The Serpent's Wisdom

I don't know if any of you out there have the same automatic internal reaction as i do when i see articles or essays that talk about a scientist's funding or other potential biases. My immediate reaction is to want to reject any such concern as "ad hominem" and therefore irrelevant to discourse about whatever matter is at hand. So, this may really only be targeted at an audience of one (me).

A while back lady_babalon linked to this news story about a researcher who examined the funding sources of scholars and clinicians who developed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM).

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Here's a study describing some of the ways researchers finagle the bounds and methods of their research in order to tweak results so that they are favorable to the pharmaceutical companies funding their research.

Objective To investigate whether funding of drug studies by the pharmaceutical industry is associated with outcomes that are favourable to the funder and whether the methods of trials funded by pharmaceutical companies differ from the methods in trials with other sources of support.

... Conclusion Systematic bias favours products which are made by the company funding the research. Explanations include the selection of an inappropriate comparator to the product being investigated and publication bias.

Add to this a study which "reveals" (as if none of us could have possibly known) that FDA panelists who have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry are more likely to vote to approve drugs:

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As an interesting aside, see an article here which tries to slant this to show that there is no conflict-of-interest in FDA drug-approval votes: "The study finds that the removal of all of those advisory committee members [with dubious funding] would not have reversed the results of any of the votes at meetings between 2001 and 2004, although their removal could have made some decisions less favorable."

One is inclined to wonder how we might correct for the warping effect of big pharma as an 800-lb gorilla in the medical field. Something that big and influential is bound to force people consider their careers and personal well-being when making decisions like this, even if they do not receive direct funding from the pharma companies.

When contemplating things like this a piece of my brain shouts, "That's an ad hominem argument!" I've been trained to overlook, as much as possible, any personal information about a person making an argument and look at the merits of the argument itself. And according to the survey linked above, the merits of the research papers themselves do reveal, upon close examination, the obvious favorable tweakings in methodology.

But the public doesn't get to examine the methodology of any given study. Usually results are just presented in the media as holy proclamations. "Scientists say blah-de-blah-blah in a new report to be published today in the Journal of Very Respectable We Assure You Science." The average American may be vaguely aware of the steps in the scientific method, but unless she has been a scholar of science she is generally not hip to the subtle ways in which methodology can be tweaked to bring results in line with expectations.

And let's take this a step further and see who it is who is alleging bias in pharmaceutical research -- mostly it is people with the organization Public Citizen, who themselves can be justifiably accused of potential bias! It never ends.

Allegations of bias in science become even more explosive when you consider various research offered to support fundamentalist agenda items. The tone of sciencific speech can be adopted even by people as thoroughly discredited as anti-gay "researcher" Paul Cameron, and the media will play along, especially if it is operated by people favorable to the agenda at hand.

The idea of personal bias in researchers is like scientific kryptonite. Science is understood as a form of inquiry that allows people to pursue knowledge removed from economic, institutional, and ideological pressures. Supposedly bias is detected during the peer review process. Therefore, people are supposedly taken out of the equation, and results stand on their own as proclamations which have the blessing of an entire community, therefore carrying more weight than the simple assertions of a few individuals.

But if the reviewing peers are biased too, what then? What if "common sense" itself is biased?

We want to pretend that bias does not exist in science, or if it does, that it is rare. If bias can be sneaked into the proclamations of science, the "scientific mystique" might be undermined. Therefore it's easier to just dismiss any kind of talk about a researcher's funding or background as trivial and over-personal. Doing so belies the reality that science falls into ruts called paradigms, which in large part reflect the biases of culture and "common sense," which in turn is shaped by oppression.

I say this not because i think drugs are great, but because an examination of it reveals the prejudicial attitudes on which it is predicated, and because i am sickened to see the many lives that have been sacrificed on its altar.

The War on Drugs is predicated on the idea that drug use is indication of a "moral failing." Person X lives a somehow "degraded" life (and we can therefore pity or despise her) and "turns to drugs" to "escape the harshness of her life." Or, alternately, person Y is a bored suburbanite teenager "lured" to drug use, like sailors drawn to the rocks by the siren song, pressured into trying it by his peers ("if it weren't for that kid with funny hair and ex-hippie parents, my child would never have tried them").

This is the way drug use is portrayed by the malestream media, projecting this moralistic analysis from the safety of gated communities far from the 'iniquity' of urban life, and thus, presumably, far from anywhere drugs are commonly used or sold.

It is but one brick in a wall built to disguise an authoritarian kyriarchal agenda, a power grab by the elites of this society predicated on racism, classism and sexism. It is a bandage covering a festering wound and soaking up the pus without allowing efforts to heal it by addressing its cause: oppression and exploitation. The "Drug War" is a way of pretending that oligarchical collectivism and cronyism can exist in a civilized society, by othering the victims and labelling them immoral.

This becomes obvious when we see that the addictions that are tolerated are precisely those that mask people's feelings and thus make people more pliant and/or hard-working. Caffeine and nicotine are more dangerous than THC or opium and are more habit-forming, but they are the "socially acceptable" addictions. Other "acceptable" addictions include several SSRIs and other prescription medications, which can also have more dangerous side effects than THC or opium.

The previous paragraph is not meant to promote pot or heroin, but just to point out that the "Drug War" rationale of protecting people from harmful substances is utter hogwash. Where was this rationale for the 38,000 people killed by Vioxx in four years? Other myriad dangers of drug use are the direct result of efforts to ban them.

Some therapists refer to drug use as "self-medicating," because the main reason people form drug habits is to feel normal. There are exceptions, of course, people seeking pleasure or thrills. But lots of people try many different drugs and don't form addictions because, nice as it may make them feel, they don't need it to correct dopamine-receptor imbalances caused by long-term physical abuse, or to mask emotions they feel required to hide from friends and partners, or to get through long hours of dehumanizing work.

It's long been noted that drug war punishments are disporportionately directed at people of racial minorities. This is a typical "one-two punch" pattern of cannibalistic oppression: to treat the often necessarily drastic and long-term-self-destructive survival tactics of people in oppressed minorities as though they are moral failings, and then punish them.

I touched on this issue a few weeks ago with my post on "options and empowerment." If you have an imbalance of this kind in your life, the solution is not court-mandated therapy, but actual changes to your life and environment. Drug users cannot make the real changes that they need in their lives, because decisions about how we are going to live and survive are not up for democratic discussion. Those decisions are hoarded by those with the power to decide where jobs will be located, with the power to hire and fire.

On another dimension, the "Drug War" is an attempt by authoritarians to control what substances people put into their bodies. Historically, psychoactive substances have sometimes played a role in revolutionary awareness (recognizing this is somewhat of a shift from my previous thoughts on this matter), and guiltless pleasure has the potential to undermine the militaristic tone of an authoritarian culture.

crossposting to my journal and crossposting to kyriarchy

An interesting article on the rise of autism and Asperger's syndrome in high-tech areas: The Geek Syndrome (thanks to inkyblue2 for the link)

[Silicon] Valley is a self-selecting community where passionately bright people migrate from all over the world to make smart machines work smarter. The nuts-and-bolts practicality of hard labor among the bits appeals to the predilections of the high-functioning autistic mind. The hidden cost of building enclaves like this, however, may be lurking in the findings of nearly every major genetic study of autism in the last 10 years. Over and over again, researchers have concluded that the DNA scripts for autism are probably passed down not only by relatives who are classically autistic, but by those who display only a few typically autistic behaviors. (Geneticists call those who don't fit into the diagnostic pigeonholes "broad autistic phenotypes.")

The chilling possibility is that what's happening now is the first proof that the genes responsible for bestowing certain special gifts on slightly autistic adults - the very abilities that have made them dreamers and architects of our technological future - are capable of bringing a plague down on the best minds of the next generation. For parents employed in prominent IT firms here, the news of increased diagnoses of autism in their ranks is a confirmation of rumors that have quietly circulated for months. Every day, more and more of their coworkers are running into one another in the waiting rooms of local clinics, taking the first uncertain steps on a journey with their children that lasts for the rest of their lives.

In previous eras, even those who recognized early that autism might have a genetic underpinning considered it a disorder that only moved diagonally down branches of a family tree. Direct inheritance was almost out of the question, because autistic people rarely had children. The profoundly affected spent their lives in institutions, and those with Asperger's syndrome tended to be loners. ...

The old line "insanity is hereditary, you get it from your kids" has a twist in the autistic world. It has become commonplace for parents to diagnose themselves as having Asperger's syndrome, or to pinpoint other relatives living on the spectrum, only after their own children have been diagnosed.