Pubdate: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON) Copyright: 2008 The Ottawa Citizen Contact: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/letters.html Website: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326 Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Supervised Injection Sites) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/insite DENYING THE DATA Reports that RCMP in Vancouver tried to discredit Insite, the city's supervised-injection site, by commissioning a study that undermines it, is the latest evidence of a trend that is alarming scientists and should worry the rest of us, too. Last week, 85 Canadian scientists, including those who contributed to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called on Canadian political leaders to end the creeping "mistreatment" of science. In Canada, scientists have accused the Harper government of "blatantly" suppressing and distorting science for political reasons. They cite both the "muzzling" of Environment Canada scientists from talking about climate change and the misrepresentation of reports on Insite. Drug policy is perhaps the most obvious area in which politicians try to deny or muddy the data. Dozens of peer-reviewed research studies point to the public health benefits of safe injection sites, but because safe injection sites supposedly symbolize (albeit wrongly) a "soft-on-crime" philosophy, politicians try to pretend that the data don't exist. As for climate change, no one should have been surprised when scientists in a number of countries complained that government officials were giving them grief. If political leaders had allowed scientists at NASA and other places to speak out freely about the reality of climate change, these political leaders would then have been expected to do something about it. And that would have been inconvenient. Now it's true that scientists have been known to harbour political agendas of their own, but peer-reviewed research is supposed to screen those out. What's left are the empirical facts, and it's an ugly thing when non-scientists step in and politicize them. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin