I have been forced to say to myself, I must eat my words. I've certainly made factual mistakes and then corrected them. I think that's okay; I'd never write critically about someone just because they said something wrong. It only gets interesting when someone's whole approach to being right or wrong seems broken — when they misuse evidence systematically.
I think the benefits of medical marijuana are often overstated, because medical marijuana attracts attention from people outside the mainstream and because medical marijuana is often a cover for talking about legalisation. But there are bigger fish to fry here than a few marijuana activists over-egging things in a blog post. Recreational drug use is risky, but prohibition is one of the most harmful and least evidence-based areas in the whole of policy. Clumsy prohibition of drugs has created health and criminal harms, both locally and globally, on a huge scale, without clear evidence of benefits to counteract those harms. So if I was going to get cross about people misusing evidence on cannabis, I'd start with the people who ignore the unintended consequences of their policy choices: imprisoning low-level dealers, ruining lives disproportionately, and putting production and distribution into the hands of criminals who inevitably use violence to enforce financial contracts businesses that live outside conventional legal remedies.
When you write critically about misuse of science, people can get angry. I've been sued, smeared, threatened, lied about, all the usual stuff. I'm not sure it's right to say that it feels like heat, once you've been around the track a few times these things start to feel pretty normal. Or rather, the abuse comes to feel like it's part of your professional life, rather than your personal emotional landscape. In the same way, when you're a doctor, sometimes you get, say, a drunk patient shouting at you. That's just part of the job. At the same time you have to be careful not to ignore all criticism. Martin Amis says you need a bulletproof jacket, but just before the bullets hit, take a quick look at what's written on the outside of them, in case it's useful. That's good advice.
My heart constantly leads my head. Science is an approach to specific technical
problems, like "how do you know if this pill works?" Science is not a personal disposition, a character trait, or an emotional stance.
I don't believe in fairies but I'm soppy as anything about real life. As a doctor I've been, I hope, a helpful bystander to some of the biggest moments in strangers' lives: births, deaths, the best and worst news from a scan. People are the miracle. When we love each other and do the right thing, especially when it's difficult, we are amazing.
