It's easy not to be sympathetic to heroin junkies. They are self-victimizing lifestyle addicts and the Obama administration CDC's efforts to blame Big Pharma for a recreational opioid addiction look ridiculous when the same Big Pharma is now saving the world from COVID-19.

But people addicted to heroin are not the same as those who eat too much cheese. There are limits to how we should let politicians diminish the plight of addicts. 

The science of New York City Mayor Eric Adams is definitely also stuck in 2015, or he frames it through his personal beliefs the way many do, because he repeated a claim that people's brains react to cheese the same way they do heroin or crack cocaine. Hizzoner is a vegan who claims he cured his diabetes and blindness thanks to his magical diet, so the wacky goggles need to be firmly in place when he invokes "studies", especially because the study he thinks he remembers because so many corporate journalists got it wrong said nothing of the kind.

It was just the same spurious method that can claim organic food causes autism; ask people to try and remember what they ate and then catalog any issues they have and write a paper on whatever is statistically significant. It is such a flawed methodology I can show coin flips are not random and have it be statistically significant but it's good enough for a lot of epidemiology papers.

It was such an abuse of the paper the University of Michigan had to debunk all of the claims made by people who used their earlier press release. The animal activist group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine got the paper into lots of journalists who lacked critical thinking and it took off. That doesn't make it science, it makes it a good reason to read non-profit groups like us rather than corporate outlets who will promote anything if it can sell advertising.