A sane voice in a crazy world of Bad Science
I can't pretend I read The Guardian every day, I barely get through the Saturday special.
Thank goodness I can refer to the Bad Science column online.
Ben Goldacre comments on science reporting - good, bad and bogus...
He may not always defend your viewpoint (say, animal testing) - but he rips apart some media nonsense and so-called 'facts' getting used as propaganda. Check him out demolishing the hysteria about cannabis, for instance.
e.g. The new super-strong breeds of marijuana that drive people crazy. Reefer Badness - Ben Goldacre Saturday March 24, 2007
And in fact, what’s most amazing is that this scare isn’t new. In the US, in the mid 1980s, during Reagan’s “war on drugs”, it was claimed that cannabis was 14 times stronger than in 1970, which rather sets you thinking. If it was 14 times stronger in 1986 than in 1970, and it’s 25 times stronger today than the beginning of the 1990s, does that mean it is now, in fact, 350 times stronger than 1970?
That’s not even a crystal in a plant pot. That’s impossible. That would require more THC to be present in the plant than the total volume of space taken up by the plant itself. That would require matter to be condensed. If I was a physics-minded branding manager, I would suggest Quark Gluon Plasma as the most appropriate street name for this substance: and I look forward to reading about the scare in the Independent tomorrow.
Um, yes - 6 million people in the UK smoke it, and this may incur a certain risk for the 800 people that could get triggered into schizophrenic breaks, etc.
He doesn't deny risk, just tries to keep it in perspective (think of the no-news of the 'acceptable losses' in the statistics of letting people drive, or drink, or even do both at the same time...)
This link will show you a sample of a range of cannabis articles (for instance).
Use the Search on his site, for subjects that interest you.
- Bogus's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Aha, brilliant, thankyou Bogus. Helpful tools in daily bullshit detective work. Roll on.
I've just read this which I thought was interesting too:
http://newsjunkiepost.com/2010/02/27/five-things-you-may-‘know’-about-marijuana…-that-aren’t-true
I hear that miraculously more potent stuff all the time. Also, pretty much every other thing a person comes in contact with can offset their schizophrenia. One example: your cat! Crazy Cat Lady syndrome is actually pretty valid. A bacteria in the kitty litter that can get spread onto your tables & ingested can also offset schizphrenia. Mice who carry this bacteria (I call it Tom & Jerry disease) actually are affected neurologically to provoke them to fuck with cats, get eaten & pass the bacteria to where it most likes to live.
Also, they've found endocannabinoids which are ligands of cannabinoid receptors - an analog of marijuana that is produced by the brain! Our brains are built for our symbiotic relationship with this awesome plant. And it's a time traveling neurotransmitter. They function as retrograde messengers conveying messages backwards from postsynaptic cells to presynaptic cells!
Anandamide is a highly studied endocannabinoid that has diverse effects, one of which is protection from excitotoxic brain damage.
Now, excitotoxins give me TERRIBLE migraines, so I've researched them extensively. Below, I pasted a summary of my findings. What bothers me, is that the more I read from so many different sources, the more evidence I see of governments' involvement in inflicting major excitotoxic brain damage to the masses. So finding out that an endocannabinoid protects our brains from this damage makes even more sense of how persecuted cannabanoid producing plants are in this country.MSG & MK Ultra Connections
<!--[if gte mso 9]>


This particular article appears quite low on the blog search, but I so loved the title for a rational newspaper article that I had to post it!
Blah blah cannabis blah blah blah
"You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?"
Marshall McLuhan