I'm not the most active visitor to this site, so excuse me if this has already been discussed, but I think it would be great if there was a forum (or subforum) dedicated to dis/proving various drug related related myths. The main goal of it would be to prevent the spread of misinformation, whether you heard it from anti/pro drug groups, your friend or Crazy Joe. Specifically in relation to substance use, there seems to be a culture of relying solely on anecdotal evidence. I think this is great for talking about experiences but falls down when people start giving advice based on something which isn't true. There even seems to be a decent sized group of people that lives in fear of aluminium! (one for the proposed forum haha! But google it if you think you can get Alzheimer's from it.)

The way I thought it should work is as follows:
1. A member puts forward something dubious. If they want to vouch whether it's true or not they can start argue it there.

2. Other members can then enter the debate but only on the condition that their information is referenced to a proper source.

3. Once everyone/a moderator is satisfied the myth can be busted/confirmed. Depending on how things go we might want to sticky and lock the thread, but there shouldn't be any problem with re-debating myths if new information becomes available. If scientists kicked up a fuss every time they were corrected we wouldn't have more than 33 elements on the periodic table!

What do you guys think? People already ask about these things in the more general forums and sometimes when threads get off topic AFAIK. This way they would all be in one place and the same questions won't be perpetually re-asked. More importantly, false information won't get spread around as much. I think it would be great for new members as well who might have only heard anecdotal evidence.

Thanks for reading, and again, if this has already been on here please pity the fool... and show me the reference

Boy, do I have egg on my face! After reading it I still don't feel satisfied though. The issue that I have with that thread is that there is still a fair amount of unreferenced information. It's also limited by being a single thread. You can't click onto it and straight away go to the bit about mushrooms or strychnine in LSD.

not a bad idea in general though I think it would be better suited for the wiki, i.e. start a thread or continue with the existing one, collecting all the myths and their debunking, then one by one start putting them in the wiki with references etc.

It would be really awesome if you would take the lead on that and start a wiki page, Igel!
I can see such a page being referenced a lot

I should have a bit of time this weekend to get it going. I'll have a good trawl and try to index as many as I can at least but I would like to get a decent start on it. ~watch this space

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li...ions_about_illegal_drugs
would that serve as a decent start?