Personal experience vs science

[Horizon88]

I have been using this site for a long time and recently became a member so I could ask a harm reduction question. After reading through many threads I have made a couple of observations that I think are important to talk about.

There is a lot of very useful information on this site and it has helped me through a few tough situations. There is also a great deal of information that is flat out wrong. I have a doctorate in pharmacy so I have a pretty in-depth knowledge on many of the issues surrounding harm reduction and medications, which can often be extended to illicit drugs. It concerns me that so many people try to provide insight and information based largely on personal experience and many times not rooted in proper pharmacology and evidence. There is so much variation in response from person to person, that kind of data is not very reliable. Like I said, this is not meant to be disrespectful, I myself have greatly benefited from this site. However, being educated in the subject matter helps me filter out bad advice very quickly and it worries me to think about other people following bad advice. I am just wondering if there is a way you control the information (besides moderators who sometimes fall into the same problems)? What are you're thoughts on this?

 

[sekio]

Bluelight doesn't have a central clearinghouse for all posts, nor is there anything preventing someone from posting outright harmful advice. The large flow of traffic to this site means that erroneous or dangerous bits of information are usually corrected quite quickly by someone knowledgeable in the field. An open community like Bluelight also means that sharing high-quality, peer reviewed research information is easier than ever. That indirectly means that it's possible for almost everyone to verify claims people make, assuming they can find the PubMed reference.

Most of the drug information on Bluelight is actually in the form of citations or links to research papers/articles. There's still the occasional individual who comes with an old-wives-tale involving drugs, but those usually get debunked pretty rapidly.

We also encourage people here to err on the side of caution, fail-safe instead of fail-deadly, and the community sort of reflects that. There are a significant fraction of BL users who are medical professionals or otherwise highly educated on drugs. Everyone encourages each other here to be safe taking drugs, and recklessness is frowned upon, so it seems so far that BL doesn't have the type of serious problems that would keep doctors up at night. If there's no obtainable data on, say, combinig drug X with drug Z, I'd be willing to bet most posters would advise you to be very cautious or not take it at all. And if there is data, chances are that someone will find some journal articles or reproduce the relevant information in a thread here for all to see.

BL is actually surprisingly effective for a community run almost entirely by volunteers. I think part of it is that any communities that encourage recklessness tend to get... well, their member numbers drop over time. BL on the other hand is specifically here to promote harm reduction, and as such we have a good idea of what is harmful vs what isn't.

 

[Tranced]

I have been using this site for a long time and recently became a member so I could ask a harm reduction question. After reading through many threads I have made a couple of observations that I think are important to talk about.

There is a lot of very useful information on this site and it has helped me through a few tough situations. There is also a great deal of information that is flat out wrong. I have a doctorate in pharmacy so I have a pretty in-depth knowledge on many of the issues surrounding harm reduction and medications, which can often be extended to illicit drugs. It concerns me that so many people try to provide insight and information based largely on personal experience and many times not rooted in proper pharmacology and evidence. There is so much variation in response from person to person, that kind of data is not very reliable. Like I said, this is not meant to be disrespectful, I myself have greatly benefited from this site. However, being educated in the subject matter helps me filter out bad advice very quickly and it worries me to think about other people following bad advice. I am just wondering if there is a way you control the information (besides moderators who sometimes fall into the same problems)? What are you're thoughts on this?

Due to the nature of illegal drugs, there isn't as much available evidence as we'd probably like. Also, yes, a lot of the users are not medical professionals, so we can only offer the information that we know (which does often filter down from more knowledge users).

If you would prefer that there were more medical professionals posting evidenced based information on bluelight, then I can only suggest that you start posting on a regular basis and contributing said information yourself.

That way, if you see something you don't like, you can refute it, or answer questions citing sources and help to clean up and verify the information currently available.

It is better that we have people posting what they know from experience, rather than waiting for the medical community to research the drugs and/or assist on forums such as this.