Our Pledge To The Community

Academic Research

From the start, Bluelight has attracted academic researchers who are interested in understanding drug use practices and patterns. We have many academic researchers that participate in our community as forum members and some who are on staff. Our Drug Studies forum has been going since 2007 and has supported many hundreds of important research projects. The Bluelight research portal is our appeal to academic researchers to consider engaging with Bluelight to assist them with their research.

What we want to do is to continue to support open dialogue between researchers and our community. We believe this is a win-win situation for both parties: researchers get to recruit participants and get critical feedback on their studies, while our community gets to contribute to and access research results, and both get the chance to talk openly through the Bluelight forums.

While it is true that not all researchers play by these rules, we have had mostly successes, and we believe that as we build our connections with the research community, we will be better able to develop constructive, two-way dialogues that enrich both parties.

We have also been able to fund large parts of the running costs of Bluelight through the generous donations of researchers whom we assist. Without their support, our site may not exist at all, or at least not in the familiar, user-friendly form it's taken today. We thus hope to attract further researchers willing to donate so that we may become more self-sufficient and sustainable, and more confident about paying our bills while keeping the forums free of advertisements.

Our Pledge

Our pledge to the Bluelight community is that despite those research links:

• We will never compromise your anonymity
• We will never give researchers access to your personal data
• We will only support researchers who can prove their official academic status
• We will carefully review studies to determine whether their design and content meets our quality standards

Whether you choose to participate in a research project endorsed by Bluelight is always your decision. But you can trust that if the study is supported by us, we have checked it out and it is legitimate. If you still have concerns about researcher legitimacy or integrity, please contact the Drug Studies moderator team or any senior staff member or administrator.

We appreciate your support of Bluelight's research portal and invite any discussion in this thread.

Bluelight Admin