> “Retractions used to be reserved for fraud,” says Keith Humphreys of Stanford University...

Science denial has many forms. This appears to be one of the older ones.

People are really bad at accepting information that superficially contradicts something they want, and react by disputing the information instead of taking it into consideration while still pushing for the ends they want to achieve.

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)

I think some drug warriors become harm advocates. If drug users can't overcome their moral failures, before they suffocate on their vomit than be resuscitated with naloxone.

What? This isn’t even a sentence. It’s a collection of sentence fragments and I can’t tell what the hell it’s trying to say.

It should read "better they" not "before they". Anyways, I was thinking of a specific incident where a fire chief came out and said they would prefer that junkies just die vs adding naxolone to their kit.

> The experience was so miserable that Ms Doleac, who studies crime, has decided never to write another health paper.

Good move on Doleac's part; her naloxone paper was atrocious.

What was bad about it?

The meta-analysis largely relied on studies that used cities or states as a control on deaths to the small (usually hardest hit) regions where the programs were offered. Like doing an intervention in Skid Row, then using LA as the control for the non-intervention.

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?

Vox discusses it: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/27/17907964/sa...

"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.