Date: Tue, 23 May 2000
Subject: Florida Prohibitionists Artificially Inflate Drug Death Figures
DrugSense FOCUS Alert #172 May 23, 2000
Florida Prohibitionists Artificially Inflate Drug Death Figures
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DrugSense FOCUS Alert #172 May 23, 2000
In an attempt to maintain some credibility, a few anti-drug
strategists have tried to establish measurable goals. For instance,
the governor Florida recently announced that his office would cut
illegal drug use in the state by 50 percent in five years.
However, even the most committed drug warriors know by now that
filling prisons, spreading absurd anti-drug propaganda and shredding
the Constitution aren’t effective. In fact those tactics have helped
to boost reports of illegal drug use throughout the 1990s. So what’s a
prohibitionist to do? In Florida, the state drug czar’s office has
been inflating the number of deaths attributed to illegal drug use,
presumably so the office can justify its outrageous budget now and
show a dramatic decline in such deaths in a few years. As revealed in
a report from the Orlando Sentinel (below), several deaths that had
nothing to do with “designer drugs” have been attributed to “designer
drug” use.
The Sentinel reports that Florida drug czar Jim McDonough, displaying
the arrogance of a real czar, reacted to proof of mistakes in drug
death records by asking “why a reporter would question shortcomings in
the research instead of helping his staff fight drug abuse.” Please
write a letter to the Orlando Sentinel to say promoting bad data and
escalating the drug war will only encourage drug abuse, not fight it.
Thanks for your effort and support.
WRITE A LETTER TODAY
It’s not what others do it’s what YOU do
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CONTACT INFO
Source: Orlando Sentinel (FL)
Contact: insight@orlandosentinel.com
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ARTICLE
URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n675/a02.html
Newshawk: Sledhead
Pubdate: Sun, 21 May 2000
Source: Orlando Sentinel (FL)
Copyright: 2000 Orlando Sentinel
Contact: insight@orlandosentinel.com
Address: 633 N.Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801
Website: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/
Forum: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/interact/messageboards/
Author: Henry Pierson Curtis
Bookmark: additional articles on Ecstasy may be found at
http://www.mapinc.org/mdma.htm
BAD RESEARCH CLOUDS STATE DEATH REPORTS
Angry, grieving. ‘My son does not belong on that list’ of
designer-drug-related deaths, says Joel Waters. Mitchell Waters, 15,
died of a heart ailment but was taking a prescription that contained a
drug on the list.
Talking about drug deaths. Jim McDonough, the state’s chief drug
fighter, tells a summit in February in Tallahassee attended by Sen.
Toni Jennings (left) and Rep. John Thrasher about club-drug deaths.
His numbers have since been questioned.
Pearl Mastros, 80, died in a nursing home.
Mitchell Waters, 15, died playing basketball.
Tavani Smith, 4, died in a hospital.
Each of these Central Floridians died of known causes. Yet they and
many others like them were portrayed by the state as victims of
designer-drug abuse.
An analysis by The Orlando Sentinel found glaring mistakes in research
by the Office of Drug Control in its campaign to spotlight the dangers
of so-called “rave” drugs.
Its official tally of rave-drug deaths reached 254. But blaming that
many deaths on the club scene was grossly misleading. The state’s
research included dozens of errors.
Lumped together with the deaths of hard-partying teens, the state
counted:
Terminal cancer patients who committed suicide.
Senior citizens who took painkillers under doctors’ supervision in
hospitals and nursing homes.
A 58-year-old St. Petersburg man who died after a
heart-bypass.
Middle-aged abusers of common street drugs.
A Miami crib death.
In Central Florida alone, a computer-assisted Sentinel review found 25
of the 60 local deaths counted by the state had no ties to club drugs.
Another 10 deaths already had been counted as heroin-related.
In total, more than half the deaths were from some other cause, and in
some cases, it was clear their inclusion was absurd.
How the state came to identify pre-schoolers and grandmothers as
victims of a drug culture known for pierced tongues and all-night
dancing does not have a simple answer.
Since 1994, Orlando has had a growing problem with club drugs — GHB,
Rohypnol, MDMA and others. At “house parties” and in more than a
dozen clubs around town, teens and young adults gather to listen to
music and dance. And get high.
Based on the Sentinel’s analysis, the death count across Central
Florida is 25 — a tragic statistic, but less than half what the state
claims. The drug office has begun removing cases from the list since
the Sentinel raised questions.
Despite increasing efforts to fight it, the abuse thrives across the
state. Today, the designer-drug craze is the latest hot topic in the
drug war.
Florida has jumped into the fight in a big way. Last summer, state
officials staged Operation Heat Rave, a statewide raid on clubs. Then
last winter, Gov. Jeb Bush’s staff of drug experts began searching
from Key West to Pensacola for proof of the deadly epidemic stalking
nightclubs and the rave scene.
Jim McDonough, the state drug-fighting chief, unveiled the results of
that study at a drug summit earlier this year, using the findings to
warn lawmakers of the dangers ahead, despite progress in his first
year as head of the drug office.
With Bush, Senate President Toni Jennings, R-Orlando, and House
Speaker John Thrasher, R-Orange Park, on the stage behind him, he
cited the work as “a very thorough, autopsy-by-autopsy review.”
McDonough told the standing-room-only crowd at the Capitol that club
drugs were killing many more youngsters than anyone had suspected.
Since then, McDonough has defended the work. He asked why a reporter
would question shortcomings in the research instead of helping his
staff fight drug abuse.
“If we made a mistake, we want to correct the mistake,” he said.
“There’s no attempt here to put out bad data. We are trying to get
the facts. We have discovered that we have a club-drug problem in
this state that is immense, and we want to do something about it.”
The Office of Drug Control acknowledges some of its errors. Two dozen
deaths of elderly men and women as old as 84 were deleted from the
list after the Sentinel questioned the findings. In some of those
cases, records showed that the medical examiners involved had urged
the state’s analysts not to count them as drug deaths.
And there are other glaring mistakes.
“My son does not belong on that list,” said Joel Waters of east Orange
County. His 15-year-old son, Mitchell, collapsed while playing
basketball at school last year. An undiagnosed heart ailment caused
his death.
But the teenager had taken Adderall, a drug prescribed by his doctor
to treat an attention-deficit disorder. It contained amphetamine, a
drug on the list. No one in Tallahassee inquired about his cause of
death before labeling the 15-year-old honor student as a victim of
illegal-drug abuse.
“If they’re working to get extra numbers to get extra money, they’re
working in the wrong direction,” said Waters, a construction
contractor. “I worked for the government. Statistics are something
people manipulate.”
These days, Florida’s drug fight is an enormous effort.
Bush created the Office of Drug Control in 1999 to coordinate
prevention, treatment and enforcement efforts, announcing his goal of
cutting drug abuse in Florida in half by 2004. It coincides with the
national drug strategy to cut abuse countrywide by the same amount.
A key element of the strategy was to make the new office
“research-based, measurable and accountable for performance.” To head
the program, Bush brought in McDonough, a former U.S. Army colonel
who served as head of strategy for the Office of National Drug Control
Policy from 1996 to 1999. He supervises Florida’s $540 million
campaign and is credited with energizing drug-fighting efforts here.
On Dec. 2, almost a year after McDonough’s arrival, the National
Institute on Drug Abuse in Washington, D.C., issued a nationwide alert
about the increasing abuse of designer drugs.
It turned the club scene into the drug war’s latest thing. Ten days
later, McDonough’s staff contacted the state’s 22 medical examiners,
saying it wanted to create a list of all designer-drug-related deaths.
Staff members wanted the information in time for a statewide drug
summit on Feb. 11.
The drug office asked the state Medical Examiners Commission to send
reports on every death from 1997 through 1999 that tested positive for
any of 20 listed drugs. The request caught the medical examiners
unprepared. There is no uniform system for tracking these drugs.
The Office of Drug Control, interviews and records show, would take
responsibility for deciding which deaths were designer-drug-related.
The list included such common rave drugs as MDMA, an amphetamine-based
hallucinogen; and GHB, a sedative once sold legally in health-food
stores.
But it also listed chemicals such as fentanyl, a painkiller, and
ketamine, an anesthetic. Both appear occasionally on the rave scene.
But they also are commonly used in hospitals and veterinary clinics.
From the outset, the state’s definition of designer drugs struck
medical examiners as unusually broad. It seemed to some that the
Office of Drug Control was asking for too much, too quickly and
without knowing how to analyze it.
“Some of those drugs on their list of 20 designer drugs are not
designer drugs,” said Dr. Shashi Gore, chief medical examiner of
Orange and Osceola counties. “Ketamine is not a designer drug. Pure
amphetamine is not a designer drug. Nitrous oxide — come on! It’s a
drug of abuse, but not a designer drug.”
Consider the case of Tavani J. Smith, one of the deaths McDonough
told legislators that he had personally reviewed.
No spikey-haired party animal, Tavani was a 4-year-old boy who loved
the Power Rangers and cold milk. He woke up on Feb. 17, 1999,
complaining of a headache that would persist all day. He arrived at
the emergency room of Orlando Regional Medical Center at 9:08 p.m.
after his mother consulted her son’s doctor.
Nurses gave the boy several drugs to sedate him so a doctor could do a
spinal tap to test for meningitis. One of those was ketamine.
At 1:25 a.m., Tavani stopped breathing. Autopsy reports show he died
from “probable adverse reaction to ketamine/brevital
administration.”
But the drug-control staff classified the child as a poly-drug abuser
who died from an overdose of ketamine.
“This is crazy, very crazy. They need to go back to school,” the
youngster’s grandmother said. “Tavani was a baby. How could they do
that? That’s crazy.”
Steve Lauer, chief of staff and creator of the designer-drug list,
acknowledged that he hadn’t known that ketamine was used in hospitals.
Asked about that and other mistakes, Lauer said, “I’m not a doctor.
I’m a layman. I have a large number of these. I simply took what
they gave me.”
Lauer said he should not have included previously counted heroin
deaths. In some cases, Lauer said he forgot about the advice from the
Medical Examiners Commission not to count deaths of elderly men and
women. And the details in other cases clearly should have raised questions.
Among them: a 58-year-old man who died the day he left a hospital
after a heart operation, a 52-year-old nursing-home patient who fell
and hit his head, and a 74-year-old cancer patient who died in a
Miami-Dade County hospital from an accidental overdose of morphine.
McDonough said he was too busy overseeing the drug-fighting effort to
discuss cases like that of Rose Pope, 82, who died in St. Petersburgh
eight days after being hit by a car.
The Office of Drug Control blamed medical examiners for the mistaken
inclusion of elderly victims on the list. But the examiners’ staffers
say the drug experts in Tallahassee got exactly what they asked for.
“I spent weeks trying to educate them on what they were really looking
for. . . . I talked until I was blue in the face,” said Larry
Bedore, director of operations for Dr. Joan Wood, chief medical
examiner of Pasco and Pinellas counties and head of the state Medical
Examiners Commission.
One-hundred-fifty pages of memos, draft policies and other
correspondence between the commission and the Office of Drug Control
show that medical examiners had tried to limit the number of drugs to
be tracked.
That might have helped to prevent the counting of victims such as
Francois Cineus, a 6-month-old Miami boy who died from sudden infant
death syndrome but who had tested positive for ketamine.
There were other mistakes not quite as obvious as infants and senior
citizens. The original list also included deaths involving drugs that
have been around since the 1940s and don’t fit what drug investigators
consider the “party” drug scene.
Locally, for example, the state counted seven amphetamine-related
deaths of middle-aged men, including that of a 42-year-old Lockheed
Martin missile engineer, a 41-year-old man who shot himself after
losing his job and a 37-year-old pedestrian killed by a hit-and-run
driver.
Gore, the Orange-Osceola medical examiner, said none of those cases
should have been counted as designer-drug-related deaths.
“I think it’s very inappropriate. They should have consulted us for
sure,” Gore said. “They need somebody who really knows what’s happening.”
The reality is that the drug-abuse crisis is complex. People in
different age groups and in different walks of life take different
drugs. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy to combatting the
problem. That requires a sophisticated breakdown of the problem.
For example, amphetamine and a related drug, methamphetamine, can be
combined with other chemicals to make the designer drug Ecstasy. But,
by themselves, they attract a different crowd of users.
“The typical meth user is a completely different stereotype from the
typical party-drug user,” said Guy Hargreaves, a special agent with
the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. “There really is a major
distinction.”
Methamphetamine users in Florida range from teenagers to working men
and women in their 50s and 60s. They are predominantly poor, rural
whites or Mexican-Americans, agents said. Few, if any, have ties to
what the Office of Drug Control considers the rave or club scene,
agents said.
“The kids I’m talking about wouldn’t know a rave if one crawled up
their leg and bit them,” said DEA Special Agent Tom Feeney, head of a
High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area methamphetamine task force in
Tampa.
“They call it, ‘Poor Man’s Cocaine.’ ”
Designer and party drugs attract a much more affluent group of users.
Most tend to be non-Hispanic, middle class and between the ages of 15
and 25, according to drug agents working for the DEA, Florida
Department of Law Enforcement and the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
The state’s list, however, included 93 deaths of people 35 or older.
Another complication is that these drug deaths are rarely as simple as
someone who sniffed or swallowed one drug. Most of Florida’s cases
involve users who mixed a variety of drugs and alcohol.
And many deaths involve car wrecks or other accidents.
Drug-treatment specialists say the flaws in the research are so
significant that they could hurt efforts to convince the public about
the deadliness of designer drugs.
“Questionable data on the nature of the problem will tend to put all
data in question,” said Jim Hall, executive director of Up Front Drug
Information Center in Miami and a researcher in trends for the
National Institute of Drug Abuse. “That’s certainly a concern we have
. . . There’s a tendency not to believe any of that government drug
data.”
Hall’s colleagues working for drug-treatment programs in Tampa, St.
Petersburg, Orlando, Jacksonville, Tallahassee and west Florida voiced
similar concerns. Provide misleading or false information to
teenagers — the most at-risk group — and they’ll never trust you,
they said.
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SAMPLE LETTER
To the editor:
I was fascinated by the article “Bad research clouds state death
reports,” (May 21). The facts are disturbing, but even more shocking
is what’s left unsaid: The tortured statistics aren’t a mistake.
The state czar requested bad data and he received bad data. As medical
examiners tried to point out, broadly defining the parameters of the
death reports forwarded to the czar’s office would definitely inflate
the numbers. Fortunately, the plan’s flaws were exposed by the
Sentinel. The czar now looks, at best, incompetent.
Why risk looking that way if there isn’t a good payoff? There are good
reasons for the czar to make “designer drug” deaths look more common
than they really are. More deaths make the massive taxpayer funds
spent on the drug war seem necessary. Better yet is the potential
long-term gain. In a few years, the czar’s number crunchers can say,
oops, we made a mistake, we shouldn’t be recording some of these
deaths as being caused by designer drugs. And, bingo, the goal of
reduced drug deaths is attained – on paper, at least. Even if the
actual numbers go up, the initial bad data makes it look like the zero
tolerance tactics of the drug prohibition are succeeding. The drug
warriors know they will fail, but armed with this knowledge they now
try to define success in terms of planned failure. It might be comical
if it weren’t causing so much destruction.
Stephen Young
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