Brewing up a Storm

As I write, America’s east coast is picking itself off the floor after Hurricane Isabel, and a mountain has collapsed in Belmullet. In the USA, Isabel killed 23 people (at the latest count) and billions of dollars worth of damage has been done. In Belmullet, nobody died and, although a house and bridges were destroyed, people are already nodding at each other and murmuring that it could have been a lot worse.

Both events remind us that the earth is still our master. Hurricane Isabel unleashed more energy than is contained in all the nuclear weapons stockpiled across the globe. And more besides. No terrorist attack, nor indeed technologically advanced air, land and sea attack, could have done as much damage in such a short space of time.

Meanwhile, the landslide reminds us that what we often take as stable and strong isn’t always. It’s not unique, of course. Coal mines have collapsed and coal-pits have subsided, for example in the Welsh village of Aberfan. And mountains have exploded unexpectedly, like Mount Saint Helen’s in Washington State.

This year, the great heat in France caused similar localised catastrophes in the Alps as high-altitude permafrost melted and the very peaks of the mountains destabilised. Mont Blanc was closed for over a week. It is now thought that hundreds of ski-lifts may be unsafe, since they were driven into the same permafrost that is now no more.

But it’s the sheer unexpectedness of such an event that shocks so much. The probable cause is a combination of a dry summer and the first torrents of autumn. Inevitably, after the rubble has been cleared, someone is going to start pointing a finger and apportioning blame.

Well, there are some things you can’t forecast. It’s one thing to have seismometers on Vesuvius, a hill with form. It’s another to be trying to calculate which Irish mountains might be unstable enough to slip slide away…

True enough. But that hasn’t stopped people making pronouncements and forecasts about equally unpredictable subjects.

By way of example, Micheál Martin has returned to Ireland citing research that shows generally beneficial effects from the ban on workplace smoking in New York. As quoted, he mentioned restaurants, which isn’t actually relevant to pubs. And he was enthusiastic about the experience of visiting pubs where there was no smoking.

It reminds me of the outcomes of his instruction to the Strategic Task Force on Alcohol to give him ‘fact-based recommendations’. They gave him facts alright, but chosen carefully to underpin a restrictive and prohibitionist agenda. Facts such as the beneficial effects of drinking red wine didn’t feature, for example. Neither did the fact that children of moderate drinkers are much less likely to have a problem with alcohol than children of heavy drinkers and of teetotallers alike.

The pending ban is based on the claim that there is a link between passive smoking and cancer. That association is contested, and not just by the tobacco industry.

We are told that policy on alcohol and tobacco is based on scientific research as though all research says the same thing, is value free and reliable. But it isn’t. Often, research, and this is especially true in the health area, is as value laden as advertising.

By way of example, one year ago the eminent journal Science published a study on ecstasy. It came from a leading American University, John Hopkins, and was carried out by scientists led by George Ricaurte.

They reported that E was extremely dangerous and that taking it just once could leave clubbers with irreversible brain damage and trigger the onset of Parkinson’s Disease. Anti-drug crusaders and public health officials spoke of a ‘neurological time bomb’. Many possible links were suggested. Professor Colin Blakemore, who is about to become head of the UK’s Medical Research Council, said it provided further evidence that ecstasy can be toxic to nerve cells…

This month, the researchers are publishing a humiliating retraction in the same journal. They didn’t use E in the research, they used speed. Not their fault – the samples they used came from a laboratory and were mislabelled – but catastrophic in terms of their outcomes.
The shit is starting to hit the fan. It is being pointed out that the publication of the original report came at a time when the US Congress was considering the Anti-Rave Act, under which club owners who knew that ecstasy was being used on their premises could be punished.

The point is this: as Joe Collier, Professor of Medicines Policy in St. George’s Medical School told the Observer, ‘mistakes are made, even by scientists’. Policymakers like Micheál Martin and his advisers – straight people who want to do the right thing, for the most part – need to understand that ‘facts’ are not necessarily ‘facts’, and ‘even’ scientists bring ideologies and biases to their work.