You may have seen claims by the Victorian Police Union that "crime has increased around the North Richmond safe injecting facility". Here is how they come up with that conclusion. /1
The major source of an "increase in crime" comes from a survey they designed and sent to "detective and uniform members stationed within the Yarra PSA" - how many, and who, hasn't been publicly disclosed. Here are how they describe their results. /2 tpav.org.au/news/journals/…
The issue with this of course is it relies on police being able to judge purely from day-to-day experience whether crime has increased. Human is flawed at the best of times. Not to mention, it's not clear whether these officers actually worked near the safe injecting facility. /3
Alright, let's provide a bit of context to this article on Colorado - because these are stats you commonly see being cited by anti-legalisation folks! /1 abc.net.au/news/2019-06-0…
Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS) is totally a thing. We don't have any good numbers on prevalence, but it's generally considered "rare" or "very rare" and only an issue if you are a heavy, daily user of cannabis ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29327809 /2
Will legalisation increase ED visits for CHS? Absolutely. But how much of this is because of increased prevalence, and how much is because cannabis use is de-stigmatised through changes in law? There is no evidence legalisation has made CHS more common. /3
Quickie thread: You are likely to see certain anti sex industry activists start putting forward arguments in favour of the Nordic Model, two rules of thumb: (i) Check the footnotes; (ii) Remember basic guides to academic references from first year university /1
Nordic Model advocates will link to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women in Australia's document "Demand Change: Understanding the Nordic Approach to Prostitution" - if a student submitted this in one of my classes, they would fail. catwa.org.au/wp-content/upl… /2
Of the 43 references in the report, only six are academic papers in peer reviewed journals (green) + 12 were gov reports (yellow) - the rest are websites, books and op-eds (blue) or deliberately misleading "journals" and "papers" which aren't what they seem (red) /3 #SpringSt