> These works have been met with anger. Their findings upset harm-reduction defenders who consider their efforts already besieged by critics. The experience was so miserable that Ms Doleac, who studies crime, has decided never to write another health paper.
> Leo Beletsky, a former drug dealer, now at Northeastern University, deems Ms Packham’s findings “nonsensical” and thinks her paper should not have been published. Don Des Jarlais, at New York University, argues that addicts do not respond to incentives like others do, making the moral-hazard effect inconceivable. Susan Sherman of Johns Hopkins University says she doubts that new evidence that harm reduction does more bad than good would convince her to disregard previous research demonstrating otherwise.
> A barrage of complaints led the editors of the International Journal of Drug Policy to retract a meta-analysis that found that safe-injection sites, where users do drugs in supervised settings, did not decrease rates of deadly overdose. “Retractions used to be reserved for fraud,” says Keith Humphreys of Stanford University, a former drug-policy adviser for the Obama administration. No longer, it seems.Science denial has many forms. This appears to be one of the older ones.
In this case, I'd speculate that harm reduction advocates aim is to (tautologically) reduce the (physical/health) harm of drug use so that it's one less problem users face. One aspect of this may be safe consumption, which this article says doesn't work on it's own. Another aspect is overdoses form Fentanyl et al, (which I would argue is largely a byproduct of a drug war that has made heroin too hard to import, and no safe medical supply options for treatment). So the focus could shift to addressing this (which in tandem with safe injection sites could still produce better overall outcomes).
My point is that it's not productive to dispute the studies, better to accept on balance of probabilities and look at how it fits with your overall aim.
(Climate change is very similar. People dispute the studies because they don't like the political rhetoric about how we should react, not because deep down they think all the research is flawed)
Good move on Doleac's part; her naloxone paper was atrocious.
Many of the problems are detailed in "Supervised consumption sites: a nuanced assessment of the causal evidence."
It mentions the reason for retraction, something about "pooling diverse outcomes into a composite measure," anyone have a link to the actual details of the retraction other than that it wasn't for fraud?
"Ahmed Bayoumi and Pamela Leece, who wrote one of two critical reviews that led to the meta-analysis’s retraction, noted that the meta-analysis combined outcomes for mortality, drug-related crimes, sharing of drug equipment, and problematic drug use — even though each of these outcomes could be affected differently by a supervised consumption site.
But I can't find the review itself.
In an era of questionable social science, retracting for bad methods seems defensible, but arguably this should just be not cited on account of being inapplicable. The emotionality of the issue makes that hard--if not retracted, it will go on to be bad evidence for things it doesn't say. People seem to have a pretty low bar for what passes as a judgement on supervised consumption sites.
“Accordingly, that estimate of effect has no practical public health or policy implications,” Bayoumi and Leece concluded.
This is such a ridiculous viewpoint on a hacker forum. There are no intrinsic resources - iron ore is just a bunch of rocks, crude oil is a toxic sludge, Uranium is a bunch of radioactive ore.
Economy is not a zero sum game, it's about allocating current resources to expand future ones (AKA growth)
They already implicitly did. Turns out the dysfunctional criminal justice and medical system the praise affect more than just addicts. Who would have thought.
Saying that a certain population should die because of their criminal nature and high "cost to society" is straight up nazi shit. What's the policy implementation of that opinion just curious? It really doesn't get more clear than this.
I think that people are more concerned with opioid death statistics than opioid addiction itself. And there is a shattering sense of defeat, which is normal, that is associated with realizing that you cannot help anyone who doesn’t want to help themselves. And if they don’t want to help themselves, then they may go down a collision course that will be their undoing. In this case that often means death.
I feel strongly this way, or maybe I'm missing your point. Addiction is terrible, but death is clearly worse than addiction. Addiction is survivable.
My point is that the “preventive maintenance” approach to opioid addiction is more about death statistics than it is about death itself. It’s a numbers game. A nation’s response to situations such as this will largely be determined by how many people don’t die, because people have a distaste toward death and the general public is subservient to what data suggests irrespective of its practical and tangible representations.
No offense, but your view here seems insane to me.
I don't follow your point about death statistics vs death itself.
"Helping them stay on drugs" is very much the wrong way to look at it. How about "reducing the harm they do to others"?
“Helping them stay on drugs” is the practical way of looking at it, because in practice that’s what’s happening. “Reducing harm” in this context sounds like some sort of neo-Hippocratic Orwellian spin on the fact that the alternative is to address the greater issues that lead to and foster drug addiction that are beyond the scope of this tiny box that I’m typing into and do not involve more needles.