Thursday, December 21, 2006

Stretching it

Reading about the proposed ban on party pills on the front page of the DomPost I learn that they are used by one in five New Zealanders.

Oh really. That's over 800,000 people. The population aged 15-29 is only 813,618. Sure, there will be people older than that (and a few younger) using party pills but I figure the concentration of use will be in that age group.

Where did these figures come from? Let's see. Massey University researchers.

The survey consisted of a random national household sample of 2,010 people aged 13-45 years old collected using the Centre for Social and Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation (SHORE) and Whariki’s in-house computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) system.

Prevalence and patterns of use
One in five (20.3%; 18.4-22.3) of the sample had ever tried legal party pills, and one in seven (15.3%; 13.6-17.1) had used legal party pills in the preceding 12 months. Levels of last year use of legal party pills were highest among the 18-24 year old age range with 33.9% (25.3-43.6) of 18-19 year olds and 38.0% (31.3-45.2) of 20-24 year olds having used legal party pills in the preceding year.


So run that past me again. One in five surveyed 13-45 year-olds had tried party pills at some time, has become, one in five New Zealanders use party pills. Brilliant.

Fantastic....if you are looking for alarmist figures to persuade the gullible that they must be banned.

(Xmas just came right on time for the Mob.)

1 comment:

Berend de Boer said...

Who reads newspapers?

And this just after the DomPost wrote:

No responsible news organisation accepts everything it is given on faith, knowing that it will rightly be held accountable for what it produces, yet that is what the Internet invites those using it to do.

Idiots.