Did Taser maker do proper study?

May 17, 2012
Julie O'Neill, joneil@wcpo.com

CINCINNATI - The 9 News I-Team continues to investigate the potential lethality of the weapon sold to law enforcement agencies across the Tri-State and around the globe as a non-lethal force option.

The original Taser was invented in 1969, but it was 30 years later Taser International introduced new Taser technology to provide "a quantum leap" in stopping power.

Since the widespread use of that Taser in 2001, at least 500 people have died following Taser stuns according to Amnesty International.

Only around 60 of those cases were definitively linked to the Taser by medical examiners.

In July 2011, a jury awarded the family of a 17-year-old $10 million, saying a Taser stun killed him, however the manufacturer failed to properly warn police the Taser could affect the heart.

In March 2012, a judge lowered the award to $5 million, but upheld the verdict.

Attorney John Burton tried the case.

"This is a device that...the power of which was boosted by four times when the Smith brothers acquired it and then sold directly by Taser International to police departments with no intervening government vetting and no peer reviewed medical testing or studies published, simply a product to make money for this company," said Burton.

Electrophysiologist Dr. Douglas Zipes testified in the trial on behalf of the victim's family, and this month his research that Tasers can cause cardiac arrest and death was published in the American Heart Association's premier journal.

"I think Taser's testing of the safety of their devices is woefully inadequate, both in animals and in humans," said Dr. Zipes.

A review of the Taser by the Department of Defense in 2002 said "Development of the Taser appears to be based on serendipitous findings and trial and error, as opposed to well-defined scientific investigation."

The reviewers gave "a limited but favorable endorsement" for military use.

Three years later in 2005, a suit filed by Taser International's own shareholders, accused the company of spending only $14,000 on safety research in 1999 and 2000 prior to putting the higher powered Taser on the market.

Taser settled the shareholder suit for $21 million.

Taser CEO Rick Smith says it's not true that the company spent only $14,000 in initial safety research, because he says Taser's original medical researcher, Dr. Robert Stratbucker, worked for the company for years.

However when asked by the I-Team whether he compensated Dr. Stratbucker with stock instead of pay, Smith said that was true.

"You know when you're a small company and you don't have cash you gotta pay people with whatever you got," said Smith.

Now a multi-million dollar company, Smith says the Taser over the years has been more studied than any other non-lethal weapon, many of the studies funded by his company.

But a September article in the American Heart Journal reported that "studies funded by Taser and/or written by an author affiliated with the company are substantially more likely to conclude that Tasers are safe...18 times higher odds."

9 News contacted Taser International earlier this week asking for any peer-reviewed and published safety research done on the higher powered Taser prior to its market launch, and the company has not responded.

Taser has pointed to a study released in May 2011 by the Department of Justice on deaths following Taser stuns. That report states "there is currently no medical evidence that CED's (Tasers) pose a significant risk for induced cardiac dysrhythmia in humans when deployed reasonably."

Nowhere in the report is the word "reasonably" defined.

The Cincinnati Police Department announced last week it is now revising its policy on the deployment of Tasers, specifically looking at the placement of the darts, following the published research of Dr. Zipes.

Research shows the Taser has saved lives and reduced injuries to officers and subjects, but the death of 18-year-old Everette Howard of North College Hill after a Taser was used on him in August 2011 on the University of Cincinnati campus has raised concerns of public safety, as well as liability for officers and taxpayers.

The Hamilton County Coroner's office still hasn't ruled on Howard's cause of death.

Answer on Taser danger depends on who's asking

August 19, 2011
Frederik Joelving, Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study adds a cynical note to the highly charged debate over Tasers, the American-made stun gun that has made its way quickly into law enforcement across the globe.

As it turns out, people looking to settle arguments about the weapon's safety may not get much help from scientists.

That's because the answer they get from published studies seems to depend on who paid for the research, according to a report in the American Heart Journal.

Looking at 50 human or animal studies on Taser safety, researchers found that 23 of them had been funded by the manufacturer, Taser International, Inc, or done by scientists with financial ties to the company.

Twenty-two of those studies, or 96 percent, concluded the stun guns were safe or at least unlikely to be harmful. By contrast, only about half of the research not linked to Taser International reached that conclusion.

"When you read articles that are very favorable to the device, invariably you will see that one of authors is affiliated with the company making Tasers or sitting on the board," said Dr. Byron K. Lee, who worked on the new study.

"I'm not necessarily saying the research is done dishonestly and they lied and twisted their conclusions, it could very well be they designed their research to give favorable results," added Lee, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

According to the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company, its weapon has conquered the market rapidly, and is now used by law enforcement agencies in 107 countries.

With a pull of the trigger, two darts fly out of the gun and lodge in the skin or clothes of the target. The darts set up a high-voltage electric circuit that causes both sensory nerves and motor nerves to go haywire. The result is excruciating pain and violent muscle spasms that immobilize even the feistiest suspect.

NOT SO HARMLESS?

But critics say the powerful jolts, which in rare cases have caused broken bones, could also hijack the heart, causing it to enter a deadly flutter called ventricular fibrillation.

They worry particularly about the cases in which police have used the Taser on children and the elderly, as well as mentally ill people and drug addicts, who may be more vulnerable.

To dispel those fears, scientists have conducted scores of experiments, including an outlandish Taser-funded study published last year, in which sheep were doped up on methamphetamine and then shocked with a Taser X26 gun.

But the studies can't seem to agree.

"Both sides have research to back their claims that the Taser is safe or unsafe," Lee told Reuters Health.

If you Taser very close to the heart, he said, you might trigger a fatal heart rhythm in some animals. But if you aim further away, or use different animals, you might not.

Of course, Lee added, it is also possible that independent scientists might be biased toward finding harm.

"It is much more interesting to say that there is something wrong here, that there are harms," he explained.

When asked if that could have happened in his own study, he acknowledged that the researchers who rated the 50 articles knew where the funding for each had come from. Still, he said he felt their assessments would hold up to scrutiny.

ACCUSATIONS OF BIAS

Steve Tuttle, vice president of communications for Taser International, told Reuters Health that there was no bias in Taser-funded studies.

In an email, Tuttle argued that in most cases, there are three degrees of separation between the scientists doing Taser-backed research and the company.

"The doctors are only paid their normal salary for the research and receive no extra compensation and no moneys from TASER," he said.

"It is worth noting that Dr. Lee has been a paid expert in litigation against TASER and this fact is not mentioned in the conflict of interest section of this report," Tuttle added.

While acknowledging this, Lee countered that it was more than a year ago and that the journal did not require disclosures that far back.

He also said that after he started doing Taser research in 2008, he had removed himself from the case and paid back all the moneys he'd received.

Debates about conflicts of interest and corporate funding biasing research are nothing new, and happen throughout the medical community.

For instance, a study from 1998 in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that scientists from the tobacco industry rated secondhand smoking harmless more than 90 percent of the time. Only 13 percent of researchers without industry ties came to that conclusion, however.

"When you come to a research question with predetermined bias because of funding that you get, you can very much design a study to further the company's interests," Lee said. "I think that is a very real danger of biomedical research."

His fix?

"The first step is to be aware of it, and then look really critically at the article's methods," Lee said.