Daily Mail vs British Medical Journal
From an article in the Daily Mail this week:
Previous studies have found that cannabis claims 30,000 lives a year by causing cancer, heart disease and bronchitis, and that it can double the risk of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.
Now, I wonder where that data is from. Oh look, the British Medical Journal:
It may be argued that the extrapolation from small numbers of individual studies to potential large scale effects amounts to scaremongering. For example, one could calculate that if cigarettes cause an annual excess of 120 000 deaths among 13 million smokers, the corresponding figure for deaths among 3.2 million cannabis smokers would be 30 000, assuming equality of effect.
Genius. Thanks to Dr Ben Goldache for spotting this.
NP: The Good, The Bad & The Queen, The Good, The Bad & The Queen
Posted by Alex at Wed Aug 1 18:03:28 2007:
It's the Daily Mail. If the Daily Mail claims the sky is blue and the grass is green, I'm going to double-check before believing it.
Posted by Maxo at Thu Aug 2 17:10:30 2007:
I did a report on Cannabis for a college class about a year ago. I did a lot of research and I came to the conclusion that when it comes specifically to marijuana there are two lying sides which provide about 90% of the information out there.
I was fortunate enough to be able to hunt down raw data and make a good, unbiased, presentation off of that.
Fun fact: Canabis has a chemical that actually causes sobriety. Non or low-THC Canabis, such as that used in making clothing and culinary product contain such small amount of THC and such (relatively) high amount of the other chemical that it actually stops you from being high.
I was fortunate enough to be able to hunt down raw data and make a good, unbiased, presentation off of that.
Fun fact: Canabis has a chemical that actually causes sobriety. Non or low-THC Canabis, such as that used in making clothing and culinary product contain such small amount of THC and such (relatively) high amount of the other chemical that it actually stops you from being high.
