9 September 2003

name of blog: Fair and Balanced:
Remember the report last year that not-huge doses of ecstasy gave monkeys brain damage? Well, it turns out that there was a minor flaw in the study. Just a teensy one. They gave the monkeys speed, not pills.

What a suprise. Anti-drug hysteria led to a completely stupid failure of science. Too be fair, it's really hard to test for ecstasy in a pill. It took me at least 15 seconds to enter the phrase 'MDMA test kit' into google to find a whole pile of vendors of kits - most are US$50 or less.



My one reservation on the Carr-as-messiah push is that he has a long history of silly laws on drug matters. The actual facts about drug use have been well-known since 1894 when the Royal Commission into Hemp Drugs reported:

and that the excessive use is comparatively exceptional. The moderate use produces practically no ill effects


The fact that shonky science is still getting churned out a century later should tell us something about the quality of drug policy.

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