Maybe they just hallucinated it.

The RAND Corporation has retracted a study linking Los Angeles pot dispensaries to drops in crime, the Los Angeles Times reports. The problem: RAND hadn’t included data from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The institute tells the Times, referring to RAND researchers:

“They made mistakes,” said Debra Knopman, a Rand vice president and director of the infrastructure, safety and environment division. “What we’re wrestling with is how the mistakes went undetected.”

The report was peer-reviewed, RAND said, and retractions are uncommon:

Rand issues about 300 reports a year, and Knopman said she could recall only one other report that has been withdrawn in the last decade. She said Rand seriously considers all complaints about its research and added, “It’s pretty rare that it leads to a retraction, very rare.”

The Times’s John Hoeffel, who reported today’s development, wrote two weeks ago that RAND had removed the report from its website after it faced fierce criticism:

Warren Robak, a spokesman for the Santa Monica-based think tank, said Tuesday, “As we’ve begun to take a look at the report, we decided it’s best to remove it from circulation until that review is complete.” The study came under intense assault by the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, which has argued in court that crime associated with dispensaries is a key reason the city needs to limit the number. The office called the report’s conclusions “highly suspect and unreliable,” saying that they were based on “faulty assumptions, conjecture, irrelevant data, untested measurements and incomplete results.”

hat tip: Deborah Blum

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