I had an argument with an old friend a bit ago over the efficacy and possible nth-order effects of publicly-funded "safe shoot-up sites" for drug addicts. my po

I had an argument with an old friend a bit ago over the efficacy and possible nth-order effects of publicly-funded "safe shoot-up sites" for drug addicts. my point was that lots of progressive liberal ideas about policy come from a place of feelings about what the "morally right" thing to is ("give homeless addicts a place to safely use drugs, to prevent spread of disease etc."), while not necessarily thinking through possible nth-order effects that could result from such policy decisions, specifically with regards to factors of human incentives and motivations ("if you provide a taxpayer-funded safe drug use facility, how will this affect inherently dangerous & self-destructive intravenous drug use in the long term? decrease it, keep it roughly the same, or increase it?"). as a means of arguing his position ("safe shoot-up facilities are good and effective"), he referred me to a nearly decade-old study that was done over the course of three years, and to him, that was slam dunk proof that his position was the better one. I pointed out the questionable research methods ("drug dealers in the area didn't report higher sales in the three years after opening the facility"), the length of the study (three years), and the time that has passed since the study (an additional seven years), and asked if maybe this was cause for at least further investigation, but to him, The Science Was Settled, someone did a research project and published the results in some journal, so That's That, Everything Is Good, Confirmed. I want to stress here that in this instance I may still be fully in the wrong and he may in fact be correct with regards to our assessments of the overall situation—my point is merely that my friend took the mere existence of a research paper in a journal with findings that affirmed his beliefs as if it were Gospel, because it's a Study in a Scientific Journal, you see. never mind that social sciences are far more fuzzy than hard sciences, never mind the methods used in the study, never mind following up and seeing if anything changed in seven years. no, a Study in a Journal asserted that his Beliefs were Correct, so that might as well be a Science stone tablet with Science written on it that some Scientists were directly told by Science God from Science Heaven to write. this friend is, of course, an atheist, basically an anti-theist really, and the degree of Faith he places in the Gospel of Science (even Social Science!!!) being comparable to that which adherents to conventional religion place upon their holy books remains completely lost on him. I don't think this is a particularly uncommon way of thinking these days.