Pubdate: Sat, 22 Apr 2006
Source: CounterPunch (US Web)
Copyright: 2006 CounterPunch
Contact:  http://www.counterpunch.org/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3785
Author: Fred Gardner
Referenced: the study 
http://www.druglibrary.org/SCHAFFER/hemp/medical/can-babies.htm
Referenced: F.D.A Dismisses Medical Benefit From Marijuana 
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v06/n495/a01.html
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Marijuana - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Food+and+Drug+Administration

DREHER'S JAMAICAN PREGNANCY STUDY

More Suppression of Marijuana Research

In the 1980s Melanie Dreher and colleagues at UMass Amherst began a 
longitudinal study to assess the well-being of infants and children 
whose mothers used cannabis during pregnancy. The researchers lived 
in rural Jamaican communities among the women they were studying. 
Thirty cannabis-using pregnant women were matched for age and 
socio-economic status with 30 non-users. Dreher et al compared the 
course of their pregnancies and their neo-natal outcomes, using 
various standard scales.

No differences were detected three days after birth. At 30 days the 
exposed babies did better than the non-exposed on all the scales and 
significantly better on two of the scales (having to do with 
autonomic stability and reflexes).

Follow-up studies were conducted when the kids were four and five 
(just before entering school and after). The moms were defined as 
light users (1-10 spliffs per week), moderate (11-20), and heavy 
(21-70). Consumption of ganja tea was also taken into account.

The children were measured at age four using three sets of criteria: 
the McCarthy scale, which measures verbal ability, perceptivity, 
quantitative skills, memory and motor; a "behavioral style" scale 
measuring temperament, based on a 72-item questionnaire filled out by 
the child's primary caregiver; and a "quality of housing" index to 
indicate socioeconomic status.

"No Differences at All."

When they controlled for the household ratings, Dreher recounted 
April 8 at the Patients Out of Time Conference in Santa Barbara, her 
team "found absolutely no differences" between the children whose 
mothers were non-users and the children from the three groups of 
users. "No differences at all."

When testing the children at age five, Dreher measured school 
attendance and introduced an additional measure, the "home scale," 
accounting for stimulation in the physical and language environment, 
and other inputs affecting development. " Low income Jamaican 
children do not have a lot of toys," Dreher noted, "but It is not 
unusual for a two-and-a-half year old to be washing out her father's 
handkerchiefs to learn some adult skills."

As with the age-four studies, no differences were found among the 
exposed and non-exposed groups. But analysis of the home scale 
revealed that "stimulation with toys, games, reading material" was 
significantly related to measures on the McCarthy scale -verbal, 
perceptual, memory, and general cognition- and to mood. There was 
also a relationship between basic school attendance and 
McCarthy-scale measurements.

"We can't conclude that there is necessarily no impact from prenatal 
ganja use but we can conclude that the child who attends basic school 
regularly, is provided with a variety of stimulating experiences at 
home, who is encouraged to show mature behavior, has a profoundly 
better chance of performing at a higher level on the skills measured 
by the McCarthy scale whether or not his or her mother used ganja 
during pregnancy," said Dreher.

"Hello, hello! If you go to school you're going to do better on these 
criteria. It doesn't sound like a very interesting finding but given 
what everybody else was finding, we thought it was pretty darned interesting."

After recounting her methodology and conclusions, Dreher said: "This 
study was published in 1991 -15 years ago. What is the impact of this 
study? Absolutely none! A recent article by Huizink and Mulder 
reviewing all the literature on cannabis use in pregnancy reports 
only two longitudinal cohorts -Peter Fried's Ottawa Prenatal 
Prospective study and Richardson and Day's Maternal Health Practices 
and Child Development study. They reported increased tremors and 
startles (Fried); altered sleep patterns (R&D); signs of stress 
(Lester); impulsive and hyperactive behavior at six years old, more 
delinquent behavior, more impulsive behavior..." The review article 
didn't even mention that Dreher's Jamaican findings differed from those cited!

Peter Fried has been the darling of the National Institute on Drug 
Abuse, well funded for decades after discovering that children whose 
mothers had smoked marijuana showed impaired "executive function." In 
2003 Fried was asked by Ethan Russo, MD, to contribute a review 
article to a book on Women and Marijuana. Fried's reference to the 
Jamaican study in the Russo book did not identify it as a 
longitudinal study, even though he had been a consultant to the project.

When Dreher sought funding to re-examine her cohort at ages nine and 
10, "NIDA said they were not interested in funding this study 
anymore, but if I made Peter Fried a co-principal investigator, they 
would consider funding it... So, the research has languished. Which 
is a shame." She's looking for alternative funding. Last summer 
Dreher returned to Jamaica and located 40 of her original subjects. 
They are now adults and many are parents. "They are doing quite 
well," she generalized.

Dreher criticized the media response to research, which tends to 
focus on alleged negative aspects of use. "Peter Fried himself has 
said 'very little impact up to three years old. Beyond that age, no 
impact on IQ. No relationship of marijuana use to miscarriage, to 
Apgar status, to neonatal complications, physical abnormalities, no 
impact on cognitive outcomes' until, he says, age four. His tremor 
and startles findings did not hold up," said Dreher, "neither did 
[his findings of differences in] head circumference, motor 
development and language expression. None of those data are really in 
the literature for people to see. This results in a lot of 
misunderstanding on the part of the public."

Dreher asked: Why the reluctance to acknowledge this study in the 
peer-reviewed literature? She answered first as an anthropologist: 
"There is a terrible arrogance and ethnocentrism in the science that 
refuses to accept the experience or the science of other cultures." 
She cited Ethan Russo's "irrefutable" review of cannabis use by women 
in other cultures.

"Contemporary evidence from the UK, Denmark, Jamaica, Israel, the 
Netherlands, even Canada tends to be disregarded unless it's funded 
by NIDA with Peter Fried as the principal investigator."

Dreher recommended a 1989 Lancet article called "The Bias Against the 
Null Hypothesis" in which the authors reviewed all the abstracts 
about the maternal use of cocaine submitted to the Society of 
Pediatric Research in the 1980s. Only 11% of negative abstracts 
(attributing no harm to cocaine) were accepted for publication, 
whereas 57% of the positive abstracts were accepted. The authors 
determined that the rejected negative papers were superior 
methodologically to the accepted positive papers.

Honest Research Impeded

Dreher decried "the politics of trying to get published." She now 
sees it as "a miracle" that Pediatrics published her work on neonatal 
outcomes, however belatedly, in 1994. (Her paper on five-year 
outcomes came out in the West Indian Medical Journal before 
Pediatrics ran the neonatal outcomes.) She suspects that a review of 
"all the fugitive literature that's out there that didn't get 
published" would convey "a very different picture of prenatal 
cannabis exposure."

Honest research is also impeded, Dreher said, by "the politics of 
building a research career. Most research is done by academics and 
academia is a very conservative environment where tenure often is 
more important than truth." (Dreher is now Dean of the College of 
Nursing at the University of Iowa.)

The end result of biased science, Dreher observed, is a misinformed 
public. Recently, she "googled to see what was out there for the 
general public regarding pregnancy and marijuana." Typical of the 
disinformation was an article entitled "Exposure to marijuana in womb 
may harm brain' that began "Over the past decade several studies have 
linked behavior problems and lower IQ scores in children to prenatal 
use of marijuana..." A reference to Dreher said she had "written 
extensively on the benefits of smoking marijuana while smoking pregnant!"

Dreher concluded: "Marijuana use by pregnant women is a big red 
herring that prevents us from looking at the impoverished conditions 
in which women throughout the world have to bear and raise children. 
These women are looking for the cheapest, most available substance to 
alleviate their morning sickness and to give them a better sleep at 
night in order to get the energy to do the work they have to do every 
day in order to support those children.

"A red herring is something that distracts us from what's really 
important. Instead of restricting our search for relatively narrow 
outcomes, such as exectuive funciton, we need to be looking at school 
performance, peer relations, leadership skills in children, prenatal 
and family relations, healthy lifestyles. Are they participating in 
sports? Are they using tobacco and alcohol and other substances?

"NIDA and the NIH still prefer to fund randomized clinical trials 
that have to do with symptom management in specific diseases. We need 
research on how marijuana affects the quality of life.

"It's not an evolutionary accident that the two activities needed to 
sustain life and perpetuate life, eating and sex, are pleasurable as 
well as functional, and that marijuana enhances both of these activities."

FDA Further Discredits Itself

The Food and Drug Administration issued a groundless "statement" 
April 20 asserting that "no scientific studies" supported the medical 
use of marijuana. The statement was not the work of a panel of 
experts reviewing recent research. It was issued, supposedly, in 
response to numerous Congressional inquiries, but actually at the 
behest of the DEA and the Drug Czar's Office. Its release on 4/20, a 
day of special significance to marijuana users, shows the juvenility 
of its authors, who apparently regard Prohibition as a little game 
they're playing with the American people. (Legend has it that four 
twenty was the time that pot smokers at Tamalpais High School in Mill 
Valley got together. Or was it the police code for a pot bust in New 
Jersey? In any case, millions of cannabis consumers are hip to its 
meaning, and so are those wags at the Drug Czar's office.)

NORML was holding its annual meeting in San Francisco when the FDA 
issued its statement, and although predictable expressions of outrage 
were forthcoming, the additional media attention was not unwelcome. 
More than three quarters of the American people know that marijuana 
has medical utility, so the FDA statement further undermined the 
credibility of the government. (This is the same FDA that recently 
approved a stimulant patch for kids with "Attention Deficit Disorder" 
even though the patch has induced fatal heart attacks.) In the days 
ahead we can expect a wave of op-eds and letters to the editor 
referencing the thousands of relevant studies on the medical efficacy 
of cannabis.

The New York Times played the FDA-statement story at the top of the 
front page 4/21. Reporter Gardiner Harris included three strong 
quotes refuting the government line, ending with Dr. Daniele 
Piomelli, a professor of pharmacology at the University of 
California, Irvine, who said he had "never met a scientist who would 
say that marijuana is either dangerous or useless."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake