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.