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At some point during the fall of 2005, Brian Stone grew tired of throwing up in a bucket and decided to go rogue.
Stone (who requested that his real name not be used) was doing his vomiting three days a week at an inpatient clinical-trial site in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, following a tip he’d gotten from a stranger at a bar. “He had quite a few to drink,” Stone recalled, “and he was yakking about a place where he could get paid $2,500 just to do painkillers and drink alcohol. And everyone was laughing at him, like, ‘You’re full of shit.’”
As it turned out, he wasn’t. At the time, Stone was unhappily working a hodgepodge of part-time restaurant and factory jobs. Intrigued by the promise of an easier way to make money, he enrolled as a guinea pig in a four-week study testing the effects of alcohol on a painkiller drug.
“It was pretty harsh,” he said. Many of the participants became violently ill; Stone vomited while having his blood drawn. The clinic staff told...