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Note: Only the relevant section of the column is reproduced below. There is considerable debate over the dangers posed by methamphetamine, but no one thinks hundreds of thousands of teenagers and twentysomethings are dying each year from use of the illegal stimulant. Yet that's what you'd conclude if you went by numbers published -- then later retracted -- from a Tennessee anti-meth campaign that continue to be cited by advocates. A site the state's attorneys general produced last year called "Meth is Death" claimed that "one in seven high school students will try meth,"; "99% of first-time meth users are hooked after just the first try"; "only 5% of meth addicts are able to kick it and stay away"; and "the life expectancy of a habitual meth user is only five years." Connect those numbers, as Reason blogger Jacob Sullum did, and you'll arrive at a troubling outcome. The Census Bureau counted more than 20 million Americans in 2004 who were between age 15 and 19. Using the state's numbers, one in seven of those teenagers, or three million, will try meth; 99% of those will get hooked; and 95% of those who are hooked won't be able to kick the habit and thus will die. Mr. Sullum did the math, and concluded: "We are talking about hundreds of thousands of deaths a year." Tennessee officials realized they couldn't verify some of the stats, and last fall, the site was pulled down and replaced by a new site, MethFreeTN.org, that doesn't include the numbers. But you can still see the old site on the Internet Archive. The crux of the numbers problem is that 99% estimate: James W. Kirby, executive director of the Tennessee District Attorneys General Association, says that it should have stated that 99% of meth addicts were hooked from their first use, not that 99% of people who try it get hooked from the first time. "That is a little misleading," Mr. Kirby told me. "It came out as a typo." Still, even though the state changed the Web site, the old stats survive. Just last month, John Carney, a Tennessee district attorney, repeated the stats in an interview with a local newspaper, the Clarksville, Tenn., Leaf-Chronicle. Mr. Carney says he got the stats from a brochure printed when the Meth Is Death site went online. He said he wasn't aware the state no longer stood by the stats. Mr. Kirby of the Tennessee District Attorneys General Association said the stats from Meth Is Death came from MMA Creative, a Cookeville, Tenn., public-relations firm that produced the Web site. Mike McCloud, president and chief executive of the company, told me in an email that they "were gathered from various local and national sources about two years ago. Unfortunately, I can't even point you to some of the sites we researched back then because they don't even exist today." Mr. McCloud added that his local sources were "hard working law enforcement and health-care providers who, working with limited resources and no central clearinghouse for data, did what they could to identify and fight the growing meth problem in our state." But bad data, however well-intentioned, only confuses the problem. The new state Web site significantly dials back its estimate for the percentage of high school students who have tried meth, to 5.6% from the 14% number on the Meth Is Death site. The new number is in line with what other researchers have found. Monitoring the Future, the University of Michigan's annual survey of substance abuse among 50,000 teens in grades 8, 10 and 12, found that 4.5% of 12th graders had tried meth in 2005, down from 8.2% in 1999. About Carl Bialik - Carl, a former technology reporter for the Online Journal, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. In addition to the Numbers Guy, he also co-writes The Daily Fix, a sports column that appears each weekday morning on WSJ.com, and oversees some free-content initiatives at the Online Journal. Carl has a degree in mathematics and physics from Yale University. About This Column - The Numbers Guy examines numbers and statistics in the news, business, politics and health. Some numbers are flat-out wrong, misleading or biased. Others are valid and useful, helping us to make informed decisions. |
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