Why did Adam Zivo afford anonymity to advocates doing advocacy?
Zivo claims academic Julian Somers was hit with a 'retaliatory' campaign for speaking out against safe supply. But he's confusing retaliation with critique.
Earlier this week, Adam Zivo, whose recent hits include “No, the real crime stats are the vibes we felt along the way,” published in the National Post an unfortunate 10,000-word collection of the same bad-faith critiques of safe supply we’ve been increasingly seeing over the last year or so. And it’s accordingly Not Great.
One of the first things that struck me while reading the piece was: who gets granted anonymity? Victims of violence and vulnerable people like precarious renters or workers speaking out, absolutely. Whistleblowers, definitely. Private people with concerns about their personal healthcare issues, sure. Political backbenchers criticizing their own party, I guess. Party insiders “leaking” a story to advance their own political careers, unfortunately.
Advocates doing advocacy? No. Absolutely not.
Yet, “Dr. Green” is just one of those people in Zivo’s piece. Zivo named his sources after colours to protect their identity, and Green is described as “a B.C.-based addictions physician with experience in drug policy advocacy.”
Green is among the many “vulnerable” individuals Zivo is protecting in his article over “concerns about the retaliation they might experience if connected to either this story or [his] future reporting on Canada’s failing drug policies.”
“As addiction physicians are particularly vulnerable, their pseudonyms have been made gender-neutral,” Zivo writes.
He gives the example of Julian Somers, an SFU professor and director of the university’s Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction with a track record for, according to one co-author, misrepresenting his own work.
In 2022, he was among those commissioned to conduct a rapid review of safer supply research for the Alberta government. According to Zivo, near the end of his National Post piece, the review found “no credible evidence that safer supply works.”
The review attracted plenty of criticism from the research community, including some of those whose research Somers dismissed in his review—criticism labelled by Zivo as a “retaliatory campaign.”
An assessment of the review by the BC Centre on Substance Use found it was of “critically low quality,” citing eight particular flaws.
The assessment: 1) Notes the review only searched one database of research, where best practices are to search at least three. 2) Critiques the rationale for which studies it included and the fact that it omitted any previous systematic reviews of the literature. 3) Notes vague eligibility criteria for inclusion in the review and notes that it specifically left out a number of valuable studies on the matter. 4) Notes the review isn’t peer reviewed and wasn’t even made available for subsequent review.
That’s just half of the critiques the group itemized in their list.
Zivo, however, dismisses the entire critique with two points of his own: he claims the assessment was made while citing “a research paper which suggested the exact opposite.” The said research paper, in fact, isn’t a research paper. It’s a paper with the riveting title “Updating search strategies for systematic reviews using EndNote.”
Following their list of eight criticisms, the assessment states: “Last but not least, the search strategy has not been updated after the initial search was done, limiting publications to Jan 15, 2022. This contradicts the recommended best practices that encourage rerunning or updating the search before submission for publication.”
The article they cite to support this, which Zivo claims contradicts the assessment’s above statement, is quite literally a step-by-step manual for how to do the thing they’re saying should be done but which the Alberta review did not do.
I keep returning to the paper Zivo claims contradicts the critique, thinking I must have missed something, but… no? No. No! No.
Zivo further states the BCCSU assessment raised the “considerable body of evidence” behind safe supply but that the group “failed to provide any details as to what, exactly, was missing,” adding that he searched a list of 173 BCCSU-affiliated publications and didn’t find what body of evidence they were talking about.
But Zivo might have saved himself some time by looking at the three examples they gave not of individual studies but of reviews of several studies.
This includes Does heroin-assisted treatment reduce crime? A review of randomized-controlled trials, which, in 2021, looked at 10 studies with a combined 2,427 participants and found that “all trials found significantly reduced criminal activity among HAT participants, and four found significantly larger reductions for HAT compared to control condition”; Evidence on the Effectiveness of Heroin-Assisted Treatment, which, in 2018, looked at 10 studies in seven countries over nearly four decades and found that “the evidence for the effectiveness of HAT relative to oral methadone treatment is markedly consistent across RCTs regarding the primary outcomes of treatment retention and illicit heroin use” (p. 58); and Heroin maintenance for chronic heroin‐dependent individuals, which, in 2011, looked at eight studies with a combined 2,007 participants and found heroin prescriptions alongside a flexible methadone prescription added value for “long‐term, treatment refractory opioid users, to reach a decrease in the use of illicit substances, involvement in criminal activity and incarceration, a possible reduction in mortality; and an increase in retention in treatment.”
The assessment also noted four examples of studies that came out after Jan. 15, 2022—the date at which the Alberta review stopped searching for research after failing to re-run their search before publication. I won’t detail them here because you get the point, but you can find them on page 8 here.
Zivo’s second point to dismiss the critique is that about half of the signatories of the researchers who signed a letter critiquing the Alberta review were researchers behind some of the studies “critiqued” by the review without declaring as much. And on the face of it that might seem like a bad conflict of interest. But this isn’t some opaque process in which you just have to take their word. It’s a demonstration of the Alberta review’s shortcomings that is clearly laid out and easily dissectible—something Zivo tried, without much success, to do.
And in the case of Somers’ attempted presentation of the findings to a conference last year, Zivo depicts the BCCSU reaching out to the said conference (he doesn’t say which conference or whether or not he was, indeed, disinvited from the conference) as among the worst excesses of cancel culture, an intimidation campaign against Somers. But when the BCCSU told the conference of the “critically low quality” of the review and suggested it maybe shouldn’t be platformed at a conference, the conference organizers could have disagreed. They could have looked at the evidence and still invited him if they found the review had merit.
Zivo, as is common among opponents of The Woke Mob, paints critique as bullying and harassment. It’s true that online discourse is toxic—consider the literal threats and derogatory, racist, sexist comments against women in journalism like Erica Ifill and Rachel Gilmore by the right or JK Rowling siccing her transphobic following on the trans YouTuber Jesse Gender. But a letter laying out deficiencies in a person’s work quite simply is not even remotely that.
But it’s true that safe supply advocates are angry—and understandably so.
I don’t think anybody is saying abstinence isn’t right for anybody. People for whom abstinence-based treatment works should absolutely have access to that form of treatment—albeit, it should be far more regulated than it is, something an all-party committee in the BC legislature agreed with.
But when people like Zivo make disparaging claims that aren’t always backed up by evidence or are made without context about safe supply, a measure that could well save hundreds or thousands of lives, not to mention the stabilizing effect it has on those lives, it’s understandable that those who have a front-row seat to the consequences of those attitudes—people who work and live in the Downtown Eastside—are upset.
Zivo claims recovery advocates are scared to speak out because they’re afraid of retaliation. But the “retaliation” Zivo describes is quite literally people challenging the position put forward by Somers by listing a set of deficiencies in his work and suggesting that maybe that work—which, again, wasn’t peer reviewed—isn’t fit to be given a platform at a conference. And the position he’s put forward is one that could be deadly in its consequences.
So it’s understandable that people will be upset by it.
I’m already almost 1,400 words into this newsletter and running out of room, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of Zivo’s piece. I’d like to dig further into his article and fact-check it more deeply, but before I get into it, I’m interested to hear from you on whether that’s something you’d like to see, or if I should just move on. Feel free to reply to this email and let me know what you think.
Also, an announcement! I have a similar project that should be coming out very shortly that I’m really excited about. This one is in video format, and I’ll share a YouTube link to that when it’s public. In general, I don’t want to keep this work from being seen by most people, but I do want to acknowledge that I’ve had a handful of paid subscribers sign up for this newsletter, which is beyond amazing to me. I will be sending a link to the video out to paid subscribers early. I don’t know how much of a benefit that is—if it is one at all—but as I’ve mentioned, I don’t want to put work behind a paywall. So I’m looking for ways to provide benefits without limiting who can see this work. If you have ideas, I’m happy to hear them!
So watch out for that!
And one last thing, I just wanted to share my first piece for The Tyee earlier this week. I was invited to write about a Comox Valley project called Walk With Me, and I was really grateful for that. You can find that story here.
Good read.