meehawl

all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned

Junk Science

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The journal Science published a retraction from a group of Johns Hopkins scientists who’d discovered that a bottle they thought contained Ecstasy was in fact filled with methamphetamine, commonly known as speed. The mix-up corrupted the results of a study, published in Science in September 2002, which found that a single, recreational dose of Ecstasy was so damaging it could lead to Parkinson’s disease … Weeks after the botched study was published, its conclusions were repeatedly invoked by witnesses at a House subcommittee hearing on the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act (RAVE Act). The bill was quietly passed last April as the slightly reworded Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act … Alan Leshner, publisher of Science and former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), has come under fire for endorsing the botched study at its time of publication … Leshner did help NIDA bring home the bacon: NIDA’s budget for Ecstasy research has more than quadrupled over the past five years, from $3.4 million to $15.8 million.

Earlier here.

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