The Hartford Courant "Untruths, unreliable data create obstacles in war on drugs." It is a stark message designed to persuade youths to stay away from marijuana. And it is a lie. The narrator tells television viewers they are watching the brain waves of a normal 14-year-old. As he speaks, squiggly lines with high peaks show an obviously active brain. The picture changes: The lines flatten. These, the narrator says, are the brain waves of a 14-year-old on marijuana. The problem with this national television advertisement is that the flatter "brain waves" are not those of a teenager on dope; they are not brain waves at all. The electroencephalograph was not hooked up to anyone. It is not just brain waves that are being manipulated in the war against drugs. Truth has been a casualty in other areas as well. For example: A study cited by presidents and business leaders to demonstrate the effect of drug use on worker productivity has no scientific validity according to the organization that conducted it. No one has been able to produce another widely quoted study that purportedly showed drug users cost companies more in worker's compensation claims and medical benefits. A third study, used to show that marijuana could cause long-term impairment, was improperly conducted and reached conclusions no other study has been able to duplicated, according to one of its authors. [article goes on to say that drugs are bad but that lying about it destroys the credibility of the anti-drug crusade.] "Part of the problem we have as drug educators today is that kids don't believe us," said Dr. Lester Grinspoon, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School who has researched the effects of marijuana. "They've been told for so long that marijuana is very bad for them and then they go off to college and see a brilliant English major that smokes dope and nothing's happened to his or her brain or heart. Then they use it themselves and discover it's the least harmful illegal drug. So they say that maybe they've been lied to about cocaine or PCP, too." But such questions are not the foremost concern of the organization that created the brain-wave advertisement. The Partnership for a Drug-Free America wants, above all else, to prevent people from using drugs. Theresa Grant, public information director for the nonprofit organization, said she doesn't see any problem with the ad. "The marijuana brain-wave commercial was one of the ads that we used as a fact, rather than a fear-inducing ad," Grant said. later, she acknowledged: "It was a simulation. They manipulated the machine. It was not attached to any person. It was not scientific. At the time we created it in 1987, we were told that it was an appropriate representation," by the government's National Institute on Drug Abuse. ... She emphasized that the partnership has not conceded that the brain-wave representation was inaccurate ... "It's a flat lie," said Grinspoon. "Marijuana has no clinically significant effect on the electroencephalograph." ... Citing a Harvard Medical School study, he said, "Nobody has been able to demonstrate one iota of brain damage from smoking marijuana." Social 'Studies' Last year President Bush declared that "drug abuse among American workers costs businesses anywhere from $60 billion to $100 billion a year in lost productivity, absenteeism, drug-related accidents, medical claims and theft." Where did he get those number? Bush, and President Reagan before him, have based their comments about drugs and productivity on a study conducted by the Research Triangle Institute, a nonprofit research organization near Raleigh, N.C., according to Henrick J. Harwood, who led the study and now is senior policy analyst in the White House drug policy office. ... "It was an inexpensive study done with inadequate data," said Reid Maness, senior manager of communications for Research Triangle Institute. "Unfortunately, there hasn't been attempt since then to do anything better. This still remains the most recent and best study of its type. "When we see people being critical about it, we don't get too upset. RTI would agree that the study does not have a lot of precision. We never claimed that it did," Maness said. The study concluded: o People who had *ever* been heavy marijuana users cost the nation $34.2 billion in diminished worker productivity in 1980. o Adding the costs of drug-related health problems, crime and accidents -- figures that exist only in very rough estimates -- the study concluded that all drug abuse, excluding alcohol, cost the country $47 billion in 1980. How did the institute come up with its figures? Using statistics from a 1982 household survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the institute compared the average income for households in which one person admitted to having every used marijuana daily to the average for households in which no one admitted to having ever used marijuana daily. Households with former heavy smokers of marijuana had an average income 27.9 percent lower than similar households in which marijuana had not been used heavily, the institute said. The study concluded that, when the figures were extrapolated to the general population, marijuana abuse caused an estimated loss in income of $34.2 billion in 1980. In turn, the researchers equated the reduced income with reduced productivity. ... "The study is worthless," said Dr. John P. Morgan, medical professor and head of the pharmacology department at the City University of New York Medical School. "It is obviously absurd. It has to do with the fact that NIDA is functioning chiefly as a minister of propaganda in the war on drugs." The study did not prove any relationship between marijuana use and reduced household income. Despite its conclusion that "The [productivity] loss due to marijuana abuse was estimated at $34.2 billion for 1980," the study elsewhere notes that the reduced income was not necessarily a result of marijuana use. Even if it were, income does not equal productivity. In an article in the University of Kansas Law Review, Morgan write that if income were the same as productivity, then "a judge is less productive than a practicing lawyer, a medical school professor is less productive than a practicing physician, a farmer is less productive than a florist and an elementary school teacher is less productive than an owner of a daycare center." The study arrived at one particularly curious conclusion: People who were *currently* abusing any illegal drug cost the nation nothing in diminished worker productivity A 34-year-old who told researchers in 1982 that he had smoked marijuana every day during the summer of 1966 and had not touched an illegal drug since would be classified as a worker whose productivity was significantly diminished by drug use. But the classification for diminished productivity applied only when someone *quit* smoking marijuana, not if someone continued to use marijuana, cocaine or heroin. Harwood acknowledged this. "We looked at current drug users vs. others and found no significant difference [in productivity] between current users and never-users," he said. The study that wasn't. Shocking anti-drug statistics seem always to make headlines, regardless of what they are based upon. In 1983, Dr. Sidney Cohen, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, wrote in the Drug Abuse and Alcoholism Newsletter that drug users were five times as likely to file workers' compensation claims and that they received three times the average level of benefits for illness. His source was a study purportedly done by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. Many other drug fighters, particularly people in favor of widespread drug testing of employees, have quoted either the Firestone study or the newsletter edited by Cohen, who has since died. In fact, there appears to have been no such study. "About three people have asked me for that study," said the Firestone medical director, Dr. E. Gates Morgan. "I'm unaware of it. We had an [employee assistance program] man with us, but left the company in 1983 and died in 1987. I've looked all over for the stuff he wrote, but we don't have any copies of it at all." ... A life of their own Other widely quoted studies have even larger margins of error -- but you wouldn't know that by listening to the people who quote them. "Marijuana does not wear off in a couple of hours," said Rosanna Creighton, president of the nonpartisan lobbying group "Citizens for a Drug-free Oregon." "The pleasure high is gone, but the effect it has ... on motor skills, eye-to-hand coordination, peripheral vision ... is not gone. A Stanford University study showed that 24 hours after smoking marijuana, the ability of airplane pilots was impaired." Creighton was referring to a 1985 study paid for by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Veterans Administration Medical Research Service. It has been used to show that even casual marijuana use is dangerous -- despite many government studies that have concluded the opposite. ... The study said that although the pilots were unaware they were impaired, their marijuana-induced errors could easily lead to airplane crashes. But a co-author of the study is not confident of those findings. "The results of the study were suggestive, non conclusive," said Dr. Von Otto Leirer, an experimental psychologist. "We didn't have the appropriate controls for the experiment. That was a real serious problem." Leirer said a follow-up study, using the proper controls and methods, was conducted. That study was published in December, but attracted little notice. ... In the past 20 years, studies have shown marijuana to cause brain damage, paranoia, early senility, heart malfunction and sexual problems, Grinspoon said. In every case, he said, follow-up studies failed to confirm that marijuana caused any of those problems. 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