Hearin’ about heroin

I’m about half-way through Ben Goldacre’s splendid book ‘Bad Science’, which talks about clinical trials, homeopathy, the subtleties of the placebo effect, the supposed benefits of antioxidants, and a range of other topics, and does so in a most enjoyable way. He exposes some of the real science, and some of the nonsense, behind what is reported in the media.

Ben is a doctor who works for the NHS, has a column in The Guardian, and a web site at badscience.net. To get a feel for his work, have a look at his analysis of some recent feel-good reports in the papers and, worryingly, in Parliament. He begins:

“”Seven hundred British troops seized four Taliban narcotics factories containing £50m of drugs”” said the Guardian on Wednesday. “”Troops recovered more than 400kg of raw opium in one drug factory and nearly 800kg of heroin in another.”” Lordy that is good. In the Telegraph, British forces had seized “”£50 million of heroin and killed at least 20 Taliban fighters in a daring raid that dealt a significant blow to the insurgents in Afghanistan.”” Everyone carried the good news. “”John Hutton, defence secretary, said the seizure of £50m of narcotics would ‘starve the Taliban of funding preventing the proliferation of drugs and terror in the UK’.””

Well.

And then he looks at the real numbers. Read the post here.

Enjoyed this post? Why not sign up to receive Status-Q in your inbox?

Got Something To Say:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To create code blocks or other preformatted text, indent by four spaces:

    This will be displayed in a monospaced font. The first four 
    spaces will be stripped off, but all other whitespace
    will be preserved.
    
    Markdown is turned off in code blocks:
     [This is not a link](http://example.com)

To create not a block, but an inline code span, use backticks:

Here is some inline `code`.

For more help see http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

*

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser