WNB

You Can't Trust the Drug 'Experts'

April 13, 2004 by Dan Gardner, Ottawa Citizen

'One night's ecstasy use can cause brain damage," shouted a newspaper headline in September 2002, after the journal Science published a study that found a single dose of the drug ecstasy injected into monkeys and baboons caused terrible brain damage. Two of the 10 primates in the study had even died. The media trumpeted the news around the world and drug enforcement officials held it up as definitive proof of the vileness of ecstasy.

But a year later, an odd thing happened. The author of the study, George Ricaurte, admitted his team had mistakenly injected the baboons and monkeys with massive doses of methamphetamine, not ecstasy, and Science formally retracted the article.

The retraction was scarcely reported and drug enforcement officials said nothing about it.

Obscure as this incident may sound, it actually demonstrates something vitally important about research on illicit drugs, something few laymen understand but is well known among researchers and academics. It's a deeply politicized field, says Peter Cohen, a professor at the Centre for Drug Research at the University of Amsterdam. "There is no neutral science."

For critics such as Mr. Cohen, George Ricaurte illustrates the problems in illicit drug research. Long before the Science study made him notorious, Dr. Ricaurte was accused by some academics of producing biased science designed to make drugs look as dangerous as possible. The motive was funding. Scientific research and scientific careers are built on funding and drug research is particularly expensive -- the flawed Science study cost $1.3 million U.S. alone.

"Researchers need to get their money from somewhere," says Mr. Cohen, but funding options are extremely limited. Pharmaceutical companies aren't interested. And most governments aren't prepared to pay a great deal of money for research on drugs they have already banned. The one exception is the United States, which lavishes money on drug research. As a result, the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse boasts that it "supports over 85 per cent of the world's research on the health aspects of drug abuse and addiction."

But that money comes with ideological strings attached. The American government is dominated by a drug-war ideology in which drugs are not simply another health risk that can be rationally studied and regulated. Drugs are criminal, immoral, even evil. When most people think of alcohol, we draw a line between "use" and "abuse" -- consumption that does no harm versus consumption that does. But because the drug-war ideology sees drugs as inherently wicked, it erases the line between use and abuse of illicit drugs. Any use is abuse. Any use is destructive. And the job of science is to prove it.

In his now-retracted study, Dr. Ricaurte was trying to prove something -- that even one dose of ecstasy causes brain damage -- which neatly fits drug-war ideology. Not surprisingly, NIDA covered the $1.3 million U.S. cost of the research. In fact, Dr. Ricaurte has been given $10 million U.S. by NIDA over his career. In exchange, NIDA consistently got what it wanted: Research that hyped the dangers of ecstasy.

But funding research is just one way American drug-war ideologues control the scientific research on illicit drugs. Not funding research can be just as effective when almost all the funding in the world comes from the U.S. "If I would approach NIDA and say I want to show that marijuana use is far less problematic than the use of alcohol, I wouldn't be funded," says Mr. Cohen.

This control can skew research in subtle but powerful ways. Mr. Cohen mentions his own research into ordinary people whose moderate use of cocaine causes little or no physical or social harm. He had been able to fund this work with money from the Dutch government. "But in many other countries, my colleagues could not find such money. They could find money to do research on cocaine use, but only in people who are in ( rehab ) clinics or living on the streets." In any other field this "selection bias" would be unacceptable because it distorts the results. In illicit drug research, it's standard.

A final method of control is crude suppression. "It goes on all the time," insists Mr. Cohen. "I was involved in the cocaine research of the World Health Organization and I saw this happen."

In the early 1990s, the WHO asked a group of international scientists, including Mr. Cohen, to produce what it billed as "the largest global study on cocaine use ever undertaken." In 1995, the study was done. It concluded that most users consume cocaine occasionally, that occasional use usually does not lead to compulsive use, and that occasional use does little or no harm to users. It was a flat contradiction of the drug-war ideology, so the U.S. threatened to pull its funding if the report was released. The WHO buckled. The report was buried.

Journalists are starting to catch on to the fact that they cannot always trust what officials say about drugs, Mr. Cohen feels, but few know how "poisoned the production of knowledge about drugs is." As a result, misinformation abounds and "drug policy is not yet a topic that society can deal with in a rational manner."

(WNB Note: Nice to see the media finally catching on to what drug users have always known. If this is representative of the lies told, and the truth not told, about hard drugs, I can't wait until it becomes widely published how distorted the 'official' view of marijuana is.)

__________________
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

bonghits4jesus

Wow. Very informative.

xxdr_zombiexx

Last year or perhaps late 2002, Barry McCaffery was on Donahue with Gary Jouhnson discussing the legalization of marijuana.

McCaffery frequently took pains to clarify that they have to stick to "facts" and he specifically meant the US Federal Governemnts own approved "facts", manipulated, misrepresented studies and had there been any time at all to discuss the issue in depth, that could have been demolished.

Gabriel Nahas did a lot of the early "factual studies" including those that found monkies would die from certian amounts of marijuana smoke.

Turned out the monkies were force-fed so much smoke they died of either asphxiation or CO poisoning.

Nahas was eventually severely discredited, Columbia University disowned him, and he left the country. Last I read he lived in France. Look him up on the net.

All this lying show how vastly important it is to "some in power" to maintain the lies of the War on Marijuana.

There is no way to support cannabis prohibition and tell the truth.

By the way, I can accept mistakes in research from time to time... but why in the hell did they confuse METH with exstacy?? Why did they even have it around? What happened to the exstacy they were supposed to be testing?

Ooops... doesnt really cut it on this study.

__________________
Torture Good, Healthcare Bad, Marijuana Evil.

There's no money for your issue so long as we're squandering $50 billion a year on the DrugWar. Ben Masel

WNB

They're both amphetamines? But in all probability, the 'confusion' was done on purpose, and they claimed it was an accident to cover their asses when the study was discredited.

As long as we're talking about stupid studies, though, here's an exerpt from a speech that talks about an early marijuana study:

Source

xxdr_zombiexx

Note: I never really comment much of "drugs" like meth or X because, frankly, I don't know anything about them and I don't "do them". I smoke pot and love espresso and that is it.

Color me dull.

But I think WNB is right, both meth and X are amphetamines.

When was the last time you tried to inject mary-ju-wanna into your arm?

Anslinger, infamous Father of Reefer Madness, started the drive to equate marijuana smoking with heroin addiction, and this continues unabated to this day.

The use of the concept and word "injection" is supremely important for the propaganda value or this study. All studies like this are are propaganda. And very bad science for those of you who grasp the significance of setting up "experiments to turn out a specified way as opposed to legitimately testing a theory or hypothesis.


Monkey Business
NIDA | 2000

Scientists at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) have demonstrated that laboratory animals will self-administer marijuana's psychoactive component, THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol), in doses equivalent to those used by humans who smoke the drug. Self-administration of drugs by animals, long considered a model of human drug-seeking behavior, is characteristic of virtually all addictive and abused drugs.

"This study is simple and its findings are clear," says NIDA Director Dr. Alan I. Leshner. "Animals will work to get THC. This emphasizes further the similarity between marijuana and other abusable, addicting substances. Both animals and humans will work to acquire access to marijuana in the same way that both animals and humans change their behavior to get other drugs of abuse, like cocaine and heroin."

Dr. Steven Goldberg and colleagues at NIDA's Intramural Research Program in Baltimore, Maryland, report in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience that squirrel monkeys will self-administer intravenous injections of THC.

"This is the first study in which it has been possible to show that monkeys or other research animals will self-administer THC. There are many factors which may explain this behavior, including the fact that in our study we used doses of THC that are directly comparable to doses in marijuana smoke inhaled by humans," Dr. Goldberg says.

Before the study began, the scientists first established self-administration behavior in squirrel monkeys that received repeated intravenous injections of cocaine after pressing a lever 10 times for each injection. At the start of the study, the researchers replaced cocaine with saline solution and the animals' self-administration stopped.

When saline was replaced with THC in a solution that would rapidly pass from blood to the brain, the animals resumed self-administration, rapidly pressing the lever to obtain on average 30 injections of THC during each of a series of 1-hour sessions. Treatment with a compound that prevented THC from binding to cannabinoid receptors on brain cells almost completely eliminated self-administration of THC, but had no effect in another group of monkeys self-administering cocaine under identical conditions, according to Dr. Goldberg.

"The drug-seeking behavior in these animals was comparable in intensity to that maintained by cocaine under identical conditions, and was obtained from a range of doses comparable to those self-administered by humans smoking a single marijuana cigarette," Dr. Goldberg says. "This finding suggests that marijuana has as much potential for abuse as other drugs of abuse, such as cocaine and heroin."

*****************************
I have looked around and tried to find the original study, but it is available only by registration...and $18.00, so I found.

The study was released through a restricted set of groups and mostly kept off the net. It was originally and a neuroscience journal but the link to that, on the original of the above says its a dead link

The has kept saying "THC" but in fact were using some artificial chemial they felt "was exactly like " THC and was suspended in some sort of fluid for injectiblity. I cannot remember the name of it... it was wierd . Something lik "7, n.ab 345" or somthing like that. Not a glamourous name.

The problems with this are rife, starting with turning the poor monkeys into junkies first THEN giving them access to the artificial THC-like contrivance.

Cocaine as a gateway drug?

The other scary thing is that additional drug pumped into them to deprive them of the high.

I have read NIDA tracts at work in the past and they see no problem with creating an injection that can be given to people when they are infants that would forever block anything pleasurable from cociane or marijuana. Sheer crazienss really. Your taxes hard at work against you.

By the way, the monkeys were fired from thier jobs for testing positive for drugs (hair testing of course - it's the Feds) and were last known to be living like paupers under a bridge.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

MAPS Critique of study

Hydrosan

Blimey, I thought I'd never be surprised at WOD tactics, but seeing the date on that NIDA piece is shocking it reads like something from the 50's.

Excellent article WNB

San.

solutions

Just a small example of McCaffrey "sticking to facts", right before his "fact finding tour" to the Netherlands:

"McCaffrey asserted that drug abuse problems in The Netherlands are "enormous" (Associated Press, July 13, 1998)

(.....)

McCaffrey also claimed, to a room full of journalists, that "The murder rate in Holland is double that in the United States... That's drugs." He cited these figures: 17.58 murders per 100,000 population in the Netherlands, he asserted, vs. 8.22 per 100,000 in the U.S. (Reuters, July 13, 1998)

(....)

In less than 24 hours, the world's media caught and corrected McCaffrey's mistake. They showed that he had arrived at his Dutch figure by lumping homicides together with the much higher number of attempted homicides, and that he had not done the same for the U.S. figures. Thus, the Drug Czar had compared the U.S. homicide rate with the combined rates of homicide and attempted homicide in the Netherlands. The correct Dutch homicide rate, the international press reported, is 1.8 per 100,000, less than one fourth the U.S. rate (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, July 13, 1998; Reuters, July 14, 1998). Even this error might have been forgotten if McCaffrey had not gone on to attribute this newfound murderous streak in the Dutch national soul to their drug policy: "That's drugs" he said, apparently unaware that there has never been any evidence that marijuana — the only drug the Dutch ever decriminalized — is a cause of murder.

Then McCaffrey's staff at the Office of National Drug Control Policy dug his agency into a deeper hole. When Dutch Embassy officials confronted Deputy Drug Czar Jim McDonough about the misleading figures, he replied: "Let's say [that's] right. What you're left with is that they [the Dutch] are a much more violent society and more inept [at murder], and that's not much to brag about" (Washington Times, July 15, 1998, p. A4). Here, in a stunning blend of ignorance and arrogance, Mr. McDonough compounds his failure to understand the earlier error with an ethnic slur upon the Dutch."

Source: The Dutch example shows that liberal drug laws can be beneficial by Dr. Reinarman, Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz:

"In war, truth is the first casualty" - Aeschylus (525 BC - 456 BC)

One of the reasons drug policies shouldn't be labeled a "war on drugs" but focus on people and their needs.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was that 99,33% of these dogs actually survived an injection of (probably a huge dose of) THC directly into their brain. I bet this "scientist" didn't expect that....

__________________
3 monkeys sitting under a coconut tree
discussing things as they are set to be
Said one to the other, now listen you two
there's a strange rumor that can't be true
they say man was descended from our noble race
but the very idea is a big disgrace
no monkey ever deserted his wife
or her baby to ruin their lives.
Damian Marley - Educated Fools

Abomonog

To add a Follow up story (Kind of). Note that the Bush administration manipulates so much research that the science community is getting angry about it.

From Physics Today

Summary: The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a report showing how the Bush administration treats scientific data.

The Bush Gang, in return, accusses the group (including 20 Nobel prize winners) of lying.

smoking_joe_lee

So scientists experimenting with ecstacy injected meth into the brains of monkeys. Makes these clowns look pretty lame. If I were conducting an experiment with ecstacy I would make sure that is what was administered. But what do I know? I'm not a scientist...
Another thing; do ecstacy users inject the drug directly into their brains? Did the scientists know the answer?
On an unrelated topic, I saw Courtney Love on the "Tonight Show" with Jay Leno. She claimed to be a Republican...wierd...

interzone

You can say what you want to about weed anywhere on this site. The only problem is that only those of us who already support its legalization are going to read it. I spread the word about these stupid asinine laws to anyone who will listen.

I believe it was Lincoln who said something about prohibition and the down fall of society.