Illicit Psychiatric Experimentation
Alex Constantine
''It is extremely wrenching to see how easily a group regarded as
misfits, or as not good enough, or as socially and economically useless,
can be made into objects for other people's purposes.''
------------------------------------------------------------------------
DOING HARM: RESEARCH ON THE MENTALLY ILL
Testing takes human toll
By Robert Whitaker, Globe Correspondent and Dolores Kong, Globe Staff,
11/15/98
PORTRAIT ARTIST SHALMAH PRINCE painted "Second Coming" - meant to depict
hope in the midst of chaos - after her harrowing experience in a
research experiment.
First of four parts
The light flickered on for Shalmah Prince one day in 1994.
Sitting in a doctor's office, she spotted an article in U.S. News &
World Report on human radiation experiments conducted in the 1950s. Her
mind, she said, raced back to a wrenching experience from her past.
She had been in an experiment of some type. Had she too been used?
Prince, a portrait artist who suffers from manic depression, also known
as bipolar disorder, dug into her medical history and documented a
chilling story.
In 1983, she had been in an experiment in which investigators withdrew
her medication, did nothing to intervene as she became increasingly
manic, and then injected her with apomorphine, a chemical that other
researchers had tested to see if it could provoke psychosis.
Prince became so delusional that she had to be placed in leather
restraints, a descent into madness that didn't fully subside for 10
days.
''I was never the same person again,'' Prince said. ''My perception of
myself and who I was completely changed. I had a sense of shame and
embarrassment. Who would have ever thought that doctors would create
psychosis like that?''
Prince's story provides a window into a troubling corner of psychiatric
research that continues to this day. She is one of more than 2,000
mentally ill patients who over the past 25 years have been ushered into
a disturbing series of experiments by psychiatric researchers exploring
the biology of psychosis.
In their published accounts, doctors have told of injecting mentally ill
patients with drugs designed to exacerbate their delusions and
hallucinations. In prestigious journals, they have described studies in
which they withheld effective antipsychotic medication from desperate
patients who stumbled into hospital emergency rooms. In precise,
clinical terms, they have reported how they deliberately stopped giving
medication to stabilized schizophrenic patients to see how quickly they
became sick again.
These studies were designed to gain knowledge that might lead to
improved treatments for schizophrenia and related illnesses. But the
experiments offered no possibility of therapeutic benefit to the
subjects and exposed them to some measure of psychic pain and risk of
long-term harm.
Moreover, this controversial line of experimentation has been marked by
repeated instances in which researchers failed to fully disclose the
risks to the mentally ill patients and obscured their true purposes.
Those are the very themes of the story Shalmah Prince pieced together:
On Jan. 14, 1983, fearing the onset of a manic episode despite the
lithium she had been taking for two years, Prince went to University
Hospital in Cincinnati seeking help. Her medical records show that she
arrived well-groomed, in control of her emotions, and thinking fairly
clearly. Standard procedure would have been to test the lithium level in
her blood and adjust the dosage, but that's not what happened.
Prince signed a consent form that said she was agreeing to take part in
a study designed to ''clearly diagnose her illness.'' In their research
protocol, however, the psychiatrists said the purpose of the study was
to explore ''schizophrenia subtypes,'' based on the patients' response
to apomorphine. The consent form didn't mention any risks associated
with stopping the medication, even though Dr. David Garver, who ran the
study, later acknowledged in a sworn deposition that without medication,
the research subjects might ''have a delusion that they were capable of
flying, leap out a window, [and] injure themselves.''
''They assured me they were there to treat me,'' Prince recalled. ''And
I just wanted to be kept safe. I knew that I didn't have insurance and
that I was extremely vulnerable. I needed help and a regular doctor was
$150. So I was really stuck.''
Without her lithium, Prince quickly deteriorated. By the fourth day she
was wildly manic, yelling and threatening suicide. She also ''got in the
face'' of another patient, she said, and he started beating her. Still,
she was given no medication.
On the fifth day, researchers injected her with apomorphine. Her manic
and delusional behavior soared. During the next three days, when her
friends and family visited, they found her in restraints, a humiliation
that has never left her.
''Everything they did to me was for the purposes of their research,''
she said, her voice tinged with bitterness even today. ''As my medical
record shows, when I went into the hospital I was calm and cooperative.
I was just worried and vulnerable. I came out thinking I was crazy, and
my parents thinking I was crazy, and my friends thinking I was crazy. My
family and I believed that every psychotic feeling and behavior was
natural to me, rather than caused by their experiment.''
The final blow came when she got a hospital bill. Prince was asked to
pay nearly $15,000 for the experience.
Attorney Ken Faller, who defended Garver and his coresearcher, Dr. Jack
Hirschowitz, in a lawsuit brought by Prince, sees her experience
differently. ''No one disputes that patients ought to be given
information concerning meaningful risks,'' he said. ''In her particular
case ... we don't believe that there were significant undisclosed risks
involved. ''
Although the judge in Prince's lawsuit said he found the facts
troubling, he dismissed Prince's case, saying she should have filed her
complaint within two years of the experiments. Faller also said that the
hospital forgave more than three-quarters of her bill.
''She did receive treatment and the treatment benefited her to this
day,'' he said. ''She was a sick person when she went into the hospital
and she came out seemingly in pretty good shape.'' Psychiatric
researchers called for an accounting
Prince's story, and scores of clinical reports of schizophrenia studies
in scientific journals, evoke troubling echoes of past stains on
American medicine. Perhaps the most notorious are the post-World War II
radiation experiments that Shalmah Price read about and the 1932 to 1972
Tuskegee syphilis studies in which infected black men were denied
treatment, blots on the remarkable achievements of US medical
researchers in the 20th century.
Even as psychiatric researchers boast they are now gaining insights into
the biology of psychotic illnesses, they are being asked to account for
how that knowledge was gained.
But unlike Tuskegee or the Cold War radiation studies, this line of
psychiatric research, much of it federally funded, is ongoing. This
year, according to research protocols obtained by the Globe, Yale
University physicians have been recruiting people with schizophrenia for
experiments in which they will hospitalize them, stop their medications,
and infuse them with tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient
in marijuana.
Columbia University researchers have been giving amphetamine to
schizophrenic patients so they can take images of their brains while
they are psychotic. At the National Institute of Mental Health, in
Bethesda, Md., researchers have been injecting ketamine, the chemical
cousin of the notorious street drug angel dust, into unmedicated
schizophrenic patients.
Deliberate withdrawal of medication for experimental purposes is an
element in other active schizophrenia studies.
''I think [these experiments] are in a category that is worse than
Tuskegee and the radiation experiments,'' said Adil Shamoo, professor of
biochemistry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and
founder of the journal Accountability in Research. ''There are large
numbers [of subjects], and these are current practices. Do they cause
harm? Of course they do.''
Shamoo, who has an adult son with schizophrenia, has been a leading
critic of symptom-exacerbation and medication-withdrawal experiments.
The Globe, in a three-month investigation, found a trail of both harm
and deceit.
* Since 1972, psychiatric researchers have used a variety of agents -
L-dopa, amphetamine, methylphenidate, m-cholorophenyl piperazine,
ketamine, and tetrahydrocannabinol - to deliberately provoke psychotic
symptoms in more than 1,200 schizophrenia patients. In some instances,
the chemicals drove the psychosis to levels the researchers called
''severe.''
Symptom-provocation experiments like these have been conducted by
prominent researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health and at
close to a dozen leading medical schools. They have drawn their
psychotic subjects largely from outpatient clinics, Veterans Affairs
hospitals, state mental institutions, and emergency rooms - settings
that regularly provide care to the poor and uninsured. In the few
studies that recorded the ethnic makeup of patients, 54 percent were
minorities.
Symptom-exacerbation studies do not appear to have been conducted in
Massachusetts, but prominent researchers here defend the approach.
* In the '80s and early '90s, researchers conducted experiments in
which they withdrew medications from schizophrenic patients whose
condition was stabilized, including some living in community settings,
and studied them until they had a full relapse. The prevailing view is
that following a relapse, particularly the first one after a psychotic
break, patients may never return to the same level of functioning.
During a relapse, schizophrenic patients are also at a dramatically
higher risk of self-injury and suicide.
* There is evidence in researchers' sworn testimony, written
correspondence, citations by the federal Office of Protection from
Research Risks, and patients' own accounts that investigators have
routinely failed to fully disclose the true purposes of their
experiments, and withheld information about risks.
The Globe's review of informed-consent forms for symptom-exacerbation
studies at the NIMH and four other leading psychiatric institutions
failed to turn up a single one in which the researchers directly stated
that a chemical agent would be used purposely to exacerbate psychotic
symptoms.
When in 1993 researchers at the University of Maryland began injecting
schizophrenic patients with ketamine, the consent form said only that
the experiment's purpose was ''to study a medication named ketamine for
schizophrenia.''
OPRR, the federal agency charged with protecting research subjects, has
found fault with informed consent practices of psychiatric researchers
at the University of Maryland; the University of California, Los
Angeles; and the National Institute of Mental Health, and has ongoing
investigations of the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center, New York
State Psychiatric Institute, and the University of Cincinnati.
Such practices do not typify all psychiatric research. There is much
experimentation that does not put mentally ill subjects at risk of harm,
conducted by physicians who take pains to ensure that subjects know what
they're getting into.
But there is no similar type of experimentation, in which patients'
symptoms are deliberately exacerbated for research purposes only, on
people of sound mind.
''We let researchers do things to people with mental illness that we
would never let them do to people with physical illness,'' said George
Annas, chairman of the Health Law Department at Boston University School
of Public Health. Schizophrenia resists divulging its secrets
As researchers note, schizophrenia is a poorly understood illness that
has resisted giving up its secrets. It afflicts about one in every 200
adults, typically beginning in early adulthood. The disease brings on
delusions, hallucinations, and bizarre thoughts (called positive
symptoms) and often a striking lack of outward emotion and extreme
social withdrawal (negative symptoms). It has no consistent course. Some
experience an initial psychotic episode and never relapse; others
relapse repeatedly as the disease becomes chronic.
Symptom-exacerbation experiments were pioneered by Dr. David Janowsky of
Vanderbilt University. In 1974, he reported success in developing a new
tool for studying schizophrenia. He found that giving schizophrenic
patients methylphenidate (Ritalin) caused ''a dramatic intensification
of preexisting symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions,'' and
that amphetamine also exacerbated their psychosis. Both drugs are known
to release dopamine, a messenger chemical in the brain, and Janowsky's
experiments provided indirect evidence that the biological mechanism of
psychosis involved an overactive dopamine system.
His work also established the idea that psychosis-inducing drugs could
be used as ''challenge agents'' to turn patients into models for
studying psychotic illnesses.
''They are uniquely human conditions and there is no animal model for
developing treatments,'' said Dr. Stephen Strakowski, associate
professor of psychiatry at University of Cincinnati Medical School, who
has used amphetamine as a challenge agent. ''Challenge tests are used to
understand complex disorders, and without them, we would lose a
significant way to do that.''
In the past decade, researchers have turned to new types of
psychostimulants to conduct these studies. Their findings, researchers
say, may lead to better drugs. It is this prospect, they say, that
justifies risks to patients, and the psychic distress they may suffer.
The researchers also say the psychotic symptoms they induce are
transient, usually lasting only a few hours, and generally cause
patients only modest discomfort.
''What we are talking about is very short-lived increases in symptoms
that patients have experienced over years and decades,'' said Dr. David
Shore, associate director for clinical research at NIMH, where
ketamine-challenge experiments are underway. ''To say that increasing a
particular symptom - like hearing voices for a couple of hours in
somebody who has been hearing voices for 10 years - is causing
[suffering] rather seems like a stretch.''
Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, who conducted methylphenidate challenge tests for
more than a decade at Hillside Hospital, a division of Long Island
Jewish Medical Center in New York, acknowledged that the induced
symptoms are sometimes ''scary and very unpleasant.'' Some patients get
worse, he said, ''but in my experience, the symptoms never exceeded the
range of severity that occurred in the course of their illness
previously.''
Dr. Paul Appelbaum, chairman of the psychiatry department at the
University of Massachusetts Medical School, said challenge studies can
be justified ''if the question researchers seek to answer is an
important one'' and the research subjects have given ''good consent,
adequate consent.'' Even the use of a drug like ketamine can be
justified, he said, as long as patients have given informed consent.
''The investigators [using ketamine] are quite persuasive, from my
discussions, that they are not causing outrageous levels of harm,''
Appelbaum said.
But a different view emerges from the researchers' own medical journal
reports, from people who suffer from mental illness, and from families
of patients who have been in such studies. They tell of fragile minds
filled with pain and suffering, and of lives made worse.
The scientific literature provides a few glimpses of individual
patients. This 1987 account by researchers at the National Institute of
Mental Health describes a patient with bipolar disorder who was injected
with methylphenidate: ''Within a few minutes after the infusion, Mr. A
experienced nausea and motor agitation. Soon thereafter he began
thrashing about uncontrollably and appeared to be very angry, displaying
facial grimacing, grunting and shouting ... 15 minutes after the
infusion, he shouted, 'It's coming at me again, like getting out of
control. It's stronger than I am.' He slammed his fists into the bed and
table and implored us not to touch him, warning that he might become
assaultive. Gradually over the next half hour, Mr. A calmed down and
began to talk about his experience.''
That is what outside observers could see. Those who have lived through
psychotic episodes describe an interior landscape that can be filled
with fear and terror as delusions and hallucinations become more florid.
''When you are psychotic, there are a lot of unusual processes going
on,'' said Michael Susko of Baltimore, who suffered a psychotic break
when he was 25 years old. He is editor of a book about schizophrenia,
''Cry of the Invisible.''
''You might be having death experiences, feeling like you are dying and
melting,'' he said. ''You give somebody a drug that amplifies that, you
run the risk of overwhelming them. It's like a bad trip.''
Franklin Marquit, founder of the National Artists for Mental Health, has
suffered from a variety of mental illnesses, including manic depression,
panic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Last fall, in
preparation for a hearing held by the New York State Department of
Health, he gathered opinions from 25 mental health ''consumers,''
including some with psychotic disorders, on symptom-exacerbation
experiments. All objected vigorously to the idea that such studies
present little danger or cause only minimal discomfort.
''Have it done to yourself and see how the symptoms are,'' Marquit said.
''Someone who doesn't experience this traumatizing feeling, how would
they know? With panic disorder, I feel like jumping off the edge of the
earth at times, it is so bad. I can't imagine the rationale for
exacerbating symptoms, especially a brain symptom. If a person had an
arrhythmia problem, would you speed the heart up and say that it is OK
because they are used to it?''
Whether symptom-exacerbation experiments and the cutoff of antipsychotic
medication that often accompanies such research cause long-term harm is
a thorny issue. Although these experiments have been ongoing for 25
years, the question hasn't been studied.
Researchers argue that the temporary increase in psychosis does not
amount to a relapse. Although they acknowledge there is a growing
suspicion that acutely psychotic episodes may be toxic to the brain,
causing a type of scarring of neurons, they do not believe exacerbation
experiments are likely to trigger such damage.
''There is a risk there,'' said Dr. Stephan Taylor, assistant professor
of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, who has used challenge
agents to study anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. ''My sense
is that the sort of psychosis that reaches a toxic level is much more
significant than what a few doses of amphetamine will produce. It's a
fairly small risk.''
The ultimate question, however, is how exacerbation experiments can be
reconciled with a standard of good medical care that runs contrary to
such practices. Psychiatrists agree that patients do best when
physicians catch the psychosis at an early stage and quickly curb their
delusions and hallucinations with medications. Relapse, often defined as
a return of even moderate psychosis, is seen as a life-threatening event
that needs to be prevented. Most clinicians believe that repeated
relapses, particularly for a person early in the course of the illness,
lead to a worse long-term outcome.
Moreover, critics say that the administration of symptom-inducing drugs
is only part of the harm. Patients in these studies are typically taken
off their medication first and may not receive effective treatment for
days and even weeks, exposing them to an extended period of psychosis. A
chilling example of this was detailed by University of Maryland
researcher Carol Tamminga and colleagues in a 1995 article on their
first ketamine experiment. One of their subjects was a 29-year-old man
who at the start of the experiment was described as doing well on his
medication. His medication was stopped and he was injected three times
with ketamine, which caused him to become ''floridly delusional.'' The
researchers allowed his disease to progress even after the ketamine
study ended.
''During a later drug-free period unrelated to this study, his clinical
symptoms were that of paranoid schizophrenia,'' Tamminga wrote. ''There
were similarities between his disease symptoms and those induced by
ketamine.'' Along with whatever harm such experiments cause, critics say
that they necessarily violate the trust between doctor and patient that
is vital to the healing process.
''If the patients have any idea about what is being done to them, they
know that they are being used as guinea pigs,'' said Dr. Peter Breggin,
director of the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology in
Bethesda and an outspoken critic of mainstream psychiatry. ''If they are
mentally unbalanced, and their condition is worsened by doctors for the
purpose of serving the doctors' scientific careers, of course that is
going to make it harder for them to trust anyone again.''
The voices that are hardest to find are those that matter the most: the
mentally ill patients who have been the subjects of these
symptom-exacerbation experiments.
Last fall, however, the mother of one patient stepped forward to tell
the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, a presidential panel that
advises the government on ethical issues in biomedical research, what
happened to her mentally ill daughter after she apparently was given
multiple doses of intravenous amphetamine.
In April 1987, Janice and Carl Becker brought their daughter Laura, 26
at the time and ill with schizophrenia, to the Maryland Psychiatric
Research Center, outside Baltimore. Researchers emphasized that she
would get excellent care while on the ward, Janice told the commission.
A few months after Laura was admitted, researchers stopped her
medications as part of a research protocol, and her condition quickly
deteriorated. Twice when her mother visited, she found Laura bound with
sheets to a chair, the knots so tight around her wrists and ankles that
it took 20 minutes to free her.
Laura's appearance changed. She lost 40 pounds. She would pace for hours
on end. Alarmed and getting no answers from the staff, her parents pored
through protocols, and found one describing an amphetamine study. They
concluded that the amphetamine explained many aspects of her
deterioration: her weight loss, the hyperactive behavior, the increased
psychosis.
Laura's parents never got a copy of any consent forms Laura may have
signed and, to this day, do not know for sure whether their daughter
signed the form for the amphetamine study.
''It was heartbreaking to watch Laura's condition deteriorate,'' Janice
told the commission. ''We had not expected that she would be required to
endure such painful symptoms without medication for years. Nor had we
expected that she would be given drugs that would make her psychotic
symptoms worse.'' Today, Laura is on her own, taking medication for her
illness, living in a group home and holding a job. But her mother
believes that Laura's story shows that the researchers put science first
and patient care second.
''The physician's creed of 'do no harm' does not apply to research
physicians,'' Janice said from the kitchen of her rural Maryland home.
''I was wrong to trust that my daughter would be protected.''
Chris Hart, a spokesman for the University of Maryland, said, ''Because
there are issues of patient confidentiality involved, we can't
comment.'' Troubling methods surface in relapse studies
Relapse studies conducted during the '80s and early '90s are at least as
troubling as the symptom-exacerbation experiments. In one line of
experimentation, researchers withdrew medications from stable patients
precisely to study the biology of relapse, expecting the patients to
become sick again. After their subjects' descent into sickness could be
studied, they planned to put them back on their medications.
One of the largest studies of this type was led by Dr. Daniel van Kammen
at Highland Drive Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Pittsburgh. From
1985 to 1995, he conducted experiments that involved withdrawing
medication from more than 150 stabilized schizophrenic patients and
using spinal taps to analyze their spinal fluid. The researchers then
followed the patients until they relapsed, which was defined as
exhibiting worse symptoms for three days straight.
During the 10-year Pittsburgh study, virtually all the schizophrenic
patients either relapsed or stopped coming to the hospital and were, in
the researchers' own words, ''lost to follow-up.''
There is considerable evidence that this relapse study put research
subjects directly in harm's way. Patients in relapse have been found to
have seven times the risk of falling victim to antisocial behavior, such
as assault, and 2.5 times the risk of self-injury, including wrist
cutting, poisoning, and attempted hanging, according to a published
study.
''You do not put patients through pain and suffering, with experiments
that have a high-risk design, with no benefit to their future,'' said
research critic Shamoo, at the University of Maryland. ''You just don't
do that.''
Van Kammen has since left the Pittsburgh VA; his coresearcher on some of
this research, Dr. John Gurklis, is still there, but he declined to be
interviewed. At UCLA, researchers conducted a long-running
medication-withdrawal study. Gregory Aller of Los Angeles was a subject,
and his experiences led him to file a complaint with federal officials.
UCLA psychologist Keith Nuechterlein began his research 15 years ago,
and in an update published in 1988 he detailed how schizophrenic
patients admitted to UCLA's Aftercare Clinic had been taken off
medication and allowed to deteriorate into ''clear'' relapse.
Aller, 24 at the time, became a patient at the clinic in 1988, after
suffering an initial bout of psychosis. At first, he was put on
antipsychotic medication, Prolixin decanoate, and thrived, earning a 3.8
grade-point average at Santa Monica College. But in late 1989, he
entered a medication-withdrawal experiment led by Nuechterlein and fell
into a severe relapse. He growled on buses; he lapped water out of a
toilet like a dog. One evening while visiting his parents, he said he
picked up a butcher knife in the kitchen and called out his mother's
nickname: ''Come here, Poo!'' Aller said he needed to exorcise the devil
that he believed inhabited her.
''It was so bizarre,'' said Aller, a mild-mannered man who looks younger
than his 34 years. ''I couldn't believe it.'' On Jan. 12, 1990, his
parents argued with researchers that Gregory needed his medication. They
detailed his psychotic behavior in a letter, but, according to the
Allers, the researchers made no attempt to remedicate him. Exactly when
the researchers attempted to put Gregory back on an antipsychotic drug
is in dispute; what is clear is that Gregory did not resume taking
medication until May 15.
By then, however, the harm had been done. Gregory is doing well today,
said his father, Robert, but ''he never returned to his previous level
of function.''
UCLA clinical psychologist Nuechterlein says he cannnot discuss Aller
because of patient confidentiality, and the family has not given written
permission waiving the confidentiality.
But he justified the study as helping to determine how soon patients
with early-onset schizophrenia could be taken off antipsychotic
medications, and how long they could stay off. It was an important
question because of the side effects of the medications available at the
time.
He also defended the 1988 update as a retrospective look at patients'
records and measurement of relapse after the fact, rather than a study
in which researchers purposely waited for patients to worsen.
In 1993 Dr. Jay Katz, professor emeritus of law, medicine, and
psychiatry at Yale, reviewed documents in the Aller study at the
family's request.
''The patients were withdrawn from medication, indeed, required to do so
for research purposes until the needs of the study, and not those of the
individual patient, had been satisfied,'' Katz wrote in a law journal
article.
By any standard, the symptom-exacerbation experiments, the relapse
studies, and the patients' stories all add up to an unsettling record,
one that has imposed some measure of suffering on thousands of
vulnerable patients and exposed them to the risk of long-term harm,
often without adequate informed consent.
Until now, it is also a record that has escaped any broad examination,
despite the efforts of a handful of people to hold researchers
accountable. Chief among them is Vera Sharav, founder of Citizens for
Responsible Care in Psychiatry and Research, a New York-based group made
up of families with sons and daughters who suffer from schizophrenia.
For years, Sharav has labored to bring this research to light, digging
deep into the scientific literature, hectoring reporters to write about
it, and, in a variety of public forums, questioning researchers about
its ethics.
It is a record of experimentation, she said, that could only be done on
the powerless.
''That is why I am so passionate about it,'' she said. ''It is extremely
wrenching to see how easily a group regarded as misfits, or as not good
enough, or as socially and economically useless, can be made into
objects for other people's purposes.''
Motif99
news:alexx12-6960EE...@nntp.we.mediaone.net...
> Boston Globe
> ''It is extremely wrenching to see how easily a group regarded as
> misfits, or as not good enough, or as socially and economically useless,
> can be made into objects for other people's purposes.''
You've stopped taking your lithium again, haven't you Alex.
--
-motif99
---------------------------------------------
If Mike Tyson bites off Jesus' ear in a fight, is it a foul or a sacrament?
Motif99
news:alexx12-6960EE...@nntp.we.mediaone.net...
> ''It is extremely wrenching to see how easily a group regarded as
> misfits, or as not good enough, or as socially and economically useless,
> can be made into objects for other people's purposes.''
You've stopped taking your lithium again, haven't you Alex.
--
-motif99
---------------------------------------------
If Mike Tyson bites off Jesus' ear in a fight, is it a foul or a sacrament?
Empress Nympho
"Motif99" <mot...@netlinkcom.com> wrote in message
news:Rdgw5.384$vb.5...@news7.onvoy.net...
> "Alex Constantine" <ale...@mediaone.net> wrote in message
> news:alexx12-6960EE...@nntp.we.mediaone.net...
> > Boston Globe
> > ''It is extremely wrenching to see how easily a group regarded as
> > misfits, or as not good enough, or as socially and economically useless,
> > can be made into objects for other people's purposes.''
>
>
> You've stopped taking your lithium again, haven't you Alex.
> --
> -motif99
> ---------------------------------------------
> If Mike Tyson bites off Jesus' ear in a fight, is it a foul or a
sacrament?
>
>
really from the Boston Globe? Sounds more like one of those Rupert Murdoch
rags.
-- Nympho