High Price

given was 20 mg, which is considerably lower than doses reportedly used by methamphetamine addicts. Perhaps the individuals described by the prosecutor and police officer used much larger doses than those tested in my studies. This might explain our disparate conclusions. I also thought about how methamphetamine is typically used outside the lab—snorted, injected, or smoked. This ensures that the drug hits the brain more quickly and produces more intense effects. In my studies, it was swallowed. When taken this way it produces the least intense effects. Given these caveats, I questioned whether the data collected in my studies was relevant to the situation in the real world. I figured the hysteria about methamphetamine had to reflect something about reality and that my studies, up until that point, had not captured it.
    Over the next seven years, I went about trying to resolve this issue. I searched the human literature to see if anyone had studied larger methamphetamine doses when the drug was snorted, smoked, or injected. There was virtually nothing. I thought about José Martí’s famous quote in his 1882 essay “On Oscar Wilde”: “A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one’s self from the tyranny of any of them.” So I read the literature on animal studies looking for information that might be relevant to human addiction. These studies showed that the drug caused extensive damage to certain brain cells and produced severe learning and memory problems. Aha, I got it! Finally, here was some data that was in line with popular anecdotes about methamphetamine. But as I looked more closely it became clear that the animal results had serious limitations and might not be applicable to people. For one, the amounts of methamphetamine given to animals are far more than amounts taken by methamphetamine addicts. If one gave similarly high doses of caffeine or nicotine to animals, the same serious toxic effects would be seen. But when animals were given methamphetamine doses comparable to those used by people, the destructive effects were not observed. During my graduate education, the notion that methamphetamine damaged brain cells was an unquestioned fundamental truth in drug research. Now this basic belief needed to be qualified, making it difficult to extrapolate to people.
    Next, I studied the literature on the long-term effects of methamphetamine in addicts. These were people who had used the drugs for many years. In these studies, abstinent methamphetamine addicts and a control group (usually non–drug users) completed a comprehensive set of cognitive tests over the course of several hours, and the results were compared to determine whether the cognitive functioning of the methamphetamine addicts was normal. Of course, normality is a relative concept that is determined by not only comparing performance of the methamphetamine group with the performance of a control group but also comparing the methamphetamine group’s scores with those from a normative dataset, taking into consideration the individual’s age and level of education. These requirements are important because they allow us to take into account the relative contribution of age and education in terms of the individual’s score and adjust the score accordingly. Simply stated, it would be inappropriate to compare the vocabulary scores of a sixteen-year-old high school dropout with those of a twenty-two-year-old college graduate. The older college graduate would be expected to outperform the younger dropout.

    With members of my lab at an end-of-year celebration.
    Study after study found that methamphetamine addicts had severe cognitive impairment. In one study by Sara Simon and colleagues, the apparent impairments were so bad that it led them to warn: “The national campaign against drugs should incorporate information about the cognitive deficits associated with methamphetamine. . . . Law enforcement officers and treatment providers should be aware that impairments in memory and in the ability to manipulate information and change points of view (set) underlie comprehension . . . methamphetamine abusers will not only have difficulty with inferences . . . but that they also may have comprehension deficits . . . the cognitive impairment associated with [methamphetamine abuse] should be publicized. . . .” 7 As I read this and similar papers more critically, I noticed something intriguing. While it was true that the controls