Beware the Violence Initiative Project--Coming Soon to an Inner City Near You.

• Author: Cohen, Mitchel

It is proper to focus on blacks and other minorities as they are over-represented in the courts and not well studied--Gail Wasserman, Ph.D., from her funding proposal to establish a "behavioral disorders" center at Columbia University's Department of Child Psychiatry.

Unemployment runs in the genes just like bad teeth.--Richard Herrnstein, Princeton University, co-author of The Bell Curve.

As late as the 1980s, a number of US and European scientists were still claiming that Black people, Latinos and American Indans are less intelligent than Caucasians. (Asians were left out of the mix.) Intelligence, they said, ran in the genes along racial lines. Some scientists are now proposing that violence is an hereditary characteristic of Black and Latino people and that, unlike the case with genetic intelligence, something can be done about it. Scientists, they say, can control the alleged "genetic predisposition" to committing criminal acts of violence by medicating Black and Latino children before aggressive behavior and violence occur.

Under the aegis of the federally-funded Violence Initiative Project (VIP), Gail Wasserman, a professor in Child Psychology at Columbia University, and Daniel Pine, a medical doctor associated with the same institution, are picking up where the utterly discredited racially-based intelligence theories of Jensen, Herrnstein, Eysenck, Shockley and Murray leave off. The new proponents of genetic racism lead a team of researchers in performing numerous experiments, partly funded by federal dollars, on children as young as six years of age.

In one "study" at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, 34 healthy boys, aged 6 to 10, were administered the drug fenfluramine, the primary ingredient in the diet drug fen-phen which has been banned by the US government. (1) The boys were all from impoverished families; 44% were African-American and 56% were Hispanic. The boys were made to fast for 12 hours prior to beginning, and during the test were allowed only water. An intravenous catheter was inserted and designed to remain in place for 51/2 hours. During that period an oral dose of the drug fenfluramine hydroxide was administered (10mg/kg). Blood was drawn hourly.

Scandal swirled around the sale of fen-phen in the mid 1990s, as Federal Drug Administration studies showed that the drug caused severe heart-valve damage in as many as 30% of the adults who took it. (2) Fenfluramine was also shown to cause a fatal heart condition known as pulmonary hypertension. (3) Effects of a single dose of fenfluramine, writes the Albany-based Disability Advocates, Inc., "frequently included anxiety, fatigue, headache, lightheadedness, difficulty concentrating, visual impairment, diarrhea, nausea, a feeling of being 'high,' and irritability." (4) Ninety percent of adult subjects experienced side-effects from a single dose of fenfluramine. And studies done on rodents and monkeys have shown that a single dose of fenfluramine caused microscopic damage to brain cells. Despite the fact that the dangers had been well-established, the NY State Psychiatric Institute proceeded with administering fenfluramine to children in doses eight times higher than the amounts causing damage to monkeys' brai ns, even after the drug had been banned in September, 1997.

In using that drug, the clinicians hypothesized, they could counter the alleged racially inherited genetic predisposition to aggressive behavior and violence by increasing serotonin levels in the brain. Some scientists have correlated lower than average serotonin levels with aggressive behavior. By increasing serotonin levels through medication, the researchers are claiming they could prevent the kids from committing future acts of violence, despite the fact that most of the children had not committed any acts of violence at all.

The children were selected because they each had an older sibling who had been ruled a delinquent by Family Court. The children's names and addresses, which are supposed to be confidential and sealed, were (and continue to be) culled by government officials at the Department of Probation and the New York City Board of Education and passed along to Wasserman and Pine. The involvement of public officials became known due only to exposes in local newspapers. (5)

Forced to reply, the NYC Board of Education denied that students had been referred for the purpose of participating in research, which would have been illegal. But the...