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 Have any of the prominent academic papers been retracted?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.
Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Monday 07 Aug 2006
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.
Ben Goldacre
The Guardian
Monday 07 Aug 2006
