Pubdate: Fri, 05 Dec 2003
Source: DrugSense Weekly
Section: Feature Article
Website: http://www.drugsense.org/current.htm
Author: Stephen Young
Note: Stephen Young is an editor with DrugSense Weekly and author of 
"Maximizing Harm: Losers and Winners in the Drug War" 
http://www.maximizingharm.com
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/George+Ricaurte

PROHIBITION'S NOT-SO-GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE

Descriptions of "scientific" studies used to support the drug war 
frequently sound as if they were conducted by Jerry Lewis (or Eddie Murphy) 
in "The Nutty Professor."

The slapstick hilarity hit a new low last week. It inspired me to attempt a 
joke.

How many National Institute on Drug Abuse researchers does it take to 
change a light bulb?

The answer depends on two factors: results expected by NIDA administrators; 
and the amount of funding available.

If NIDA-funded researchers are encountering more ridicule than usual this 
week, they've got one of their brightest stars to thank. George Ricaurte, 
who literally carved a career out of Ecstasy hysteria, was the subject of 
an unflattering but generally tame profile in the New York Times - 
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v03/n1857/a03.html . His research had been 
exposed as shoddy before, but Ricaurte found new notoriety in September 
after he retracted a study which purported a single exposure to Ecstasy to 
be capable of causing brain damage in monkeys.

Ricaurte initially said he injected Ecstasy into monkeys as part of the 
study which is strange in itself, since no humans inject Ecstasy.  The 
retraction indicated that he really injected the poor creatures with a dose 
methamphetamine that proved deadly to some. Whoops! Such a silly mistake! 
Nobody's perfect, it seems, even if they warrant $10 million in funding 
from NIDA.

Embarrassing as the story might be, the Times let Ricaurte off the hook 
regarding the mysterious drug mix-up. The story states: "The labels on two 
vials he bought in 2000, he said, were somehow switched."

In previous stories, Ricaurte blamed the supplier of the drugs for the 
switched labels, but the supplier has since offered a vehement denial - 
http://www.maps.org/media/tbj111003.html

"Somehow switched"? Who could have been so wacky?

The Times does suggest Ricaurte didn't want just any data in his studies; 
he wanted data that would fit his (and NIDA's) preconceived notions about 
Ecstasy.

A pair of human subjects who had participated in another Ricaurte study 
told the Times they were coached to deny using drugs other than Ecstasy in 
the days prior to the study, even though one had done just that.  They also 
said they took memory tests while they were jet-lagged and sleep tests 
while they were in pain, conditions that could obviously impact test 
results negatively.

The human subjects should count their blessings - at least they weren't 
"accidentally" injected with a lethal dose of crank.

Kudos to the Times for finding some new details, but skewed government 
research on illegal drugs isn't exactly news. It is, however, always 
interesting to learn how the skewing occurs.

Back in 2000, the Orlando Sentinel published a story - 
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n675/a02.html - about research 
commissioned by the State of Florida on "club drug" deaths. State 
researchers asked medical examiners for statistics about people who died 
with any government-designated "club drugs" in their systems. The medical 
examiners tried to explain the list would include a lot of people who 
didn't know what club drugs were. The state did not listen.  When 
publicized, the list included a 15-year-old with a heart ailment who had 
been taking prescription Adderall at the time of his death, and an 
82-year-old who died days after being hit by a car.  More than half of the 
deaths surveyed by the Sentinel were not caused by illicit drug use.

Predictably, Florida officials blamed medical examiners for bad data, but 
medical examiners said they answered state requests with precision.  "I 
spent weeks trying to educate them on what they were really looking for," 
one medical examiner told the Sentinel. "I talked until I was blue in the 
face."

The research was announced at the same time Florida's drug czar unveiled a 
plan to cut state drug use rates in half within five years.  Do the math - 
if you want to cut future drug use rate by 50 percent, it's awfully 
convenient to have current drug use rates overstated by 50 percent. (Set 
back in 1999, the five year mark hits in less than a month. Good luck to 
Governor Bush on pulling it out in the home stretch, but not even the 
bloated numbers would help at this point.)

The history of drug war rhetoric sold as research goes back several 
decades.  In his 1965 book "The Addict and the Law," drug research pioneer 
Alfred Lindesmith wrote about the federal anti-drug establishment and its 
methods of controlling information.

" any individual investigator who found himself at odds with the 
comprehensive official line laid down by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics 
had to contend with the solid, monolithic phalanxes of the government 
bureaucracy. The latter, with the mass media and government printing 
presses available to them, could readily brand the heretic as an 
irresponsible 'self-appointed expert,' or inspire a stooge to attack him or 
label his work as 'unscientific.'"

As Lindesmith wrote, he hoped the era of scientific bias was ending. Just 
seven years later, the Shafer Commission appointed by President Nixon to 
study marijuana dispelled many long-standing myths about marijuana and 
urged a tolerant policy. The study was dismissed by Nixon and generally 
ignored.  The same sort of thing happened when the National Academy of 
Science released another honest marijuana report in 1982.

In the upside down world of the drug war, the situation sort of makes 
sense.  Solid research efforts are blocked; those that get through are 
consciously overlooked by prohibitionists.  But when biased researchers are 
challenged on deliberately twisted studies, it's always explained away as 
an honest mistake.

The paradox might seem funny if it did not advance such a destructive force.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake