CRACK CLAIMS NET COMPLAINT

In Dr. Louis Pagliaro's world view, he's a modern-day Galileo in an epic
battle against the flat-Earth forces of academic thought control.

To the public school board and some of his fellow academics, he's just a
pain-in-the-neck professor who won't shut up.

You may remember the name. Pagliaro last made headlines back in March with
his controversial (and widely disputed) claim that crack cocaine use in
Edmonton high schools had hit "epidemic" levels.

Pagliaro, associate director of the U of A's substance abusology research
office, insisted he had evidence from more than 250 interviews - teachers,
cops, students, parents - to suggest crack is easy to get and widely used
in high schools. Now, one of his fellow profs is trying to get Pagliaro to
eat those words. Back in June Dr. Roger Smith, U of A vice-president of
research, filed a formal complaint against Pagliaro with vice-president of
academics Dr. Doug Owram. Among other things, Smith suggested Pagliaro's
media comments about crack use might have violated U of A rules on "honesty
and ... scientific practice" in academic research.

And what does that mean? Smith won't say. Neither will Owram. The only one
who's talking about the complaint against Pagliaro is Pagliaro himself.

"They're trying to stifle my freedom of speech," he said yesterday. "I
recall how people were being burned at the stake hundreds of years ago
because they said the Earth wasn't flat or that it wasn't the centre of the
universe.

"I'm saying things that are tough, that may seem ugly, and people want to
hide from the truth. I stand by what I've said." This isn't a simple matter
of academics trading insults; according to the U of A rules for academic
conduct Pagliaro could lose his job over this one.

In his complaint, Smith quotes an interview Pagliaro did with CHED radio in
late March about how many Edmonton high school students are using crack.

"The reason I can't tell you whether it's one, 10 or 50 schools ... is
because the data that we have, if I were to make an extrapolation from it
... it would be biased," says Pagliaro in the interview transcript.

But Pagliaro did draw broad conclusions from his "data" when he said that
crack use was widespread in Edmonton high schools. He also claimed publicly
that crack use was causing a spike in student violence, high-risk sex among
teens and lower academic achievement. Edmonton Public Schools was quick to
respond in March, dismissing Pagliaro's crack claims as bogus. The board
insisted that, after consulting school principals and Edmonton Police
Service officers assigned to patrol the schools, they found no evidence of
a crack problem.

"If anything, the incidence of (drug use) has gone down," said public
school superintendent Emery Dosdall. "We consulted with (the Alberta
Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission)," said board spokesman Victor Tanti. "We
talked to police. We're convinced his claims are unfounded. Eventually we
had to stop responding to media queries about (Pagliaro's claims), because
we just ended up validating them by answering them." Pagliaro, who's made
controversial allegations in the past of widespread drug use among cops and
airline pilots, freely admits his 250 research interviews don't amount to a
statistical finger-pointing at a wave of teen crack use.

His sources were never formally interviewed, never asked to fill out
questionnaires. The bulk of their information is "anecdotal," he said, and
only half of it is first-hand. He estimates only 20% of the sources were
high-school students at the time they spoke about crack use.

The academic assigned by Owram to investigate Smith's complaints was Dr.
Peter Dixon, one of Pagliaro's colleagues at the Department of Psychology.
He advised Owram last month to dismiss Smith's complaints.

Owram agreed to drop one of them, but insisted on continuing an inquiry
into the claim that Pagliaro had violated academic standards of "honesty
and ... scientific practice." Owram won't say when that inquiry might wrap up.

That, said Pagliaro, is proof enough that his bosses are trying to shut him
up. "They have nothing on me."