THE ICKY, INSIDE STORY ON DRUG ABUSE

Medical Students Use Diseased Organs to Make Their Point at Fairfax School

It was the liver that made the children squeal the loudest.

"Ooh, gross!" shrieked a clump of sixth-grade girls as Neil Segal held up
the pork-chop-size organ in a classroom at Fairfax County's Ellen Glasgow
Middle School yesterday.

Not just any liver. This one, riddled with yellow bumps, belonged to an
alcohol abuser who suffered from cirrhosis, Segal explained.

Segal, 26, who attends Vanderbilt University, was one of 49 medical
students who came to Glasgow to give preteens dramatic proof of the damage
that drugs and alcohol can cause to the body's vital organs.

The medical students, in Washington for a conference of the American
Medical Student Association, brought 70 specimens in all -- livers, lungs,
brains and hearts.

"They flew with us on United," said Eric Berkson, 24, a student at the
University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine.

Berkson and fellow Chicago medical student Charles Samenow, 24, founded the
Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention program. For three years, they have
wowed students in the Chicago area with their show-and-tell version of
"Just Say No" to drugs. Their visit to Fairfax marked the first time they
had taken the show on the road.

"Seeing a heart or lungs is something they never forget," said Samenow, a
Falls Church native and Glasgow graduate.

The organs -- packed in water-filled plastic containers and later draped on
red plastic plates at the middle school -- belonged to drug and alcohol
abusers who donated their bodies to science.

Before seeing the specimens, the 300 sixth-graders were primed with an
hour-long discussion about the realities and misconceptions about drug and
alcohol use.

Then came the main event. "You might see pictures, you might see movies,"
Samenow told the students. "But this is the real thing."

There were a few rules. Touching the organs wouldn't be allowed, he said.
"We ask you to treat them with respect."

Neeris Maldon, 12, of Falls Church, pointed to the yellow marks on the
cirrhotic liver. "How do these go away?" he asked.

"Can that cause cancer?" Ava Ighanian, 12, of Alexandria, chimed in.

Cirrhosis of the liver can, indeed, lead to cancer, said Segal. And the
bumps, he said, will never go away.

"Even when you stop [drinking]?" asked Keyber Mendez, 13, of Falls Church.

Not even then, said the medical student.

Across the room, Samenow had the rapt attention of a group of boys who were
studying the lung of a cancer victim. The specimen had some healthy tissue,
but the telltale circular splotches of cancer were plain to see.

Samenow showed the students small pockets of black from tar in cigarettes.

Anne Millard, 30, a student at the University of Texas Medical Branch at
Galveston, held a brain in her gloved hands at another table and asked
students how cocaine hurts the body's most complex organ.

The responses were rapid:

"It can make you tired."

"It can make you lose your memory."

Memory is stored here, Millard said, pointing to some pathways in the organ.

"It's pretty neat," said Daryl Anthony, 12, of Annandale. "I learned about
what the drugs did to the heart, lungs, liver and brain. I learned about
how you can lose brain cells."

Zain Javed, 11, of the Alexandria section of Fairfax, said the lesson was
crystal-clear.

"If you don't want your insides to look like that," he said, "don't do drugs."

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company