Blogrolling: DrugLawBlog

I try to stay away from the public policy implications of drug abuse science because it gets into stupid repetitive arguments and generally the science is beside the point anyway. Especially when we’re talking about marijuana, MDMA and alcohol.

The DrugLawBlog has some interesting viewpoints, one recent one on the increase in prescription drug recreational use is of note.  A teaser:

the annual Monitoring the Future study, with high-school age kids reporting using drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin in significant numbers.

Is this a cause for panic?

Not necessarily. It may actually be a good thing.

Because if people — even young people whom we care about deeply — are going to use recreational drugs, it’s a hell of a lot better for them to be using pharmaceuticals or over-the-counter drugs than to buy heroin or cocaine on the street.

I’m adding this site to the blogroll…

SfN07: Our weather sucks here

Apropos of starting to bear down on some social obligations for the Society for Neuroscience Annual meeting I’m reminded of something. Might be useful for those of you who think SD is an unrelenting paradise. Our weather is terrible.

They got me at last

LOL is teh stupidz.

Yeh bttu fnee smtimez.

Neh it fracgink aint!

A Modest Proposal on Impact Factors

People argue back and forth over whether Impact Factor of journals, the h-index, Total Cites, specific paper cites, etc should be used as the primary assessment of scientific quality. Many folks talk out of both sides of their mouths, bemoaning the irrelevance of journal Impact Factor while beavering away to get their papers into those journals and using the criterion to judge others. In this you will note people arguing the case that makes their CV look the best. I have a proposal:

Unseemly competition

Once again I’m watching a publication-ethics situation develop in a very large lab with which I am familiar. Ultimately this is going to result in a series of papers from multiple labs on closely related topics appearing in C/N/S journals (and maybe another one or two). Papers for which a close examination of the submitted, revised, accepted dates will tell a fascinating (to some) or drearily familiar (to others) story.

Shocked, simply shocked I tell ya

Geneviève Jeanson has confessed to EPO use (scroll down). I’m flabbergasted. Remember when she was the cat’s meow of women’s bike racing? A teenaged wunderkind kicking the pants of all of those women with lengthy performance records? Practically lapping the field in Montreal? Please. Everybody knew at the time. Couldn’t prove it. Then she was busted for hematocrit or something a couple of times. Denied, denied, denied. Now, confession.

Just like Bjarne Riis. All the hoopla this summer over his confession seemed to completely overlook that back in ’96 everybody “knew” he was juiced. Look on Usenet if you don’t recall the conventional wisdom and available public evidence. He “vehemently denied” drug use for a decade.

Screw it. I’m off the Pollyanna bandwagon. If your effort was “superhuman” on one goo day, you changed from domestique to superstud in one season or you  dominated the competition (which has confessed to doping) for years, well I think you were a doper. The whole bunch of ya. Indurain, Ulrich, Armstrong, Basso, Vinokourov… the list goes on. Dopers. We’ll get confessions eventually.

Now the bandwagon I share with DM and am most certainly not off is the stupid ticky-tack, not ready for an Acta journal analysis that passes for doping science. What a freaking joke. Landis’ appeal was turned back. It shouldn’t have been. He probably doped with something sure. Maybe the reason he’s so pissed is that it wasn’t with exogenous testosterone! Who the fuck could know what with the dumb ass procedures that were in place to analyze the samples, blind the analysis and replicate with the “B” sample.