Professor Lyke Thompson, director of Wayne State's Center for Urban Studies, commented extensively in a piece about the Detroit mayoral race and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's remarks during a recent debate at the Economic Club about character issues and drug use among youth in the suburbs. Kilpatrick said that in suburban communities such as Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills young people "do more meth, they do more Ecstasy and they do more acid than all the schools in the city of Detroit put together." Thompson said national data would support the mayor's comments but there are no specifics to Metro Detroit to back up his claim. "There are several national studies that indicate drug [Ecstasy] use by suburban teens is higher than its use by teens in inner cities," Thompson said. "On the other hand there is no data to suggest that it is higher in those cities than in Detroit." Thompson added that some officials both in the suburbs and Detroit have found this kind of attack to be useful because it gets them votes.