B.C.'s Iboga Therapy House is following in a decades-old tradition of underground rehab-administering a drug called ibogaine, which has the reported side effect of curbing addiction. But can these activists take their experiment mainstream? The drug rehabilitation facility is an ordinary split-level house in a sleepy residential neighbourhood in a small town on B.C.'s Sunshine Coast. Inside, the many bookshelves contain everything from psychopharmacology textbooks to psychedelic graphic novels. Visitors are welcomed by a small, dark-haired woman named Sandra Karpetas. Though she has no formal training in medicine, she speaks knowledgeably about neurochemistry. [continues 2435 words]
The following is supplied by the BC Chapter of the Campaign for Press and Broadcast Freedom. What's worse: bad science, bad journalism or both? It turns out that last year's infamous "monkey study", which was supposed to show that ecstasy (MDMA) caused symptoms like Parkinson's disease in lab monkeys, was invalid because scientists accidentally gave the monkeys speed, not ecstasy. Maybe this is more a matter of bad science than bad journalism, but it can teach us a thing or two about the concept of a "news story." [continues 313 words]