Thread by @davelevitan

Hey sure, I’ll join the pile-on as I read Gladwell’s big pot story (newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…). I’m two paragraphs in and I already went to the report he’s citing and found some bullshit.

Here’s what he writes versus one thing the report says:

Yes, he’s right that they say INHALED cannabis has limited data on this. But oral cannabinoids have an abundance of evidence, and they do in fact help a lot of people with nausea and vomiting. You have to say both things. Gladwell only said one of them, and sort of hid the other.

This piece is just rife with a combination of anecdote and relative stats without the absolute numbers. Oh, the incidence of schizophrenia has doubled since 1993 in “the northern part of Finland?” You mean this country, where almost all of its 5 million people live in the south?

“If we accept this bullshit straw man argument I just pretended to prove, we can move on to this other bullshit straw man argument that I will proceed to also be unable to prove."

This is more a New Yorker complaint, but why can’t you link to the studies you’re citing? Why am I sifting through the entire 2013 volume of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence to try and find this?

I am still looking for that study. Damn it all.

Okay I’ll come back to that.

Here’s another delightful bit of statistical malfeasance. Gladwell’s claim, versus just one quick story I found that quickly adds the relevant context:

Oh good, Gladwell is talking about the gateway effect! This is always fun. Here’s my 2015 story for @factcheckdotorg about this:

factcheck.org/2015/04/is-mar…

Gladwell: studies of twins suggest a gateway effect!

Me, in an actual book with citations and shit: you didn’t look at the OTHER twin study that found something else, dick.

Also, here’s an actual expert who told me all the ways those twin studies could be misinterpreted or misleading:

By the way, if anyone has institutional access to this study so I don’t have to pay 40 bucks to find out how Gladwell has misrepresented it, I would greatly appreciate that.

psychiatrist.com/jcp/article/pa…

O RLY?? The message of THIS book, presumably that began with the working title REEFER MADNESS REBORN, is that we aren’t “in a position” to make any major claims about a complicated topic??????

Aaaand, the piece ends with a bizarre pivot to e-cigarettes and a delicious-sounding menu of edibles at a store in Massachusetts. I’m glad we did this.

I don’t know what the point of this piece is. If it really is “we lack good data on pot,” okay, fine. But why all the fear-mongering stat manipulation then?

I could write an equivalent article with essentially opposite conclusions on its danger/benefit. That’d be dumb too.

Whew, okay, back to the study I couldn’t find. Here’s how Gladwell characterizes its findings, about marijuana/alcohol use and aggression. He seems to have used the exact language from Berenson’s book, which… isn’t right.

The study itself correlated recent (<30 days) substance use with getting into more than 1 fight in the last 12 months. Getting into a fight is NOT the same as being “physically aggressive.” The study does use that language, but its actual data focuses on fights.

The Gladwell version ignores social context. Much like with supposed gateway drug effects, the act of buying weed can put one in situations where things like fights might be more likely — that’s not an effect of the drug itself, and in fact is an argument for legalization.

Also, further context to that study: of more than 12,000 high school students surveyed, almost 35% were involved in at least one fight over the past 12 months — and more than half of those had not used either alcohol or marijuana. So.

Also, my god Gladwell! Read the goddamn study! He clearly just read Berenson’s work and did no actual research of his own. Below are Gladwell version, Berenson version, and the study’s ACTUAL hypothesis. “Not associated” is NOT THE SAME THING as “predict the opposite”!

Considering starting a newsletter where all I do is dunk on something like this every time. I find it both infuriating and soothing.

I can’t get over how bad this tweet is.