"I laugh at your claims to scientific validity!"

[fiat_knox]

News article on cocaine asserting its links to violent behaviour

Okay, these guys have released all these facts and figures. But this is not a scientific study by any means.

I was watching a news report on this, and when I heard the newscaster begin a sentence "To support this theory, DrugScope collected data from bzzzzzzzz ..."

I filled in the blank with laughter there, because no matter what they were going to say, no matter how fervently they believed what they were saying to be true, the gathering of data from police records and from second hand accounts of behaviour is not scientific evidence.

The only scientific evidence that can truly back up the theory would have to involve using a very large sample of volunteers, about 20,000, measuring their health, body masses, gender and metabolism, recording their diets and physiological and mental changes throughout, and sending them out regularly onto the streets, week in, week out, for a period of not less than two years, ripped to the twiddly bits on precisely measured shots of Vod Bulls and the finest cocaine, and see what trouble they get into.

And the difference between the police's effort and this effort is that this effort would have to be taking place under controlled conditions, and likely involve a double blind with a control group of equal size whom we would feed on the finest Corona fizzies and snorted sherbet.

And you know it makes sense, because this is Science. Good, clean Science.

I'd love to get funding for this. I'll have my IgNobel prize in green, thank you very much.

Comments

[cdave]

Unfortunately that wouldn't get approval from an ethics board.

You can do all sorts of interesting analysis with existing data sets. That's how they found out how dangerous smoking is. They did a big analysis of questionnaires of life styles of medical doctors, and when they compared everything else they found there was a large correlation between smoking and lung cancer, that wasn't accompanied by other life styles (e.g. a poor diet, is often correlated with low exersize). They hadn't been expecting that.

I recommended you give the Bad Science book by Ben Goldacre a read. I reckon you'd enjoy a lot of it.