February 28, 2002

There was a study released all-over the news about 2 days ago... "Youths Consume 25% of All Alcohol in the U.S." The instant I saw that number, I thought "No way can that be TRUE! If it were, every teenager would be constantly reeking of hooch!" I immediately disbelieved it- every teenager in the U.S. would have to guzzle gallons of the stuff in order to meet their quota.

But, this gets better: Here's the punch-line released in today's news:

"THE NATIONAL Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse acknowledged late Tuesday that due to an oversight it had not made a necessary adjustment when analyzing data from the 1998 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse.
It said that using the adjustment would bring the figure down to 11.4 percent, but added that it believed that percentage was low due to underreporting by the teens being surveyed; the fact that the survey doesn't account for binge drinking; and the fact that children under 12 weren't surveyed. Adding those factors in, it said, could raise the percentage of alcohol consumed by underage drinkers to 30 percent."

So, basically, they were saying: "Um, yeah, we processed our data wrong. But I'm certain that we collected it wrong too, and if we'd collected and processed it right, it would probably be twenty percent more damning! It's an epidemic, I say!"

Later on in the article, the president of the organization running the survey defends his decision to avoid publicizing the correct information, rationalizing that lying about the whole matter just helps correct for the fact that the subjects must be lying to him about how much they really drink. Blink. Wha? Did he say this with a straight face too?

Don't people check their math before making a big, grand press-release? Doesn't 'peer review' mean anything to these people?

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