A woman has established an outfit she calls Candor Trust and is running a campaign against drugged driving and in particular, driving by methadone patients. Obviously I have no problem with this. But I wish she would substantiate her claims. A press release from yesterday is quite typical;
A woman has appeared in Court on drug driving charges today in relation to incidents of dangerous driving in the Bay of Plenty. The methadone patient drove dangerously after sleeping in the car at a service station, with children aboard and other motorists had to evade.
Candor Trust says this scenario is quite common as shown by the ESR drug driving study results which show about a dozen dead methadone drivers over the last 2 years.
Using the formula applied to alcohol harm it can be safely assumed methadone drivers were also implicated in a similar number of innocents deaths (on the road).
This is a grossly disproportionate level of road trauma in relation to the actual numbers of methadone patients. It constitutes involvement in 10% of the road toll by under 1% of the population, and double the involvement of untreated heroin addicts.
OK. That's 6 dead methadone drivers a year and an assumption of 6 associated deaths of 'innocent' people. The yearly road toll to October 9, 2007 is 399. How do 12 deaths become 10 percent?
Go the website and read such claims as;
About 1 in 50 Kiwis now die due to a crash - and over 1/2 the deaths are due to intoxicated drivers.
According to the LTSA, in 2005 29 percent of fatal crashes had driver alcohol as a factor. Again a significant difference between 29 percent and over 50 percent.
I reiterate I have no problem with people campaigning against problems but this sort of dubious information does her cause, and in a broader sense the internet, no favours.
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2 comments:
Good sleuthing. Seems to be something wrong with the math on methadone there, try as I might I only arrive at 3%. A typo?
But the 50% of accident deaths being due to intoxication sounds about right, if it's a given that the term "intoxication" is not referring to alcohol alone.
LTSA only seems to be counting alcohol with it's 29%, and this website you link to is clearly concerned with both booze and the drugs. But more like with pot than methadone, at a glance.
So when are you having an exhibition (:
I think you'll find that 29% of dead drivers were drunk. It is well known that for each dead drink driver is an innocent victim. Which brings it to over half the road toll being alcohol/drug related. It seems from a check at Stats NZ over 1 in 50 are killed on NZ roads. As 19000 die yearly and round 400 on the road. More like 1 in 40 then. Sometimes with stats one needs to understand the context before the veracity can be assessed.
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