I’ve been inactive as a blogger for the past few days because I’ve been on the road, first in Toronto at the criminology meetings and now in London at a set of drug policy meetings sponsored by the Beckley Foundation. My sleep cycle is still completely shot, but now that the meetings are over with (my only remaining professional responsibility is a talk on drugs and terrorism scheduled for Thursday afternoon at King’s College, London) I’ll be posting more.
At the drug policy meetings I picked up two aphorisms which I intend to steal shamelessly for the rest of my career. (The ground rules forbid me to name the authors unless/until I get explicit consent.) Though they were said about the drug-policy arena, they have much wider applications.
Does research influence policy? Certainly it does. Especially bad research.
Yes, it would be nice to have evidence-based policy-making. But even if we can’t get that, perhaps we can do away with policy-based evidence-making.