New MADD propaganda site

[Brendan Perez]

Cross posted to ASFAR and Oblivion forums:

Click here for same old nonsense, different wrapper.

The best link is the one called Studies
"MADD's positions on underage drinking comes from scientific research. Learn the scientific and social factors behind MADD's positions on underage drinking."

There is a lot of MADD statements, but not much in the true studies department.

One of the only studies on that page is actually an article from the March 2001 issue of Discovery Magazine. This article was posted (I believe in its entirety) to the ASFAR mailing list in 2001.

From that 2001 article:
'First, Swartzwelder's team dosed adolescent and adult rats with alcohol and
ran them through maze-learning tests. Compared with the adult rats, the
adolescents failed miserably. To see whether similar results held true for
humans, Swartzwelder recruited a group of volunteers aged 21 to 29 years
old. He couldn't use younger subjects because of laws that forbid drinking
before age 21. He chose to split the volunteers into two groups: 21 to 24
years old and 25 to 29 years old. "While I wouldn't argue that these younger
folks are adolescents, even in their early twenties their brains are still
developing," Swartzwelder says. After three drinks, with a blood-alcohol
level slightly below the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's
recommended limit- .08 percent- the younger group's learning was impaired 25
percent more than the older group's.

Intrigued by these results, Swartzwelder's colleague Aaron White, a
biological psychologist at Duke, set out to discover how vulnerable the
adolescent brain is to long-term damage. He gave adolescent and adult rats
large doses of alcohol every other day for 20 days- the equivalent of a
150-pound human chugging 24 drinks in a row. Twenty days after the last
binge, when the adolescent rats had reached adulthood, White trained them
in a maze-memory task roughly akin to that performed by a human when
remembering the location of his car in a parking garage.

Both the younger and older rats performed equally well when sober. But when
intoxicated, those who had binged as adolescents performed much worse.
"Binge alcohol exposure in adolescence appears to produce long-lasting
changes in brain function," White says. He suspects that early damage caused
by alcohol could surface whenever the brain is taxed. He also suspects that
the NMDA receptor is involved, because just as alcohol in the system
inhibits the receptor, the drug's withdrawal overstimulates it- which can
kill the cell outright.'

==
Call me crazy, but neither of these seem like an accurate comparisons.

The first one is like testing a 1998 Honda Accord for crashworthiness and than applying those results to a 2004 Accord, arguing that they're all Honda and Accords.

The second is like an insurance group testing airbag effectivness by slamming cars into walls at 150mph, then claiming that the results of that study show that current airbag technology is insufficient for day-to-day driving. All this second "study" really shows is that "adolescent" rats who drank near fatal amounts (for humans) of alcohol every other day for 20 days later will later score lower on memory exercises when drunk then adults who engaged in similar "Darwin Award candidate" drinking.

He only speculates that this performance issue, which he takes to be evidence of brain damage, might turn up when the (I guess sober) brain is overtaxed. Didn't he just partially test that by running both rats through mazes while sober? If overtaxing the brain is the issue, why not make a much more stringent maze?

I've also got to wonder what kind of conditions the rats were in after their 20 day drinking binge. I'm a pretty weak drinker, but even those I know who can handle their liquor would take several days if not weeks to fully recover from a case-a-day-every-other-day-for-3-weeks drinking binge.

The BAC calculator here estimates that a 150 lb. person drinking 24 beers over 6 hours would have a BAC of .465. The article said right in a row though, so:
[hours-.BAC]
1- 581
2-.558
3-.535
4-.511
5-.488
8-.418
12-.325
16-.231
20-.138
24-.045

From that site:

0.00 g/210 liters of breath - This is the only safe BAC level.
0.02 g/210 liters of breath - At and above this level US federal laws mandate that a person in a safety sensitive transportation job must be removed from the workplace.
0.04 g/210 liters of breath - At and above this level US federal laws mandate that a person in a safety sensitive transportation job must be sanctioned and may lose their job. Also in most states a person can be convicted of driving under the influence at this level.
0.08 g/210 liters of breath - At and above this level you can be convicted of driving while intoxicated in most states.
0.10 g/210 liters of breath - At and above this level you can be convicted of driving while intoxicated in ALL states.
0.30 g/210 liters of breath - At this level most people will lose conciousness.
0.40 g/210 liters of breath - At this level most people will become comatose and may die

I'm guessing that rats were given pure ehtanol either orally or through injection-otherwise stomach capacity could become an issue. A person would probably have to down everclear or equivalent very quickly to sidestep issues of vomiting reducing the amount of alcohol in your stomach.

Imagine getting so trashed that you have true alcohol poisoning and are near the point of death, recovering for one day, doing it again, recovering for one day, etc. for 20 days. Assuming you could even form words after that 20 days, I don't imagine that anyone would have a problem outperforming you in a skill based exercise especially if you were drunk.

==
From MADD's "Studies" page:

'Over the past few years there has been extensive research conducted on brain development. Until recently, it was thought that the brain was completely developed around the age of 18. However, recent studies show that the brain does not completely develop until the early 20s, and any use of alcohol prior to full development can cause significant and permanent damage to certain parts of the brain.

Dr. Scott Swartzwelder, a highly respected neuropsychologist at Duke University, has studied the brain development of adolescent rats, and has conducted many tests on them to distinguish the harms caused to the brain from alcohol consumption.

Teen drinkers appear to be most susceptible to damage in the hippocampus, a structure buried deep in the brain that is responsible for many types of learning and memory, and the prefrontal cortex, located behind the forehead, which is the brain's chief decision maker and voice of reason. Both areas, especially the prefrontal cortex, undergo dramatic change in the second decade of life.

Consuming alcohol before the brain is fully developed causes significant damage to the parts of the brain which help to create and retain memories. Dr. Swartzwelder found that alcohol blocks long-term memory making abilities, called potentiation, in adolescent brain tissue much more than in adult tissue. Next, Swartzwelder identified a likely explanation. Long-term potentiation- and thus memory formation- relies in large part on the action of a neurotransmitter known as glutamate, the brain's chemical king-pin of neural excitation. Glutamate strengthens a cell's electrical stimulation when it binds to a docking port called the NMDA receptor. If the receptor is blocked, so is long-term potentiation, and thus memory formation. Swartzwelder found that exposure to the equivalent of just two beers inhibits the NMDA receptors in the hippocampai cells of adolescent rats, while more than twice as much is required to produce the same effect in adult rats. These findings led him to suspect that alcohol consumption might have a dramatic impact on the ability of adolescents to learn.

Excerpts taken from "Getting Stupid" by Bernice Wuethrich in Discover magazine, Vol. 22, No. 03, March 2001.'
===

Maybe this is arrogance and no knowledge of history on the part of these researchers. They have forgotten that are billions of other people in hundreds of other countries, all with laws different than ours. Maybe they just think that everywhere is just like us with a 21 drinking age. They also seem to have no idea of what laws in the US were like before 1987.

[KPalicz]

Brendon, would you be interested in writing a paragraph sized rebuttal to MADD's claims in that section? Something that we can put in the Drinking Age FAQ in the section "Doesn't your body develop up till the age of 21?" Reference the study, refute it, and also mention European drinking and how that doesn't give them brain damage, and fit it into a polished paragraph.

[Brendan Perez]

Brendon, would you be interested in writing a paragraph sized rebuttal to MADD's claims in that section? Something that we can put in the Drinking Age FAQ in the section "Doesn't your body develop up till the age of 21?" Reference the study, refute it, and also mention European drinking and how that doesn't give them brain damage, and fit it into a polished paragraph.

I've been working on condensing a lot of what I said in the previous post. I want to try to talk about how brain and body development (in the context madd talks about) are biological in nature, and how no other hormonally driven biological process has any one specific where it occurs ie., there is no age defined as the "age at which puberty finishes" or a single age for menopause, senility, or even death.

If anyone has any ideas about other process that happen around certain ages, are biological and tend to effect the population at large?
I'd also like to point out that with all those processes if age is mentioned, it's always qualified with approxmiations and specific conditions have to be met for them to be considered and age isn't one of them.

The entire rest of the world provides ample rebuttal of the brain damage argument and I know I can get that part into something presentable.

[nostromo]

There is a very long history of people using science to prove minority groups are inferior, in order to legitimize their oppression.

http://skepdic.com/higgins.html

How could anyone possibly take MADD's "studies" seriously? They have decided to "prove" that it turns out all along young people are biologically more susceptible to harm from alcohol at, that's right, age 21. Only they are "proving" this 20 years after the states began to change their drinking ages to 21.

There is just far too much incentive to prove alcohol harms those under 21 moreso than adults. How could anything doing so possibly be considered objective?

Science is geared for solving practical problems, and whereas physical sciences can be more theoretical, social sciences are geared even moreso for solving practical problems. What is the goal of psychological research to "prove" a certain group is inferior to others. There is only one goal of such research, and that is to justify oppression.

Science has been used to justify oppression of every minority group throughout history, as the article above points out. This is an abuse of science, and those who do it must be condemned for it.

I am highly skeptical of all "scientific" research supposedly providing evidence for the inferiority of youth. I have even heard of such research trying to show the human brain does not reach full maturity until age 25, which to me sounds like absolute nonsense. The theoretical stages of early childhood development up until adolescence do seem to be well supported by experimental research. However, it doesn't seem to me that hardly any evidence at all about stages of mental development in the teen years and early twenties, is very well supported.

[SciVille]

Yeah, using science for purposes of supporting differences in people like this (and using methods that yield very inconclusive results but nonetheless convince the idiots of the world) is probably the biggest insult to the study of science in and of itself. Science (well, the natural sciences anyway) are so pure and innocent, and look what those bastards do to it! Also, click here to find my psychology rant. Psychology is not science. If you want to hear another of my bashing psychology, check out my website, Science Village and click on Column.

[XavierAKadafi]

Who chugs 24 beers a day?

[Ayliana]

Who can afford to chug 24 beers a day?

[Fabuluke]

Hmm...I never heard that theory about people maturing completely at the age of 25. In fact, I've heard that the human brain is normally completely mature at about the early teens. So I don't know where -that- one came from...

-Jess.

[Kev]

24 beers. My personal record is 6 half liter bottles (not the normal 0.3 liter ones) in one sitting when i was visiting relatives in Germany. Believe it or not I was still semi-sober when I finished.

[pingu8]

Basically it boils down to racism as well. Because if you think about it, they are essentially saying that Americans are a master race, and that citizens of every other country on earth have irreversible brain damage. I am incredibly insulted every time I read these pieces, and I think that "science" that supports a master race is incredibly dangerous.

Why is there no information on the MADD Canada website about brain damage due to drinking before 21? If this were true, shouldn't it be a national emergency in every country on earth? And does this mean that all the middle-aged and senior citizens currently running all levels of American government and business, who grew up with a lower drinking age, are brain damaged? I guess we can only trust people under the age of 40 to be in charge now, because they're the only ones who have been "saved" by the watchful eye of the law, and never consumed alcohol before the age of 21. Yikes.

[Bongermann]

I went to a party once, one case of beer in that night. I dont remember much... Im still alive!

[XavierAKadafi]

Their statistics are bullshit inclined to make them right. Who the fuck chugs 24 beers in a day? Honestly, who the fuck does? NOBODY! So how the fuck are you going to base a study off of that?

[SciVille]

Exactly, Xav.

[XavierAKadafi]

There's nothing that should discredit MADD more than the fact that they base their studies off of obscene falsified realities.

[SpcBert]

"Approximately 900 lives are saved each year because of the 21 minimum drinking age law."

OK lemme leap into another dimension and count how many extra people would have died this year because of the drinking law being 21. How do they get these facts???

[XavierAKadafi]

Bullshit scientists and analysts that already agree with them and want to make it worse..

Fucking prohibitionist bitches are going to rule the government soon enough.