Re Trump's budget calls for sensible cuts in research

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Chris Beck <cbeck () pacanukeha net>
Date: Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 8:01 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Trump's budget calls for sensible cuts in research
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>


While it may be true that NIDA is a worthy target, one highly doubts that
an authoritarian in the vein of Donald "I still think they should execute
the Central Park Five even though they were found innocent" Trump is going
to chose that as one of his spending targets.

<snark>One would suspect that if anything he'd move the funding for
research on the health effects of environmental problems into it.</snark>

An anti-science, anti-logic, anti-fact mind is not where I'd first look to
get ideas about pruning any research funding, indeed it is reasonable to
assume most choices will be wrong except by chance.

Best,
Chris


On Mar 17, 2017 7:23 PM, "Dave Farber" <dave () farber net> wrote:


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: John Gilmore <gnu () toad com>
Date: Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 11:37 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] Trump's budget calls for sensible cuts in research
To: <dave () farber net>
Cc: ip <ip () listbox com>


> The National Institutes of Health, for example, would be cut by
> nearly $6 billion, about a fifth of the NIH budget.

There is PLENTY of fat there that needs to be cut.

The few stories below are just the beginning of the bloated and
misused taxpayer money at the NIH.  NIH can easily afford to lose 20%
of their budget and still do ALL of the important part of their work.
Indeed, prioritizing what matters would IMPROVE their work.

I'm not a Trump supporter, he's a malicious buffoon.  But that
doesn't mean that every idea he has is a bad one, nor that every new
departure from previous government practice is a terrible thing.

When he does something good, I applaud; when he does something bad,
I criticize.  That's how debate in society is best supposed to work.
"Ad hominem" attacks based on who suggested an idea are foolish
and counterproductive at sorting the good from the bad.

I suggest that NIH should eliminate an entire one of the National
Institutes -- NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse -- which
spends over $1B every year.  What's its important research?  It's all
studies designed to prove that already-illegal drugs are bad for you.

Wait, what?  If they're already illegal, declared "too harmful for
citizens to be allowed to possess", worth throwing hundreds of
thousands of citizens in for long jail terms, why waste tax money
trying to prove anything about them?

The real goal of NIDA is to provide faked "scientific" support for
politicians who hate drug users.  They create scary headlines when
studies are announced or finished.  And knowing the miniscule
attention span of the media, they usually release the scary press
release a week before any reporter can read the actual scientific
paper.  So the scary headlines have come and gone, mission
accomplished!, before any reporter can even notice that the scientific
paper doesn't actually support the scary press release.  But
occasionally their "scientific" lies so egregious that the press
actually notices and the scientist is forced to retract them, like
this time when NIDA and "Science magazine" (which were run by the same
corrupt guy, it turns out) helped stampede Congress to pass the "Rave
Act" to criminalize events where the customers bring and use illegal
drugs:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retracted_article_on_dopaminergic_neurotoxicity_of_MDMA

Since many already-illegal drugs aren't actually bad for you, it takes
a lot of twisted research, with a big government thumb on the scale,
to try to "prove" that.  For example, "crack babies" don't actually
exist, but scary headlines and pictures of malnourished babies sure
did convince Congress to penalize crack-smoking black people with 100x
the penalties of white people who snorted the same substance in the
form of powder cocaine.  Don't believe me?  You never got the update?
You aren't alone.  See Wikipedia:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_baby

  "Later studies failed to substantiate the findings of earlier ones
  ...  Scientists have come to understand that the findings of the
  early studies were vastly overstated and that most people who were
  exposed to cocaine in utero do not have disabilities."

NIDA has also spent many hundreds of millions trying to prove that
marijuana is bad for you, and failed (but you might get a little cough
in the back of your throat from smoking it, they discovered).  They
fund underpowered studies over and over, bury the ones that by chance
don't show harm, and publicize the ones that do by chance show harm.
They strain to find "associations", e.g. between marijuana use and
psychosis or depression, and then pretend that they've shown
"causation".  But it's equally possible that people who were already
psychotic or depressed tend to choose to smoke cannabis because it
makes them feel better; it relieves their symptoms.  And in these
papers I keep finding statements like "Our results cannot preclude the
possibility that cannabis may exhibit an association with lung cancer
risk at extremely high dosage."  I.e. they didn't PROVE that, in fact
they proved the opposite at all other dosages, but to please NIDA, the
paper includes the scary IDEA of a "possible" harm that they didn't
even attempt to prove or disprove.  You can see a summary of this NIDA
marijuana research in Wikipedia too:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_cannabis

Meanwhile NIDA and all of NIH spent NOTHING, $0, over decades, on
trying to see if any of those hundreds of politically disfavored drugs
were GOOD for you.  Which is why there's so little research exploring
the anti-cancer properties of marijuana (which were proven at UCLA by
Donald Tashkin), or the anti-epileptic effects that have salvaged the
young lives of thousands of kids.  Which is why Raphael Mechoulam, an
Israeli scientist, not a US scientist, discovered the body's own
internal regulatory endocannabinoid system, that no so-called
scientist in the US even suspected was there (because non-hateful US
research on marijuana is politically incorrect and never gets funded).

I personally know a doctor, Donald Abrams, who applied for an NIH
grant to study whether smoking marijuana actually does help AIDS
patients.  (He worked in the AIDS ward at SF General Hospital, along
with "Brownie Mary" Rathbun, and had seen many early AIDS patients
improve after marijuana use.)  NIDA turned him down, explaining that
if he rewrote the proposal to try to study how smoking marijuana HARMS
AIDS patients, then they would seriously consider it.  After holding
back the urge to vomit, he took the hint, rewrote the proposal, they
DID fund it, and his study wasted a bunch of NIH tax money disproving
NIDA's made-up theory that smoking marijuana harms AIDS patients.  And
as a side result he showed that the patients' viral load was reduced
(i.e. they got somewhat better from smoking pot).

There's plenty of not just waste but actual malicious mischief at
NIH that can and should be cut.  Bravo, Mr. Trump.

        John Gilmore

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