Quinacrine has the additional property of being a sclerosing agent. It was this property and the well established safety of this drug that made it attractive for use in nonsurgical female sterilization. The safety of the quinacrine pellet method has clearly been established in the clinical trials appearing on this web site. It is undeniably superior to surgical sterilization because it does not kill women and serious complications very rare. The skill of the clinician in performing the procedure has not been considered in evaluating the method failure rate.
Many clinicians have failure rates that approximate surgical sterilization.
We do not fully understand why. This represents the single most important research question associated with this method. Most women who have opted for this procedure did not have access to surgical sterilization and probably would not have before completing their reproductive years. There are over 20,000 published scientific papers on this drug. The preponderance of this research was conducted by the United States Army.