Statistics - Do they just make them up? Part Two

Searching for material for my teaching I came across a BBC Radio Four programme A Baby ASBO first broadcast in 2009. About five minutes into the programme a new initiative aimed at Primary School Children called Growing Against Gangs is introduced. The programme ran by an organisation called Gang Resistance Education and Training and is adapted from a similar scheme in the United States. The programme involves police officers delivering lessons to primary school children. In this programme we hear PC Emma Hart "teaching" some young children. She tells the children she is "going to through some facts" with them. She checks that they understand what facts are before telling them:

Most gang members make very little money ... 95% of drug dealers are working for less than the minimum wage you could earn at McDonalds ...

What PC Hart fails to tell the children that her "fact" is based on a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2000 by Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh An Economic Analysis of a Drug Selling Gang's Finances. The paper is based on data collected by Venkatesh on a Chicago gang in the mid 1980s whose activities included dealing crack.  In fact the paper although showing that the rewards for drug dealing were very much concentrated at the higher levels had concluded that average rewards were better than the participants would have gained in legitimate occupations. However these rewards were not sufficiently high as to justify the risks involved in gang activity. The activity could be better explained they argued by gang members hopes of high future earnings (when and if they made it higher up the drug dealing ladder) rather than current earnings.

This research has featured in Levitt's best selling Freakonomics and Venkatesh's Gangleader for a Day and have become generalised both in terms of all drug dealers and all places.  Although I am not a great fan of either book at least reading them meant I could spot the dodgy source being used by PC Hart as having established that the children knew what a fact was then provided them with at best spin, at worse a lie.  The sad news is I only heard it on the radio and was not present to point out to the kids the dangers of trusting what a police officer tells them.  A valuable lesson in Lambeth!

Satire brutally murdered by Dail Mail

From Jonathan Swift to Chris Morris satire has played an important part in literary and political life.  But today the Daily Mail has produced a story that is so beyond satire as to have effectively killed it

I-Dosing: How teenagers are getting 'digitally high' from music they download from internet

By Daniel Bates

Last updated at 5:57 PM on 20th July 2010

They put on their headphones, drape a hood over their head and drift off into the world of ‘digital highs’.

Videos posted on YouTube show a young girl freaking out and leaping up in fear, a teenager shaking violently and a young boy in extreme distress.

This is the world of ‘i-Dosing’, the new craze sweeping the internet in which teenagers used so-called ‘digital drugs’ to change their brains in the same way as real-life narcotics.

They believe the repetitive drone-like music will give them a ‘high’ that takes them out of reality, only legally available and downloadable on the Internet.
The craze has so far been popular among teenagers in the U.S. but given how easily available the videos are, it is just a matter of time before it catches on in Britain.
Those who come up with the ‘doses’ claim different tracks mimic different sensations you can feel by taking drugs such as Ecstasy or smoking cannabis.
The reactions have been partially sceptical but some songs have become wildly popular, receiving nearly half a million hits on YouTube.
Under one called ‘Shroom’, Berecz wrote: ‘just listened to this... at the beginning I began to see some blinking light (while eyes closed), then the pitch went up and I began to feel that Im sinking into my chair...as the pitch went down I began to feel confident, and very relaxed, and I dont want to stand up from my chair and I dont want to say any words...’
Not everyone is taking i-Dosing seriously - some YouTube videos show young adults ‘i-Dosing’ on Neil Diamond and mocking the whole phenomenon.
But there has been such alarm in the U.S. that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has issued a warning to children not to do it.
‘Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places, spokesman Mark Woodward said. He added that parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, since I-dosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs. ‘So that's why we want parents to be aware of what sites their kids are visiting and not just dismiss this as something harmless on the computer.
‘If you want to reach these kids, save these kids and keep these kids safe, parents have to be aware. They've got to take action.’ He added that another concern is that many of these I-dosing sites lure visitors to actual drug and drug paraphernalia sites.
Schools in the Mustang area recently sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several high school students reported having physiological effects after trying one of these digital downloads. ‘We had never come across anything like this and anything that is going to cause these physiological effects in a student, that causes us concern,’ said Shannon Rigsby, Mustang Public Schools Communication Officer.

It goes on (and on) - full story here

On a lighter note earlier this week the Poke revealed the Daily Mail's secret editorial formula.

Police Drug Training Video 1960s

Vintage training film from the early days of the war on drugs. It is interesting to note how some of the scare tactics are used - super strength hash then and super strength skunk now.



As I posted this I was redirected to a page which has google adverts - which interestingly were for drug rehab providers. I checked out the first one and was not unsurprised to find their 'information' on cannabis was as ill informed as this film. But like the film both the police and the treatment industry have done very well out of misinformation and ill founded scare stories about illicit drugs.

Rant over!!


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Safer Alcohol - A dangerous drug to be banned

I was up in London this week for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Annual Eve Saville Lecture given by Professor David Nutt. David who chairs the Home Office's Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) spoke on Estimating drug harms: a risky business.



David has compared the dangers of (high risk) alcohol and (low risk) Ecstasy to highlighted the irrationality of the current system. Last year he got into trouble for pointing out the fact that horse ridding was more dangerous than taking Ecstasy. With colleagues he produced the chart below comparing the harms of both legal and illegal drugs.

What I found really interesting was an aside he made that he was sure he could create an alcohol substitute that had all the "positive" attributes of alcohol but had far less harmful effects. However such a 'drug' would be, he felt, banned under the Misuse of Drugs Act. I will follow up this madness and find out exactly why and the role of the Alcohol Industry in such decision making.