Hi Ella,
I think that researchers probably did plan for the study and likely even consulted with their CABs but, they did fail in researching Thailand’s drug laws and the implications that it could have on their research plan and with their stakeholders. In this case, there was a lack of effective communication (the importance of which I stress at my site all the time) between researchers/coordinators, stakeholders, and possibly even participants themselves which had the potential to derail all of the work that was done to launch BTS. It seems that stakeholders did not trust the legitimacy of the results because they were skeptical of the research team’s ethics as opposed to the results themselves being false. Either way, there is definitely room for improvement in this case!
