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I think you will enjoy this new article from Virtual Citizens titled "Your Tax Dollars at Work: More Drug War Lies".

More Government Sponsored Drug War Lies

Summary of the Research

In mid-August 2007, a spokesperson for the academic “Society for Neuroscience” (which publishes the journal Neuroscience), announced to the world that a team at the University of South Carolina headed by Dr. Jacqueline McGinty, had discovered evidence to conclude that methamphetamine use by teens causes brain damage in later life.[1] Uncritical reporting from Agence France Presse and emesis spewed from the good Dr. McGinty herself informed America that we are suffering from a meth epidemic and that increases in Parkinson’s are 30 to 40 years around the corner.

In their study titled, “Long-Term Consequences of Methamphetamine Exposure in Young Adults Are Exacerbated in Glial Cell Line-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Heterozygous Mice,” Dr. McGinty et al, claim that after a mere four doses of methamphetamine injected into the abdominal area of mice that they could measure residual brain damage in said mice nine months later.[2] Building on the assumption that human brains function and react just as chemically altered brains of imprisoned mice, the researchers concluded, reasoning by analogy, that use of methamphetamine by humans teenagers will lead to brain damage that harkens Parkinson’s disease.[3]

Reasons for Skepticism

At a most basic level, there are methodological, political, and ethical critiques to question the validity and propriety of the study itself as well as the authors’ conclusions. First, McGinty et al. injected the mice with mega doses of methamphetamine, not doses comparable to what humans use regularly – even if they uses are so-called addicts. Second, as reported, at least one set of mice used in the study were physically altered. Hence the mice are not necessarily comparable to humans who are exposed to or who use methamphetamines, making the validity of the study suspect. Third, for over 100 years, the federal government has produced and or supported “research” that parrots government positions designed to vilify certain drugs and the suspect classes who use them. What is the likelihood that a government funded study would not generate the proper conclusion about the latest drug craze? More poignantly, the State of South Carolina and her USC medical center has recently been on the frontlines of the prosecution of the War on Drugs as opposed to addressing drug use issues as a medical matter. Considered in light of this context, given that this latest “research” piece is funded by both the U.S. Army (which compels soldiers to consume amphetamines),[4] and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (a mouthpiece for American Drug War propaganda – note there is no comparable bureau to study drug use per se), we must question McGinty’s motives for undertaking the project period, much less her teams’ results and speculative conclusions.

Should We Find the Study Valid?

It’s the Dosage Stupid! McGinty and her co-authors purport to tell us that typical doses of methamphetamines can have serious, long-lasting, deleterious effects on brain function to the point of causing Parkinson’s disease or Parkinson’s-like neurological impairment and disorder. However instead of giving mice comparable doses as consumed by regular or infrequent meth users, McGinty et al. gave one set of mice four mega doses of methamphetamine.

According to McGinty, the mice were injected with 10mg of meth per kg body weight four times.[5] The latter three injections coming at two hour intervals after the first.[6] If a person followed the same regime, how much meth would they take following the McGinty binge?  For a 110 pound woman (50 kg), at 10mg per kg, she would be injected with 500 mg of meth – and then injected three more times over a period of six hours! The obvious question is, would four doses of 500mg of meth in six hours be a lot of meth for a 50kg woman?

McGinty et al., and journalists from AFP fail to provide any mention of the matter of dosage and how realistic or common such mega use occurs in humans. Though one might find a wide range of opinion as to what constitutes a normal, common, or mega-dose of methamphetamine, the evidence is relatively clear as to how much meth humans regularly consume. 

The DEA references an uncited NIDA report of 2006 which declares, “In some cases, abusers forego food and sleep while indulging in a form of binging known as a “run,” injecting as much as a gram of the drug every 2 to 3 hours over several days until the user runs out of the drug or is too disorganized to continue.”[7] (Nota bene: for some curious oddity, the NIDA report has no citations or references to bolster to support its claim about superhuman meth addicts). Conversely, according to Erowid (2003)[8] a large dose of meth, taken intravenously, would be 50 mg. For even a regular user, 50 mg[9] would generate a high from one to three hours and the user would have another two to four hours to come down (Erowid 2003).

Hence, if we follow the dictates of Erowid (2003), where a regular meth user might go seven hours between hits, we see that McGinty and company (2007), gave mice 10 times what a regular user needs and then re-administered the mega dose three more times within less than seven hours!

According to Wikipedia, intravenous meth users might use anywhere from 125mg to 1g at a time. (As expected there is no source to support the 1000mg claim. However, given recent revelations that government officials doctor Wikipedia entries, it is likely that the 1g claim is tied to propagandists at the DEA and NIDA). Nevertheless, if we take the low-end Wikipedia estimate, the mice in McGinty’s study were forced to endure four times more than what a heavy meth user would take in one injection, and then the mice were forced to repeat that three more times in a few hours.

Maybe we can extrapolate a standard dosage according to street prices? Various reports and government buy operations find that a quarter-gram (250mg) of meth costs anywhere from $20-25.[10] If we assume that this price is for a single dose we still must consider that the purity of such street drugs is uncertain. Thus a 50kg woman might use less than 5mg/kg. By contrast, in McGinty’s study, mice were given unadulterated meth at twice that level.

There have been other documented cases of unadulterated meth use. During the Third Reich, German soldiers were given Pervitin (which had 3mg of methamphetamine) and later another drug which contained Pervitin called D-IX. D-IX had three significant psychoactive substances, cocaine (5mg), methamphetamine (3mg), and 5mg of a morphine extract.[11] Soldiers and their commanders were advised to take only two pills (either the Pervitin or later the D-IX) per day as necessary to stave off sleepiness.[12]

To compare then, while German soldiers weighing roughly 75kg (165 lbs.) were taking not more than 12 mg of meth (orally) per day (two pills with three mg each, twice a day),[13] lab mice were injected with relatively 250 times that much, in one day! Ingesting 200-250 times too much water, coffee, aspirin, heroin, alcohol, etc. within a six hour period, is enough to kill anyone. That some researchers found evidence that mice would show a sign of brain damage 9 months after what should have been a life ending meth binge is unremarkable.

And by no means should McGinty or her team have been so ignorant of the fact that they were giving mice mega doses of methamphetamine. Other American scientists offered them a guide – and professionals at a research hospital in South Carolina should have known.

In sharp contrast with the McGinty study, researchers at UCLA (2007) gave groups of monkeys a range from .2mg/kg to .6mg/kg of meth, no more than three times per day![14]  As well, while the monkeys in the UCLA study were doped up 9-12 times per week for 6-8 weeks, the researchers concluded that while such meth exposure correlated strongly with behavioral changes, anti-social and more aggressive actions, the brains of the monkeys did NOT show extensive neurodegeneration.[15] If one set of animals were exposed to meth for a longer period, yet did not show the same types of disease as McGinty et al. found, what can we conclude, but that she poisoned her mice needlessly, with mega doses of meth?

Just Another Propaganda Study?

On the surface, it is easy to see that McGinty and colleagues have simply produced another junk-science, pro-government Drug War propaganda piece. Recent history is filled with examples. In 1974 Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University poisoned monkeys with carbon monoxide smoke produced by burning marijuana. Though Dr. Heath claimed that the marijuana itself produced brain damage, later investigation showed that Heath forced the monkeys to inhale the equivalent of smoke from 63 joints in five minutes and 30 joints a day for 90 days![16]

1989, without any scientific evidence, Dr. Ira Chasnoff, published work proclaiming to show that crack use by pregnant woman was generating a new demon, the “crack baby.” That nearly all accounts were of Black children was omitted during the age of the CIA-crack connection (aka Iran-Contra) and the Reagan-Bush drug war against Blacks and Browns. Years later, however, when Chasnoff and other neurologists approached the topic with some rigor and scientific controls, lo and behold Chasnoff realized that there were no measurable negative developmental side-effects from in utero cocaine exposure. Claiming that poverty, not crack, was the greatest determinant of brain development, Chasnoff wrote:

“Their average developmental functioning level is normal.  [In utero cocaine exposed children] are no different from other children growing up.  They are not the retarded imbeciles [that] people talk about.”[17]

In 2002, NIH-sponsored researcher, George Ricaurte, announced to the world that recreational use of XTC (MDMA) leads to brain damage and that XTC use by teens would lead to Parkinson’s or other nueropsychiatric diseases in later life.[18] Like McGinty and Co., Ricaurte’s team poisoned monkeys with massive doses of XTC that they claimed were standard doses – even though Ricaurte had no references as to define what a baseline dose should be.[19] Voices opposed the drug war responded immediately, attacking the methodology and conclusions of Ricaurte’s work. One year later, Science itself retracted the article after Ricaurte himself claimed that he did not administer MDMA, but another amphetamine.

In the early 1990s, at the same hospital whence McGinty and her team now hail, the Medical University Hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, doctors and nurses on the maternity ward elected to work as an arm of the state in prosecuting the Drug War … and perpetuated the crack baby myths and stereotypes about crack and African-Americans at the same time.

The Medical University Hospital instituted a policy of reporting on and facilitating the arrest of pregnant, primarily African-American patients who tested positive for cocaine. For four years, many African-American women were dragged out publicly, from the hospital, in chains.[20]

The medical staff, working in collaboration with the prosecutor and police, conducted an “experiment” to see if arrests would reduce drug use by pregnant women. All but one of the thirty women arrested pursuant to the policy were African-American.  The White nurse who implemented and ran the program admitted that she believed that mixing of the races was against God’s will and noted in the medical records of the one White woman they arrested that she “lived with her boyfriend who is a Negro.” Despite claims to the contrary by hospital staff and the South Carolina Attorney General, most of the arrested mothers were never offered any drug treatment before being taken to jail.[21]

News Flash: McGinty finds a drug epidemic

So with this history, we must contextualize McGinty’s study and what she claims is the serious social need both to study meth and to warn us of its ills. In recent interviews, Dr. Jacqueline McGinty told reporters that:

“Methamphetamine intoxication in any young adult may have deleterious consequences later in life, though [the consequences might] not be apparent until many decades after the exposure. These studies speak directly to the possibility of long-term public health consequences resulting from the current epidemic of methamphetamine abuse among young adults.”

What is the basis for McGinty, a medical doctor and researcher, proclaiming that South Carolina, or the United States is suffering from a “meth epidemic”?

There are a few ways to address the question. Let us start with a medical definition of an epidemic. As a baseline medical definition, an epidemic refers to the occurrence of more cases of a disease than would be expected in a community or region during a given time period. As well, epidemics refer to sudden severe outbreaks of a disease.[22]

The threat of disease epidemics in crowded, densely populated or unsanitary conditions is particularly well illustrated in military history. On many occasions a germ has been as important as the sword or gun in determining the outcome of a war. The Spanish conquest of Mexico owes much of its success to an epidemic of smallpox that destroyed about half of the Aztec population.[23] The typhoid bacillus caused severe effects during both the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa.[24] The mortality rate from epidemic typhus increases with age. Over half of untreated persons age 50 or more die but people of all ages can perish of the disease.[25]

Two other examples of epidemics include the Spanish flu and Bubonic plague. In 1918, some estimates find that 28% of all Americans were affected with the Spanish Flu.[26] And the mortality rate associated with that flu outbreak was 2.5%.[27] The bubonic plague (or Black plague) has been responsible for a number great pandemics. The first spread occurred from the Middle East to the Mediterranean basin during the fifth and sixth centuries AD, killing approximately 50% of the population there. The second pandemic afflicted Europe between the 8th and 14th centuries, destroying nearly 40% of the population.[28]

The Invisible Epidemic?

So while in the medical context, the use of the term epidemic is reserved for contagious diseases, McGinty insists on using the inflammatory language in relation to a behavior that in no way is contagious … though arguably addictive for some individual users. Nonetheless, what does the data say about meth use? Have mortality rates skyrocketed or even increased recently, and can we attribute any changes to meth? Could we call meth addiction or meth use rates indicative of an epidemic that is wiping out populations, communities, and or the nation in the same manner that the Spanish flu hit American in 1918? Or should we understand that a study which was lauded by Dr. Nora Volkow, the current head of the NIDA,[29] McGinty is spewing Drug War nonsense, designed to justify policies that have created rises in the rates of meth use?

According the 2006 edition of the annual study by the University of Michigan, Monitoring the Future (funded by the NIDA), less than 1% of American teens use meth monthly.[30]  Another recent NIDA report (2003) found that in some parts of Nebraska, nearly six percent of arrestees across five select counties tested positive for methamphetamine.[31] In raw numbers, that study found that 32 people out of a population of 644,000 were both arrested and tested positive for meth.[32]

In December 2001, the federal National Drug Intelligence Center reported that meth use in South Carolina was far below that of other states![33] That said, in 2004, a total of 500 people sought treatment for meth addiction in the state of South Carolina.[34] That is, 500 people in a population of over 4.3 million – or little more than 12 in 100,000 residents of the state.

To compare, in an area of the country where meth is supposedly a visible problem, the Midwest, not even a rural state like Nebraska can show meth use rates of over 1% for the general population. Similarly, given that South Carolina has meth use rates below the national average, and the nation does not show teen meth use at even 1%, where is McGinty’s credibility in claiming that there is a meth epidemic, much less at the level of validity in her study overall? Given the federal government’s own data on meth use, McGinty’s insistence on a meth epidemic is about as credible as G. W. Bush claiming that in 2003, the U.S. and her allies were under an imminent threat from Iraq’s non-existent stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

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Sources

[1] See Sara Harris. 2007. “Meth exposure in young adults leads to long-term behavioral consequences.” Society for Neuroscience, public release 14 August. Online at: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/sfn-mei081307.php#. Contact Ms. Harris at sharris@sfn.org; or 202-962-4000

[2-3] Journal of Neuroscience, August 15, 2007, volume 27, number 33:8816-8825. Online at: http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/27/33/8816. Received Aug. 11, 2006; revised June 11, 2007; accepted June 27, 2007.

[4] Murdo Macleod. 2007. “UK troops receiving 'trigger happy' drug.” Scotland on Sunday, 10 July, http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=906322007

[5-6] Journal of Neuroscience, August 15, 2007, volume 27, number 33:8816-8825. Online at: http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/27/33/8816. Received Aug. 11, 2006; revised June 11, 2007; accepted June 27, 2007.

[7] The report was first issued in 1998 and subsequently revised in 2002 and 2006. See National Institute on Drug Abuse, Research Report - Methamphetamine Abuse and Addiction, www.drugabuse.gov/ResearchReports/methamph/methamph.html

[8] http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/meth/meth_dose.shtml

[9] Editor’s note: Erowid does not present any consideration of bodyweight.

[10] http://www.kci.org/meth_info/faq_meth.htm

[11] Jeralyn (2005) at TalkLeft cites Ulrich (infra) and describes Pervitin as: “five milligrams of cocaine, three milligrams of Pervitin and five milligrams of Eukodal (a morphine-based painkiller).” See http://www.talkleft.com/story/2005/05/11/574/20039

[12-13] Andreas Ulrich (2005). “The Nazi Death Machine: Hitler’s Drugged Soldiers.” Der Spiegel (The Mirror), 6 May. http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,354606,00.html

[14-15] See Melegal et al. 2007. “Long-Term Methamphetamine Administration in the Vervet Monkey Models Aspects of a Human Exposure: Brain Neurotoxicity and Behavioral Profiles,” Neuropsychopharmacology. Correspondence: Dr WP Melega, Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Box 951735, 28-117 BRI, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1735; E-mail: wmelega@mednet.ucla.edu

[16] Jack Herer. The Emperor Wears No Clothes.

[17] http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/cocaine/crackbb2.htm

[18] See Science, 26 September 2002

[19] http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/257/fullofholes.shtml

[20-21] Paltrow, Lynn. 1999. “Pregnant Drug Users, Fetal Persons, and the Threat to Roe v. Wade.” 62 Alb. L. Rev. 999, 1024-1025 [22] http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=3273

[23-24] http://www.answers.com/topic/epidemic?cat=health

[25] http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=5881

[26-27] http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/index.html

[28] http://www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic428.htm

[29] See Sara Harris. 2007. “Meth exposure in young adults leads to long-term behavioral consequences.” Society for Neuroscience, public release 14 August.

[30] http://www.nida.nih.gov/Infofacts/methamphetamine.html

[31] http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/180986.pdf

[32] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/31000.html

[33] http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs07/717/meth.htm

[34] http://www.drug-rehabs.org/content.php?cid=1530&state=South%20Carolina

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