Pauline Esther Phillips was an American advice columnist who answered letters subscribers wrote to the San Francisco Chronicle. Her byline was Abigail Van Buren. Writing gossip columns was her job, and she knew almost as much about statistics as the nail technicians in the strip mall near you. “Dear Abby” statistics are awash in ignorance and presented ass-backwards. They’re statistics provided by numerically disadvantaged people who wouldn’t know a fact if you hit them over the head with it. Twice.
Last week the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece that has Harry Anslinger grinning in his grave
They included the oft-cited statistic so old it has a long white beard like Father Time:
This is a textbook example of fearmongering, the term for deliberately spreading frightening rumors to sway public opinion. The long-ago discredited “gateway theory” was built on that single completely wrongheaded statistic and as a result, many uniformed people have been led by propagandists (yes, we have them, too, not just the Russians) to believe marijuana use unfailingly and irrevocably leads to heroin addiction.
The presumption
The gateway theory supposes that those who use mood-altering substances progress through a linear sequence of escalating stages. They think this sequence begins with socially and legally acceptable psychotropics (caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine) then illegal psychotropics (cannabis), then heroin. Following that rationale, it is easy to see most heroin users can be said to have begun their addictions by using caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine (or cookies, or cheese, or rye bread, or jello, or baby formula, or anything they ingested prior to becoming heroin users), making them gateway drugs, too.
Few call for the banning of caffeine or nicotine, but 100 years ago the United States banned the drinking of alcohol
As most people know, one of the unintended consequences of Prohibition (1920-1933) was the growth of organized crime. Most people do not know, however, that the other unintended consequence was the passing of a law that made cannabis illegal when it had never been before.
Proselytizers are those who attempt to convert others to their way of thinking
Some are willing to spread misinformation to achieve their ends, none more so than Harry Anslinger, head of the Bureau of Prohibition.
Regular readers know the first goal of a bureaucracy is to perpetuate itself
Prohibiting people from drinking alcohol ended with the repeal of the 18th Amendment. Harry saw it coming, and with it, the disbandment of his Bureau of Prohibition because there would no longer be a need for it and everyone who worked there would no longer have a job.
So Harry pulled some strings and got himself appointed as the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
Knowing his vast prohibition bureaucracy would no longer be necessary, he needed a new demon to pursue. He chose cannabis because it was used mostly by two groups unlikely to put up much of a fuss: ethnic minorities and jazz musicians (read American Negroes). After getting some how-to advice from famed yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst, Anslinger set out on a fear-mongering campaign.
Reefer Madness is now a cult classic
First titled Tell Your Children, it was the #1 propaganda film Anslinger used to lie Americans, claiming that “marihuana is the most violent drug in the history of mankind.” Harry blamed it for causing insanity, sex crimes, and murder. A diehard racist, Harry also claimed it made what he called the “degenerate races” (Negroes, Hispanics, and Filipinos) “forget their place in society and think they’re as good as white men.”
Here’s the 1:39 trailer that ran in movie houses all over the United States.
Axe-grinders are those who have strong opinions based upon ulterior motives
Take Parents Opposed to Pot, for example. It’s a well-meaning organization whose philosophy is clearly stated in its name. According to their website, the gateway hypothesis cannot be denied because the math demonstrates a connection between marijuana use and heroin use.
Yes, there is a connection between the two
It’s the same connection as the connection between heroin use and peanut butter: heroin users began by eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. A wonderful example of unintended irony, Parents Opposed to Pot has an entire section devoted to what they call the lies and propaganda promulgated by anyone who doesn’t see things the way they do.
Gateway drugs
For the gateway drug hypothesis to hold any water, cannabis use must lead to heroin use more often than not, so let’s do some simple division and see for ourselves.
Readily available data indicate about 25 million U.S. adults smoke marijuana and about 1 million are heroin users
This means only about 4% of marijuana users use heroin, which completely contradicts the marijuana-as-gateway-to-heroin argument. Ask yourself how any substance used by one million people can cause 25 million people to become heroin users?
The numbers don’t add up
Regular readers know if you want to determine cause-and-effect, you put the cause (marijuana use) first and the effect (heroin use) second. When you do this, you see that 96% of cannabis users do not use heroin. A favorite example of the ludicrousness of selling correlation as causality is Marriage Causes Divorce.
After all these years, the erroneous conclusion that marijuana use leads to heroin use remains all the evidence statistical illiterates believe they need to conclude causality
You would hardly expect the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal to be lacking in numeracy, the mathematical equivalent of literacy. But no one sensible person maintains the “gateway theory” leads nearly every cannabis user into heroin addiction.
The crucial takeaway for users of information is this
The people who control the flow of information in most organizations know so little about what constitutes correlation and causation that they draw upside-down and ass-backward conclusions just like Abby and the Wall Street Journal, who are either ignorant or rely on us being unaware they’re doing it.
Bonus
A friend bought a motorcycle. His mother had read most motorcycle accidents occurred during the first six months of ownership. Unaware that those accidents were not related to the calendar (correlation), but to the new rider’s inexperience (causation), her advice to him was to put it in the garage and not ride it for six months. Her conclusion was misguided, of course.
Want to look at old things in new ways, see the commonplace in more detail and hear complicated subject matter explained in simple terms?
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