As questions mount over the federal government’s approval and production of cocaine and other hard-core drugs for testing on addicts, a former top Washington official defended the research as necessary for the greater good.
“It’s an important ethical issue and I’m glad you raise it, but holy cow, there’s so much more important stuff to focus on,” Bertha K. Madras said in a phone interview from her Harvard office Friday. “Twenty-three percent of people who show up in health care settings are in need of an [anti-drug] intervention. We need a strategic plan for that.”
Madras was President George W. Bush’s deputy director for demand reduction under the Office of National Drug Control Policy. She broke publicly with her former boss, ex-drug czar John Walters, who blew the whistle on the wide-ranging experiments.
“You need human subjects,” Madras said.
The Examiner reported Thursday that the federal government has authorized, funded and provided drugs for studies that gave cocaine, morphine and otherwise illegal drugs for tests on addicts around the country.
Officials at the National Institute on Drug Abuse say they set rigid standards for administering drugs to addicts and trusted university researchers from Washington to San Antonio to follow them.
But former NIDA Director Charles Schuster actively lobbied to get an ethics board to approve giving crack cocaine to addicts in at least one case.
Schuster wrote a letter to the University of Minnesota’s Institutional Review Board in the mid-1990s, backing a plan to give crack to addicts in clinical settings, former researcher Dorothy Hatsukami told The Examiner in a phone interview.
NIDA officials have consistently declined to discuss the programs with The Examiner, but Hatsukami said that her studies in the late 1990s adhered to a rigorous ethical process.
“You can’t imagine the work it took,” Hatsukami said.
Institutional review boards are in-house ethics committees that set standards for human testing. Hatsukami initially led the studies at the University of Minnesota but has since stopped to focus on nicotine addiction. She said that the cocaine addicts who came in to participate in the tests were well-informed and well-protected.
“We were extremely responsible,” she said. “We wanted to make sure there was no more harm done.”
