David S. Fink

Cannabis Legalization and Opioid Use Disorder in Veterans Health Administration Patients This cohort study examines changes in opioid use disorder prevalence associated with medical and recreational cannabis law enactment among veterans treated at the Veterans Health Administration and wh...

Our latest publications examining the relationship between cannabis legalization and opioid use disorder in VA patients published in @jamahealthforum.bsky.social

Again, contradictory results, make it hard to draw conclusions about legalization and opioid outcomes

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Let’s just say a 5% false positive rate, which would be pretty low I imagine…could you imagine being one of those people a computer looks at and says will die?

These two issues seems totally different to me. Sure, more money for science can do a lot of good, it can pay for replication research, it can create different incentive structures to allow more patience, but it can’t fix challenges of interdisciplinary conflicts or measurement. At least to me.

That’s actually not why. The reason why is that science is really hard. There are times when biologists work in one unit of measurement and chemists use different measures. In my field, epidemiologists and economists call the same method something totally different. Interdisciplinary science is hard

I’m having trouble seeing the link between this comment and the discussion on measurement challenges and identifying meaningful findings versus “significant” findings from large data sets.

How do we overcome this problem? Anyone who has worked with administrative data knows that this is real. We often find small results that are very precise. But, even a small result on a population level could affect millions of people, so it isn’t unimportant if true. So what do we do?

a picture of a man whispering into George W. Bush's ear. Bush looks surprised. "Sir, a second signal chat has just been leaked."

Just putting this here so we can use it when it happens.

One of the only NECESSARY components of an addiction and any mental health disorder for that matter is functional impairment, which isn’t a given for billionaires or uber-wealthy because their wealth actually insulates them from that impairment.

They are using the wrong term for what they are trying to communicate. Most would call it standardization, right? It’s the same as plotting the avg price of milk over the past 50 years in 2025 dollars to account for inflation. I assume the authors are attempting to account for demographic shifts.

On some personal news, I’ll be starting on Monday as an assistant professor in the Dept of Internal Medicine at Yale. Excited about starting in this role even though it can be hard to celebrate personal achievements at a time when our whole profession is under attack.

Not exactly. I worked for the VA as a researcher from 2007-2010, then the US Army and National Guard. Now I’m at Yale and have VA approval to work with data for research.

The VA EHR is an amazing data source for understand what is really happening in the patient populations. Like any administrative dataset, it has its downsides (patients aren’t directly asked about use too), but there is a lot of great work that can be done in these data.

This is the problem with the science of policy making, we don’t do enough work with the policy makers and the public to learn how to scale it up. Americans have been taught that “hand outs” are bad-lazy scamming people get hand outs. This is what needs to be changed. Cost effectiveness isn’t enough

Complex systems are incredibly difficult to understand and even more challenging to predict. Feedback loops aren’t always obvious, threshold effects aren’t known before hand. It would have been hard to predict had they tried to model this, and I feel confident they didn’t even try

Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger | CNN Dr. Ardem Patapoutian says he watches “with deep sadness as the United States’ remarkable scientific enterprise, which took generations of hard work and national investment to build, faces a concerted...

Published an op-ed for @cnn.com: “Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger.”
A personal reflection on what’s at stake as science funding gets slashed. I’d be grateful if you could amplify both in and beyond the science world.
www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/h...

The real question: would you rather be an American Idiot or a 21st Century Digital Boy?

Funny, I do the same thing. With the sorting algorithms, I live in a liberal bubble, so I’ve noticed going to the local news comments I can get a tap on the range of view pointe and I’ve definitely noticed the same thing.

Not too long ago, I got in a discussion with a biologists who said people are over reviewing papers. In his words, the goal of peer review is to determine if the paper advances the science enough to merit publication, which should be done in about a 2 paragraph response. I see SOME merit in this

Very nice paper! Like most things, we agree!

There is also an alternative, they don’t put out a call, but they actually pay researchers to ask a specific question they are interested in, would that be “okay”? Or do you think that leads to poor research too?

Can I agree and disagree. There is actually a reasonable case for asking scientists to use data, particularly for descriptive work. For example, if I’m collecting data to study adolescent drug use and I created a good representative data set, why not encourage people to publish these statistics?

On a personal levels, I’m interested in whether the k99s are being rolled over to the R00 phase. Trying to get that answer from my PO

I was explaining why the money from the government have nothing to do with the cost of tuition. Most federal funds the university received goes to funding research, not teaching. They are complete different revenue streams. If I the funding went to paying profs, then it would be tied to tuition

This funds research. Professors at universities need to cover their salary. They do this through research, teaching, clinical care or some combination. I don’t teach nor do clinical care, so my salary is 100% covered by research grants and I do research 100% of the time. Hope this helps. Pls ask ?

Yes, sorry, that was one of my reasons for the email too because all funding for travel and such has been frozen at my university. I was told the executive committee was already discussing how to handle the issue. I hope they take the hit and provide remote access at normal cost of registration

I wouldn’t travel to the US right now, it just isn’t worth it. I already sent an email to @societyforepi.bsky.social to bring up the issue of how to have a remote conference to allow non-US folks to participate. It just isn’t worth the risk 😔

There is actually really no evidence of a link between social media and mental health overall. There is this narrative that social media is a plague on our society, and maybe it is, but the evidence doesn’t show it in mental health outcomes. Some evidence on the extremes, but not average user

Many of us are confused. We kept being told they were doing a cost/benefit analysis to figure out the best approach and then they decided to roll over. This will have long term effects on this university and all universities that won’t be good.

Precisely and what part of that explanation required a discussion of the school’s endowment? None. The point is that the discussion about endowments is a red herring (“but they have all this money, it will be business as usual”). Fighting will require sacrifice and it’s the right thing to do

Cool. Glad to hear it. It’s complicated and pretending it’s no big deal and easy solution, turn to endowments is an oversimplication of a much bigger problem. They still didn’t make the right choice, but anyone who is sure they know the right choice is wrong too. Be well