies and this time around I was considering one for Parkinson’s. The dates on that were wrong, so the drug I’ll be taking the morning after tomorrow is intended to treat epilepsy (you’re welcome, Sonja).

I’ve written about this extensively in the past, so if you’re new to reading this journal and want some background, it’s all up there. Otherwise, that’s a basic refresher.

It’s pretty much exactly the same as being in a study in America, doing one in London. There are a couple of key differences, but mostly those things are the sort of differences you’d find between any two facilities, and not specific to the country in which the study takes place. You get to pick your meals here, which is not a common feature in the facilities I’ve checked into in the United States. In PPD in Austin, you are fed what amounts basically to cafeteria food, with a slight edge of Texas to remind you where you are- breakfast tacos some mornings, chicken fajitas some afternoons, catfish some evenings. There are no exceptions or alterations allowed to the menu. In Covance in Wisconsin, on the other hand, the food is almost always fresh and pretty good. When you’re fed eggs in the morning, the eggs don’t come out of a box, and you can request them scrambled or fried; if there are leftovers after everyone has eaten, you can usually help yourself to an extra grilled cheese sandwich or slice of cake. Abbott in Waukegan has the worst food of any I’ve been to, bland Midwestern hospital food, and you’re required to eat every bit of it no matter what. Sometimes there are unnecessary garnishments that nonetheless must be devoured- I’ve had to spread a single-serving package of butter on a bag of pretzels before. Here, though, they come around in the morning with a list of options, and you tick off the box next to the one you want. Since British food is, by and large, fucking disgusting, the option is much appreciated- while my compatriots may be choosing to dine on fish pie tonight, I’ll give the roast lamb a try, provided they keep the mint sauce on the side. Who knows? It may even be good.

The major difference between this facility in Middlesex and the ones I’ve been to in America is the people.

The types of people who participate in these studies in America tend to not always be the coolest ones you’ll meet in your life. Usually there’ll be a handful of good eggs, and then a bunch of lifers- trashy motherfuckers who do this professional, six to eight times a year, bouncing around Texas or America from place to place, rubbing vitamin E on the marks left by the needles they use to take blood samples. People with child support payments for five or six kids who are in the study as often just to have a place to stay without paying rent so they can scatter the check among the various mothers; professional gamblers who suck at their job and expect that this one’s gonna be their last, cuz they’re about to go down to Vegas for the World Series of Poker and win big…; the unambitious and lazy who would spend their day playing XBox and watching DVDs anyway, so figure they may as well be paid for it. And there’s nothing wrong with them, but it definitely makes you question your career choice sometimes when you’re locked up with them because- shit, man, maybe they’re locked up with you.

These are some of the reasons I stopped doing studies in 2006. It all started to make me uncomfortable. But I’m being paid £900 for five days in the joint right now, and if that means I’m one of those people again, well, I can make peace with it.

But the UK- that’s what’s weird about it. These people are mostly well-dressed, socially acceptable, presentable young men and women ranging from about 21-30 years old. I am in a room with four other men, and three of them are medical students, using the spare time to study. None of them have participated in a study before. It feels a lot less desperate.

This is my sixth study, which is weird- I tried to count on the train over here, and I assumed it’d was more, at least seven or eight. Well, there’ve been others that I’ve checked into, but been rejected from before dosing, for various reasons. So this makes six, or it will on Monday when I take that pill.

So far, so good. The room’s got a view- it’s actually pretty spectacular. Wembley Stadium is in the foreground, and the rest of the city is visible in the distance. You can see Canary Wharf and the London Eye way the hell down there. It’s not so bad, really, at least not yet.