> What it really tends to mean is that a peer looked at the procedures and results and that it passes the "sniff test" and generally doesn't have any glaring errors.
It sometimes means that.
But there are studies that fail the smell test like a refuse heap and still somehow pass a "rigorous" peer-review process.
Remember when George Ricaurte, who by the way was already pretty obviously a charlatan ONDCP whore at the time, injected baboons with what he said was a normal dose of MDMA (2mg /kg) and found severe neurotoxicity? [0]
Yeah, well two of the five of the baboons died. I remember literally the day that study was published - in effing Science. It was all over the news, including the front page of the NYT.
But plenty of us in the drug policy reform movement (and, for that matter, those of us who had used MDMA a few times) knew immediately (and said so) that this study was obviously flawed because, well, people don't die from a normal dose of MDMA. Sure enough, it later turned out that Ricaurte had injected those poor baboons with a 2mg/kg dose of methamphetamine, not MDMA. He said that there had been a "labeling error," which his supplier denied.
There are examples like this every day.
The peer review process is only as good as the political will toward righteous honesty - the state has muscled out-and-out deceit through this system often enough to make any thinking person doubt its capacity even as an effective "sniff test."
It sometimes means that.
But there are studies that fail the smell test like a refuse heap and still somehow pass a "rigorous" peer-review process.
Remember when George Ricaurte, who by the way was already pretty obviously a charlatan ONDCP whore at the time, injected baboons with what he said was a normal dose of MDMA (2mg /kg) and found severe neurotoxicity? [0]
Yeah, well two of the five of the baboons died. I remember literally the day that study was published - in effing Science. It was all over the news, including the front page of the NYT.
But plenty of us in the drug policy reform movement (and, for that matter, those of us who had used MDMA a few times) knew immediately (and said so) that this study was obviously flawed because, well, people don't die from a normal dose of MDMA. Sure enough, it later turned out that Ricaurte had injected those poor baboons with a 2mg/kg dose of methamphetamine, not MDMA. He said that there had been a "labeling error," which his supplier denied.
There are examples like this every day.
The peer review process is only as good as the political will toward righteous honesty - the state has muscled out-and-out deceit through this system often enough to make any thinking person doubt its capacity even as an effective "sniff test."
0: https://erowid.org/chemicals/mdma/references/journal/2002_ri...