As passionate journalists and authors, we always keep a close eye on developments in the media landscape and science. What we recently learned about a groundbreaking social experiment from Spain has deeply impressed and, at the same time, concerned us. It’s a story that should encourage all of us to think more critically and look more closely when it comes to so-called “scientific” publications.
Imagine a study claiming that cannabis consumption causes the male penis to grow by more than two centimeters. Absurd, right? Yet, precisely this fictional assertion, embedded in a seemingly scientific paper titled “The Perceived Effect of Cannabis Use on Penile Growth in Humans,” managed to be published in several international academic journals. But it was all a hoax: the data, the alleged universities, the authors, and even the conclusions.
Behind this brilliant hoax are we, Carles Tamayo and our team. Our goal: to expose the machinations of “predatory journals.” These are scientific publications that, for a fee, accept articles without any form of review or peer-review. An alarming shortcoming that undermines the foundation of scientific integrity.
The study we invented was riddled with obvious inconsistencies. It contained falsified data from over 10,000 young men from El Palmar de Troya, a small town in Seville with only 3,000 inhabitants. It claimed that daily cannabis use led to an average penile growth of 2.54 centimeters. But that’s not all: we invented universities such as the “Central University of Charlatanry in Cochabamba” and the “University of Independent Gerbils in Siberia”—the latter represented by two fictional rodents, Wilfred and Richmond, who were listed as co-authors. A sentence in the article summed up the absurdity: “The data in this article have been falsified, as our respondents are a figment of our imagination.”
Despite all these obvious errors and clear indications of fraud—even the absurd claim that the effect of cannabis was greater if the drug was paid for with Dragon Ball cards—the article was accepted by six of these “predatory journals” and eventually published in three of them. This is a terrifying testament to how commercial interests can override scientific due diligence.
We meticulously documented the experiment, including in the RTVE program “Futuros Imperfectos” and on Carles Tamayo’s own YouTube channel. All steps of the process were revealed there, from writing the article to its publication. Our goal was clear: to demonstrate how certain journals, claiming to be scientific, actually function as pure business models, accepting any content as long as the fees are paid.
These “predatory journals” pose a serious threat to science and public health. They enable the dissemination of false information under the guise of science, which can then be used to justify pseudoscientific therapies, miracle cures, or even public policies based on fraudulent studies. Carles Tamayo puts it bluntly: “Anyone who has 80 dollars and a technical English paper can publish whatever they want in some of these journals.”
In this endeavor, we were supported by Fernando Cervera, a science communicator who had already developed “Fekomagnetism” in 2014—a fake therapy based on human feces—to demonstrate the extent to which pseudoscience, when technically packaged, can infiltrate supposedly serious circles.
The article on penile growth and cannabis is more than just a joke; it’s a loud wake-up call. We expose how the scientific publication system is exploited by those trying to legitimize false information. This experiment, in the words of its authors, is a tool of “critical pedagogy” that warns us against pseudoscience and underscores the indispensable importance of genuine peer review. It’s time for all of us to sharpen our media literacy and critically question the sources of scientific information.
