Month: February 2014

Following
yesterday’s
death of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman from an apparent
heroin overdose, MSNBC perceives
a “rapidly growing crisis of heroin and other opiate abuse” in the
United States. Under the headline “Philip Seymour Hoffman and
America’s Heroin Problem,” Max Lockie reports that “first-time
heroin use has increased in the U.S. by nearly 60% over
the past decade.”

That sounds like a big increase, but overall heroin use rates
remain very low. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and
Health, 0.3 percent of Americans 12 and older used heroin in

2012, compared to 0.2 percent in
2002. During the same period past-month use remained steady at
0.1 percent. According to the Monitoring
the Future Study, past-year heroin use among high school
seniors actually fell from 1 percent in 2002 to 0.6 percent in
2012.

MSNBC exaggerates the increase in heroin use by focusing on raw
numbers instead of rates. A chart accompanying the article shows
the number of past-month users rising from 166,000 in 2002 to
335,000 in 2012, which creates an alarming upward curve instead of
the flat line you’d get by comparing rates. The effect is less
dramatic for past-year use, but it still makes the curve
steeper.

A CNN story also cites raw numbers instead of rates
and claims,
in the label on a video, that “heroin use [is] soaring in [the]
U.S.” By contrast, the accompanying article refers to “an uptick”
and concedes that “heroin remains comparatively rare.” Measured by
past-year use, marijuana is 40 times as popular.

[Thanks to Stanton Peele for the MSNBC link.]

Following
yesterday’s
death of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman from an apparent
heroin overdose, MSNBC perceives
a “rapidly growing crisis of heroin and other opiate abuse” in the
United States. Under the headline “Philip Seymour Hoffman and
America’s Heroin Problem,” Max Lockie reports that “first-time
heroin use has increased in the U.S. by nearly 60% over
the past decade.”

That sounds like a big increase, but overall heroin use rates
remain very low. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and
Health, 0.3 percent of Americans 12 and older used heroin in

2012, compared to 0.2 percent in
2002. During the same period past-month use remained steady at
0.1 percent. According to the Monitoring
the Future Study, past-year heroin use among high school
seniors actually fell from 1 percent in 2002 to 0.6 percent in
2012.

MSNBC exaggerates the increase in heroin use by focusing on raw
numbers instead of rates. A chart accompanying the article shows
the number of past-month users rising from 166,000 in 2002 to
335,000 in 2012, which creates an alarming upward curve instead of
the flat line you’d get by comparing rates. The effect is less
dramatic for past-year use, but it still makes the curve
steeper.

A CNN story also cites raw numbers instead of rates
and claims,
in the label on a video, that “heroin use [is] soaring in [the]
U.S.” By contrast, the accompanying article refers to “an uptick”
and concedes that “heroin remains comparatively rare.” Measured by
past-year use, marijuana is 40 times as popular.

[Thanks to Stanton Peele for the MSNBC link.]

It’s Monday night, which means
The
Independents is backatcha live at 9 pm ET, 6 pm PT on Fox
Business Network (with a midnight-hour repeat), injecting some hot
buttered libertarian weirdness into the cable-news slipstream.

Tonight’s show begins where
Friday’s Super Bowl
episode left
off—with Super Bowl commercials, particularly the two that have
generated the most (and most pointless) political controversy:

Bob Dylan’s Chrysler stunt, and Coca-Cola’s
multilingual rendition of “America the
Beautiful.” Commenting on these, as well as on
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s heroin overdose and the recent

confessions-of-a-TSA-snooper essay in Politico, will
be Wall Street lawyer-turned comedian Paul Mecurio, and criminal
defense attorney-slash-TV commentator Remi Spencer.

Then joining the show for a couple of segments will be former
congressman, recent New York mayoral loser and two-time sexting
scandal protagonist
Anthony Weiner, who is slated to discuss (among other things)
Washington’s latest
debt ceiling fight, President Barack Obama’s
combative interview with Fox host Bill O’Reilly, and the

rather remarkable confession that Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.)
made last week during his confirmation hearing to be America’s next
ambassador to China.

Michael Malice, author of a
new unauthorized biography of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il
titled
Dear Reader (as well as of a great 2013 Reason
feature “My
Week in North Korea“), will be on to talk about the horrors of
the Hermit Kingdom. And the “Keeping it Kmele” segment tonight will
use Janet Yellen’s
first day on the job as Fed chief to take a closer look at the
Federal Reserve. Other topics that may come up on the show include
Joe
Namath‘s
sartorial awesomeness, the post-game show’s
9/11 truther,
Bill de Blasio’s groundhog (not a euphemism), and
beer drones.

There will be a live-stream after-show available on the website,
and as always, send your tweets out to @IndependentsFBN; some
may be used on air.

What happens when you plant two
real, unloaded guns among toys and a backpack in grade school
classroom and then tell kids that, while unsupervised, they should
indulge in some nearby candy? ABC reporters did just this, and
breathlessly revealed their discovery: the kids will touch the
guns! …Before notifying an adult. “Can you really hide guns from
children?”
asks the network.

This less-than-scientific experiment was part of a 20/20
“unsettling
special” called Young Guns, which aired
last Friday. Its aim was investigate the supposedly deadly world of
households in which both children and firearms reside. ABC also
posted instructions on how to confront gun-toting friends without
making
it awkward and provides a handy
quiz on the differences between fake and real weapons.

“The new numbers are arresting,”
assures the ABC’s David Muir, “nearly one child or teen every
hour [is] injured by a firearm in this country.” He speaks to a
doctor who “at one point was seeing gunshots and children twice a
week.” Diane Sawyer
reports that a “groundbreaking” study implies that, “every
other day, a child is shot to death.”

But, the
study doesn’t match the ABC’s far-fetched image of young kids
finding guns among their playthings in school. Children, in this
case, includes individuals aged 18 and 19, i.e. people who are
legally adults and able to buy rifles.

The presentation is not reflective of America’s gun community,
which owns a total of 310 million firearms (by far the highest
concentration per capita of any nation in the world). Major
gun rights
advocacy groups, as well as
firearms instructors, and
others in the community
explicitly teach and advocate
for the safe use and storage of guns. Gun forums are rife with
advice
on educating kids about gun safety and keeping weapons accessible
for self-defense but out of children’s reach.

One need not rely on anecdotal evidence, though.

Despite the massive number of guns in the US and ABC’s
hysterics,
data collected by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in 2010
states that among children aged 1-14 there were 396 firearm deaths.
Among the 15-19 demographic, 2,331 deaths were recorded, including
legal intervention. Although this may seem dramatically higher than
the younger group, it is hardly more than one percent of the total
15-19 year old population. While each deaths is a tragedy, putting
the numbers into context reveal a far less dramatic side of the
story.

And, while ABC focuses on the accidents caused by guns, the
network overlooks how many lives guns save. Gun Owners of America
(GOA) states:

Guns [are] used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense.
Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against
criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year — or about 6,850
times a day. This means that each year, firearms are used more than
80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to
take lives.

Unlike ABC’s extrapolations from an in-house trial, GOA’s
information comes from peer-reviewed academic
research.