Ben Goldacre
Saturday August 5, 2006
The Guardian
Certain areas of human conduct lend themselves so readily to bad science that you have to wonder if there is a pattern emerging. Last week the parliamentary science and technology committee looked into the ABC classification of illegal drugs, and found it was rubbish. This is not an article about that report, but it is a good place to start: drugs, they found, are supposed to be ranked by harm, in classes A, B, and C, but they’re not; and the ranking is supposed to act as a deterrent, but it doesn’t.
Watching this small area of prohibition collapse like wet tissue paper got me thinking: how does the world of prohibition match up against our gold standards for bad science, like the nutritionists or the anti-MMR movement? Have any of the prominent academic papers been retracted? Yes, they have. Professor George Ricaurte, funded by the National Institute for Drug Abuse, published an article in Science, describing how he administered a comparable recreational dose of ecstasy to monkeys: this dose killed 20% of the monkeys, and another 20% were severely injured.
Even before it was announced – a year later – that they’d got the bottles mixed up and used the wrong drug, you didn’t need to be Einstein to know this was duff research, because millions of clubbers have taken the “comparable” recreational dose of ecstasy, and 20% of them did not die. It’s no wonder animal rights campaigners manage to persuade themselves that animal research makes a bad model for human physiology.
That’s before you even get started on workaday bad science. Like the food gurus, prohibitionists will cherry pick research that suits them, measure inappropriate surrogate outcomes, and wishfully over-interpret data: a prohibitionist will observe that less cannabis has been seized, and declare that this means there is less cannabis on the streets, rather than less police interest.
For textbook bad science we’d also want to see the media distorting research: overstating the stuff it likes, and ignoring stuff it doesn’t, especially negative findings. We used to read a lot about cannabis and lung cancer in the papers. The largest ever study of whether cannabis causes lung cancer reported its findings recently, to total UK media silence. Lifelong cannabis users, who had smoked more than 22,000 joints, showed no greater risk of cancer than people who had never smoked cannabis.
While no journalist has written a single word on that study, the Times did manage to make a front page story headed “Cocaine floods the playground: use of the addictive drug by children doubles in a year,” out of their misinterpretation of a government report that showed nothing of the sort.
There are even optimists who believe in quick fix treatments for drug habits – the heroin detox in five days, or painless withdrawal in just 48 hours, under general anaesthesia.
Why are drugs such a bad science magnet? Partly, of course, it’s the moral panic. But more than that, sat squarely at the heart of our discourse on drugs, is one fabulously reductionist notion: it is the idea that a complex web of social, moral, criminal, health, and political problems can be simplified to, blamed on, or treated via a molecule or a plant. You’d have a job keeping that idea afloat.
· Please send your bad science to bad.science@guardian.co.uk
[I’m going to be really self indulgent and mention that in my head, well in my book really, this was a smashing 2,000 word thesis with 8 examples in it, and by the time I’d chopped it down to a 600 word column with four crammed half examples it had kind of stopped holding water. I’ve been playing a bit of Go recently, which always takes my brain over completely, and this column was like trying to fit four battles on a 9×9 board.]
Melissa said,
August 8, 2006 at 3:18 pm
“that and many other media studies PhDs i will be generously giving away over the coming weeks.”
OOooh! I want one! I don’t have any qualifications, but I’ve read twelve books!
j said,
August 8, 2006 at 4:28 pm
“There was a lot of harassment of seller’s of paraphenalia when I lived in the UK. Things may well have changed.”
I’d think most decent sized UK towns (certainly, all the ones I’ve lived in) would have a shop or two selling pipes etc; there’s also lots of stuff on e-bay/the web nowadays. Not sure if there’s still harrassment – but if there is it’s not terribly effective 😉
superburger said,
August 8, 2006 at 7:08 pm
“that and many other media studies PhDs”
Any subject with “studies” in its title isn’t worth studying
Any science with “science” it its title isn’t one.
Disccuss.
Ben Goldacre said,
August 8, 2006 at 7:40 pm
Any subject with “studies” in its title isn’t worth studying
Any science with “science” it its title isn’t one.
Disccuss.
we could keep an entire department going here.
Janet W said,
August 9, 2006 at 8:37 am
glad I didn’t go for one of those poxy Natural Sciences degrees they dish out in the fens, then…
Ben Goldacre said,
August 9, 2006 at 9:08 am
i can say for definite that those are well dodgy.
Robert Carnegie said,
August 9, 2006 at 10:19 am
If the American press were all over it, was that this year or last, telling broadly the same story?
If only this year, I think you just conclude that journalism works at random. Fox News Web site, for instance, seemed to have picked up the American Thoracic Society, 2006, version of the story, straight from WebMD I think. Now would they do so without referring toda previous story of their own… well, why not I guess, no one takes this very seriously.
At the same time, in the other week’s rerun of “[u]Have I Got News For You[/u]”, Danny Kelly (I think) claimed to have seen a headline on Fox News TV that went like “Fox News confirms Pope John Paul II is dead”, implying very specific diligence. (I don’t mean that they went in and finished him off.)
coracle said,
August 9, 2006 at 12:58 pm
Certainly don’t agree with this bit.
Neuroscience? Biomedical Science? Bioscience?
jonman said,
August 9, 2006 at 3:09 pm
replying to hatter
“most of the weed you get is ’skunk’, which is a darned sight stronger than weed used to be. Smoking a pure skunk joint is simply not feasible for all but the most hardened smokers – you’d get too stoned too quick.â€
“t isn’t. I’ve never actually heard this excuse before. When is used to be?”
Dunno about ‘excuse’ but there you go. Also not sure when ‘used to be’ is – whenever it is that people used to smoke all-weed joints. I’ve never come across it in 15ish years, but I’ve heard american folk talk about it. To be perfectly honest, I see smoking a pure-weed joint as in the same league of endurance as necking a bottle of vodka in one go – not very pleasant, and liable to end in tears. But not impossible for a hardened drinker…
superburger said,
August 9, 2006 at 3:44 pm
biosciecne? That’ll be biology then?
Neuroscience? Colud be anything, from psychology to medicine to biochemistry
BMS? All the ones i know it’s just a brew of biology, molecular biology, physiology, genetics, biochemistry.
superburger said,
August 9, 2006 at 3:49 pm
ps all of which are very wothwhile endeavours…..
superburger said,
August 9, 2006 at 4:14 pm
“i can say for definite that those are well dodgy.”
Anyone who thinks they can spend three years acting like a daft punt in East Anglia, waltz out with some poxy first in ‘natural sciences” , then expect to be taken seriously has clearly taken leave of their senses.
hatter said,
August 10, 2006 at 6:04 am
“how very cutlurally aware of you”
Very culturally aware. But it doesn’t make the practice any less stupid. In South Africa you’ll find the even more bizarre practice of mixing Mandrax (Methaqualone) with cannabis. Presumably completely wipes out the effects of THC sought by normal cannabis users.
“it’s pretty common throught europe to mix cannabis with tobbaco”
I’d hope that the sensible people in The Netherlands are not quite so silly.
A practice you will see in the US is sprinkling some crushed resin onto leaf.
“Could be leaf cannabis is so common here in the States is that it’s a major (illegal) cash-crop ’round these parts”
To some extent yes. Although the British weather is not suitable for this plant it can be easily grown indoors with minimal equipment or skill. Growing top quality cannabis is not particularly difficult.
And resin is common in the US.
The modern weed is stronger myth is largely a result of comparing the poorest quality material of the 60s/70s with the best quality of today, and deliberately so. It is just a myth.
Dr Nicholas said,
August 10, 2006 at 2:16 pm
“Anyone who thinks they can spend three years acting like a daft punt in East Anglia, waltz out with some poxy first in ‘natural sciences†, then expect to be taken seriously has clearly taken leave of their senses.”
Being a UCL (and RFUCMS) boy through and through, I’ve taken to pronouncing it “Nazi” instead of their way (gnat-ski). It does a good job of winding up my tab friends, especially if you place the “bio” in front, conjuring up images of cruel and twisted experimentation, which they are guilty of anyway.
andyl said,
August 10, 2006 at 4:59 pm
So what’s the current consensus on cannabis and schizophrenia?
The alarmists are always telling us that drug use has mushroomed over the past 20 years. Home Office research suggests that 4 million (or so) adults have used cannabis (the News Of The World suggests there are 3.5 million regular users) which is approximately 1/10th of the entire adult population. If one studied the numbers of recorded schizophrenic sufferers one might expect some quite significant jump in the schizophrenia rates corresponding to the jump in cannabis usage. Indeed research in to that very issue has been done (using 8 cohorts spanning 40 years) which found no link [Testing hypotheses about the relationship between cannabis use and psychosis by Degenhardt L, Hall W, Lynskey M.]
Also in 1968, the Wootton Report, a Home Office investigation into the effects of cannabis, concluded: “There is no evidence that this activity is causing violent crime or aggression, anti-social behaviour, or is producing in otherwise normal people conditions of dependence or psychosis requiring medical treatment.”.
However the problem space is muddied somewhat as many people who suffer from pre- or mild schizophrenia tend to self-medicate by smoking cannabis before coming into contact with the mental health service. Which many studies of people presenting with schizophrenia fail to take into account.
Robert Carnegie said,
August 10, 2006 at 11:42 pm
“The modern weed is stronger myth is largely a result of comparing the poorest quality material of the 60s/70s with the best quality of today, and deliberately so. It is just a myth.”
That would be not a myth, but a lie, surely?
Kyle2008 said,
November 12, 2008 at 5:35 am
The gold standard is a monetary system in which a region’s common media of exchange are paper notes that are normally freely convertible into pre-set, fixed quantities of gold.
==================
Kyle
newfoundland drug rehab
jiangjiang said,
December 8, 2009 at 2:45 am
ed hardy ed hardy
ed hardy clothing ed hardy clothing
ed hardy shop ed hardy shop
christian audigier christian audigier
ed hardy cheap ed hardy cheap
ed hardy outlet ed hardy outlet
ed hardy sale ed hardy sale
ed hardy store ed hardy store
ed hardy mens ed hardy mens
ed hardy womens ed hardy womens
ed hardy kids ed hardy kids ed hardy kids