The parents of a 12-year-old Brooklyn boy filed a $60 million suit yesterday, charging that the city released confidential records that led to his being recruited for a controversial psychiatric drug study.
The family of Isaac Johnson also charged the city, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and the state Psychiatric Institute with discrimination for targeting minority youth.
Court records attached to the suit provide a rare glimpse into a controversial study – first exposed in a Post series that revealed minority kids were used as guinea pigs to study effects of a now-banned weight-loss drug on children.
A protocol for the 1993 study, involving the drug Fenfluramine, noted it was to target black and Hispanic boys from 6 to 10 years, and was set up to explore children deemed at high risk for “antisocial and aggressive disorders,” court records show.
“We plan to enlist children at an early enough age that serious conduct problems will generally not have appeared,” the protocol stated.
The protocol also revealed that Bronx probation officials were to discuss the program with “appropriate families” and pass along the phone numbers of potential recruits.
In January 1993, medical researchers contacted Johnson’s mother, Charisse, and recruited Isaac, then 6, into the program.
After a battery of physical and psychological tests, Isaac was given a 60-mg dose of Fenfluramine and confined to a bed for more than five hours while blood was drawn about every hour.
For four years afterward, Isaac returned to Columbia Presbyterian to see what long-term effect, if any, the drug had.
Since receiving the dose, Isaac has suffered from nightmares, “intensely painful headaches, anxiety attacks, paranoid delusions, fearfulness, breathing difficulties, hyperventilating and, in general, a personality transformation,” the suit alleges.
Participants were paid $50 for taking psychiatric tests, an EKG and a physical, another $50 for an MRI, $50 for the “Fenfluramine Challenge,” and $25 for transportation.
In December 1992, Peter Reinharz, the city’s former chief Family Court prosecutor, handed over confidential Probation records for more than 100 black and Hispanic juveniles to state psychiatric officials and Columbia Presbyterian, the suit alleged.
The records of Isaac Johnson’s 16-year-old brother were among those released to further the study, which included giving Fenfluramine to kids whose siblings were juvenile delinquents, the suit alleged.
The FDA yanked Fenfluramine from the market last year after users developed heart problems.
Rudy Brown, the family’s lawyer, said Isaac came from a stable, two-parent family and was a healthy, normal child before the tests.
“There’s something very disturbing about the whole thing just based on the selection of minority children,” Brown said.