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Just a politically-motivated web-only progaganda vehicle
I've spent a substantial amount of time looking into this, and it's my very strong impression that this doesn't qualify as a "journal" in any conventional sense at all. It's a propaganda vehicle sponsored by anti needle-exchange advocates and law-enforcement groups on the political right. I could quote many opinions to say so, but here are two of the most concise and convincing:
- Efforts to undermine the science specific to HIV prevention for injection drug users are becoming increasingly sophisticated. One new and worrisome trend is the creation of internet sites posing as open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals. One such example, funded by the Drug Free America Foundation, contains a review of the research supporting needle exchange program and declares that the "effectiveness of NEPs to reduce HIV among IDUs is overrated;" it further claims that the WHO position on needle exchange programs "is not based on solid evidence." — Canadian Medical Association Journal, 25 March, 2008.
- At the CMA meeting in August, he repeated his assertion: "There has been more research done, and some of it has been questioning of the research that has already taken place and questioning of the methodology of those associated with Insite." When asked to clarify what evidence Mr Clement was referring to, Mr Waddell confirmed it was a commentary published in January 2007 in a non-peer-reviewed journal called The Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice, which receives funding from the US Department of Justice. — National Review of Medicine, 15 September, 2007. ( Emphasis mine )
That "more research" that get-tough-on-drugs conservative health minister Tony Clement mentioned was an opinion piece funded by Canada's RCMP and written by Colin Mangham, the "director of research" for the Drug Prevention Network of Canada. No hypothesis tested, no study design, no controls, no statistical analysis; in fact, no research. Just a poorly written and inadequately conceived argument against a particular Canadian needle exchange program.
Anyone can put up a website, throw a few opinion pieces at it, and call it a journal. And that's exactly what's been done in this case. This purported "journal" is nothing but anti harm-reduction politically-driven propaganda. – OhioStandard (talk) 07:47, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
- Okay, one more, from here:
- It should be pointed out that the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice is funded by the Drug Free America Foundation and is an effort of the Institute on Global Drug Policy. Neither organization is a scientific body. The stated goal of the Institute is outlined clearly on the Drug Free America Foundation web site:
- “The Institute is charged with creating and strengthening international laws that hold drug users and dealers criminally accountable for their actions. It will vigorously promote treaties and agreements that provide clear penalties to individuals who buy, sell or use harmful drugs. … The institute supports efforts to oppose policies based on the concept of harm reduction.”
- The bottom of the "about us" page for this purported online "journal" says, "This project was supported by Grant No. 2005-JL-FX-0128 awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view or opinions on this website are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice." Uh huh. Just another one of Alberto Gonzales' stealthy little disinformation salvos in the U.S. "war on drugs"; just another day with your tax dollars at work. Nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen. – OhioStandard (talk) 08:24, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
- And one last one, a journal-ranking site that speaks to notability, and I'm done. – OhioStandard (talk) 08:46, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
- Just seen this, I added in a critical source I found - should probably add some of these also.--Pontificalibus (talk) 17:06, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
- Thanks for your addition, Pont. I've also added the first quotation I presented above (which user Steinberger discovered first, btw, without my knowledge) to the article, along with the associated ref. I haven't (yet?) done anything with the second or third quotes I presented, though: Anyone who has the time should feel free.
- I do think that second quotation, the one from the National Review of Medicine, could form the basis of a nice new section in this article, btw. The current conservative Canadian government basing their drug policies on a bogus journal seems to me to merit its own section, and I know their are WP:RS that could be included about this in such a section. – OhioStandard (talk) 01:13, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
- Update: I've documented what the third quotation was citing in the article. Still haven't done anything with the second quote from the National Review of Medicine, though. – OhioStandard (talk) 04:00, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
Where on Misplaced Pages is this journal used?
I don't think it is a coincidence that references to an article of this journal was stripped from Needle-exchange programme now after this journal got an article. I don't dare to touch the user Minphies contributions as it could be "edit warring", something I have been blocked for already. But it might be useful for others to know that the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice is cited at Safe injection site and at Harm reduction. In both cases together with other sources of varying credibility. Steinberger (talk) 10:25, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
- Okay, I looked at those two articles and, like user Gabbe, agree the refs there to this "journal" needed to go. I've deleted them; you might like to double-check my work. – OhioStandard (talk) 02:46, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
- In looking at this I followed a broken link from Harm_reduction#Criticism to the web site for the Drug Prevention Network of Canada (DPNC) founded, as our article about him claims, by Conservative Party Canadian politician Randy White. I looked around the DPNC site, a little, trying to find the correct target page for the link, which seems to have just disappeared. I tagged the link, but kept on poking around. In the process I discovered some other things that I think are very interesting indeed. I'll break that out into a new section, though, to follow below. – OhioStandard (talk) 19:45, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
This "journal" a small part of major astroturfing of international drug policy
As I wrote in the section above, user Steinberger's post prompted me to look more closely at our Harm reduction article and at the web site for the Drug Prevention Network of Canada (DPNC). One thing led to another, and I turned up some very interesting results. I'm going to apologize in advance here, for what will necessarily be a very long post.
The first thing I noticed was that the current director of the Drug Free America Foundation (DFAF), Calvina Fay, is listed as an "honorary board member" of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada (DPNC). That caught my interest, because she also appears to be the driving force behind this ostensible "journal" of ours, via two independently-named "divisions" of the Drug Free America Foundation, viz. "Institute on Global Drug Policy" and "International Scientific and Medical Forum on Drug Abuse". The DFAF site doesn't say so, but other sites I've seen name Fay as one of the founders of that organization, of the Drug Free America Foundation, and as one of its principal private funders, along with founders Betty Sembler and husband Mel Sembler.
The discovery that Calvina Fay is on the board of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada (DPNC) seemed the more interesting to me because our own article on her Drug Free Foundation of America (DFAF) currently lists no fewer than six divisions, many of which are cited in our articles as if they were independent organizations. So I began to wonder just how many "divisions" DFAF really has. I decided to satisfy my curiosity and I investigated further. I found a stronger connection between The Drug Prevention Network of Canada (DPNC) and the Drug Free Foundation of America (DFAF). Stronger than the presence of Calvina Fay in the management structures of both, I mean.
That connection consists of yet another apparent division of the Drug Free Foundation of America (DFAF), but this time one that's unavowed. It goes under the name "the Drug Prevention Network of the Americas" (DPNA), and bills itself as "a network of concerned citizens and organizations". One of the five listed duties expected of board members of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada (DPNC) is "To participate with and support the Drug Prevention Network of the Americas". Indeed, this page on the DPNA web site discloses a "partner coalition" with the DPNC.
But guess who owns the domain name for the ostensibly independent organization "Drug Prevention Network of the Americas" (DPNA)? If you're feeling cynical by now you're right to. The Drug Free America Foundation owns the DPNA domain name. So the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, where Calvina Fay is a board member, is charged with supporting the Drug Prevention Network of the Americas. And the domain name for the Drug Prevention Network of the Americas is owned by the Drug Free America Foundation, which Calvina Fay also runs. Indeed, she's listed as the contact e-mail recipient for the dpna.org domain. Big surprise.
( Late-edit update: I just noticed from DFAF's "about us" page that DFAF lists DPNA as one of its six avowed "divisions". – OhioStandard (talk) 18:00, 23 March 2011 (UTC) )
That same link, immediately above, also reports that the Drug Free America Foundation owns around 35 other domains. Now wouldn't it be interesting to know which ones those are? I don't have subscriber access to perform that kind of DNS search, but I bet some friendly editor one at our computing reference desk would, and might be willing to help out anyone who'd be willing to try to answer that question.
I'll also just mention that, despite its regrettable cloak-and-dagger tone, this page might be a good starting place to try to document this whole network of interrelated websites that purport to represent independent organizations, but apparently don't. My guess is that if anyone can devote the substantial time that would be required to sort this interconnected web of "front" or "shill" organizations, that most of them will tie back to with Calvina Fay and Betty Sembler. Note, btw, that the foregoing link is from the page history at Sourcewatch; the current page there about the Drug Free America Foundation is a whitewash copied directly from DFAF's own site that expunges, among other things, Sembler's ties to the George Bush presidency.
The astroturfing strategy that these two champions of the war on drugs, Fay and Sembler, appear to have adopted is actually fairly sophisticated. For example, I've read that when their coercive brainwashing/cultlike drug "treatment" organization for adolescents, Straight, Inc. accumulated too much really horrible press, they renamed it and splintered it into a host of smaller organizations. Indeed, many sites on the web ( but no WP:RS that I saw ) claim that Straight Inc. was just renamed to become our familiar Drug Free America Foundation.
Similarly, they appear to create ostensibly "new" drug-criminalization "organizations" on a whim. These "new" organizations seem, in many or most cases, to be nothing more than just another web site or even a subpage devoted to their same theme of supporting the criminalization principles of the so-called war on drugs. But they do enable the appearance that the same theme is being independently championed by multiple organizations when the fact seems to be that these "organizations" are little more than shills acting on behalf of a single, well-funded group.
Even the web site for Drug Free America Foundation alludes to this strategy of astroturfing through the creation of ostensibly "new" organizations when it says, "On December 1, 2000, Drug Free America Foundation announced the establishment of yet another division..." (emphasis mine).
Now somewhere, probably locked in a file cabinet at the Drug Free America Foundation (DFAF) headquarters, there's bound to be an "organizational chart" that includes both the avowed and unavowed front organizations created to parrot its "war on drugs" theme. Since we don't have access to that, many of our articles about drug policy contain criticism that looks like it originates from multiple independent organizations and sources when that criticism really is properly attributable to just one source: the DFAF.
It might be that researching and documenting that "organizational chart" from the outside would be a more appropriate task for an experienced investigative journalist than a Misplaced Pages editor; there may not have been enough published in WP:RS about this whole web of ostensibly independent "organizations", in other words, for it to be able to be documented on Misplaced Pages. I'm not sure whether that's so or not, actually.
But at the very least, if our articles are going to quote from or cite to one of the multiplicity of organizations that Fay and Sembler appear to be responsible for then I think the connection back to the two of them and to their Drug Free America Foundation should be identified in some appropriate way. – OhioStandard (talk) 00:22, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
- Just noticed the domain name for the "organization" Save our Society from Drugs is also owned by the Drug Free America Foundation, and that "SOS" lists Calvina Fay and Betty Sembler as founders and directors. I've added this information to our article on the Drug Free America Foundation. – OhioStandard (talk) 01:19, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
WP:NOR applies. We should not "look up" domanins in order to make points about any organization - it is up to us to follow what reliable sources report only. Collect (talk) 12:01, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
CMAJ quotation
On 20 March, 2011, I added the following cited quotation to our article:
Also referring to this journal, authors in the Canadian Medical Association Journal wrote,
Efforts to undermine the science specific to HIV prevention for injection drug users are becoming increasingly sophisticated. One new and worrisome trend is the creation of internet sites posing as open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals. One such example, funded by the Drug Free America Foundation, contains a review of the research supporting needle exchange program and declares that the "effectiveness of NEPs to reduce HIV among IDUs is overrated;" it further claims that the WHO position on needle exchange programs "is not based on solid evidence."
On 27 March, user Collect (talk · contribs), who often follows my edits and who had no prior involvement with this article, and with whom I'm currently in contention over an unrelated matter at AN/I, deleted the quote, saying it was a violation of NPOV. Partly because Collect claimed at AN/I that this journal is a reliable source, I restored the quotation today, saying in my edit summary, "Restored a very specific and highly-relevant quotation about this publication from a 'gold-standard' source." Several hours later, also today, Collect edited the quote to expunge the part of the quotation that's struck through below:
Also referring to this journal, authors in the Canadian Medical Association Journal wrote,
Efforts to undermine the science specific to HIV prevention for injection drug users are becoming increasingly sophisticated. One new and worrisome trend is the creation of internet sites posing as open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals. One such example, funded by the Drug Free America Foundation,contains a review of the research supporting needle exchange program and declares that the "effectiveness of NEPs to reduce HIV among IDUs is overrated;"it further claims that the WHO position on needle exchange programs "is not based on solid evidence."
Collect's edit summary for the above was merely, "wp:undue". Please note that this change radically distorts the meaning of the passage from its original context, and that our policy on weight is mostly about not giving minority viewpoints as much emphasis as majority ones.
That policy says, among other things,
- "Neutrality requires that each article or other page in the mainspace fairly represents all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint. Giving due weight and avoiding giving undue weight means that articles should not give minority views as much of or as detailed a description as more widely held views."
Collect is perfectly welcome to try find sources that claim this web site represents a sterling and unbiased example of the highest standards in medical research publishing, and to give due weight in the article to whatever he turns up. Perhaps it's won award after award, the medical equivalent of Pulitzer Prizes, whatever that might be. Given that it appears to receive (almost?) no external cites, I think that's unlikely, but whether he finds some presumably minority view to sing its praises or not, he has no basis for trying to suppress opinions about it that appear in gold-standard publications like the Canadian Medical Association Journal, which has been ranked at number seven by English-speaking physicians, btw, in terms of credibility and respect, from what I read recently.
I've restored the full quote. If Collect reverts that, or otherwise truncates it, I'd appreciate it if other editors who've shown an interest in this article would express their opinions. I will not be debating the question with Collect, however, as I've learned from previous experience that doing so is invariably unproductive. – OhioStandard (talk) 17:58, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
- Only the part of the quote directly related to the journal belongs in the journal article. The huge bulk is an accusation far beyond the journal entirely, and is UNDUE at the least. I did not delete any of the quote which actually dealt with the journal. Collect (talk) 18:14, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
- WP:NPA applies. Collect (talk) 18:15, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
- You're wrong. The whole quotation is obviously about the journal and clearly belongs in the article. Your selective deletion significantly distorted the meaning of the quote. --Crusio (talk) 18:20, 10 April 2011 (UTC)