Ecstasy Relieved from Agony

An interesting report from AlterNet on the blurry line between science and politics in the never ending War on Drugs:

"The press release deliberately misrepresented the data," says Colin Blakemore. "There was no evidence of the 60 to 80 percent cell-death claim." There were other red flags: 20 percent of the monkeys had died; another 20 percent had gotten so sick they had to be withdrawn. Yet, there simply aren't thousands of people dying from Ecstasy every weekend. Then there was the problem that the drugs were injected Â? not administered orally as suggested in the paper's introduction.

"The more I looked at it, the more I felt there was an agenda," says Blakemore, who immediately fired off a letter to Science editor in chief Donald Kennedy, complaining of "flaws so radical, so deep, they would have been picked up by any referee." But Science maintains it did everything right. "This study was peer-reviewed according to the same rigorous system used in all articles published in Science," says Ginger Pinholster, spokesperson for the Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal. According to Pinholster, the prompt retraction proved that "science is self-correcting."

And

Rick Doblin, on the eve of his own study, says the payoffs for such shoddy science have been immense. "Leshner was willing to exaggerate findings to pander to politicians for money," he says. Leshner did help NIDA bring home the bacon: NIDA's budget for Ecstasy research has more than quadrupled over the past five years, from $3.4 million to $15.8 million; the agency funds 85 percent of the world's drug-abuse research. In 2001, Leshner testified before a Senate subcommittee on "Ecstasy Abuse and Control"; critics say Leshner manipulated brain scans from a 2000 study by Dr. Linda Chang showing no difference between Ecstasy users and control subjects. But NIDA insists it's independent from political pressures. "We don't set policy; we don't create laws," says Beverly Jackson, the agency's spokesperson.

NIDA wasn't the only benefactor of Ricaurte and wife Una McCann's research. "George and Una are cash cows for Johns Hopkins," says Doblin, who points out that every time a scientist receives a grant, money indirectly goes to the affiliated institution. While both NIDA and The New York Times have clocked Ricaurte's NIDA grant money at around $10 million, Doblin believes that's a low-ball figure. "Just this one study was $1.3 million, and he has done loads and loads of them." Johns Hopkins spokesperson Gary Stevenson declined comment beyond the official statement.

Don't get me wrong here. In no way am I advocating recreational usage of ecstasy. Indeed, people on X are among the most annoying of drug users--actually, anybody taking speedy drugs, coke for instance, or meth in particular, is usually pretty annoying, not to mention too damned enamored with his or her own drug-induced verbosity (ah, the time I've wasted in conversations with addled tweakers).

Rather, drug policy should be formulated using strong science: drug addiction is a public health problem, not a criminal problem. It appears, however, that politics and government dollars are providing strong incentives for scientists and doctors to decide on study outcomes before the studies are even commissioned. This is bad for a host of reasons, the most important being an undermining of trust in science--this makes those who do decide to use illegal drugs far less likely to make informed decisions about how to approach their drug use: in the age of "just say no," pot=crack=heroin.

Clearly, pot is not crack, but you wouldn't know that if you relied on politicians and their surrogates (teachers, cops) for your info--this makes it much easier for the teenager who has had a relatively benign experience with marijuana to determine that harder drugs must not be so bad: "they were wrong about pot--it's all just propaganda."

Now, those same politicians are seemingly using their power to infiltrate the scientific community in order to facilitate their own social agendas. The American people stand to pay the price for that.

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