While researching
the issue of the state of Tennessee’s use of a three question drug-use questionnaire,
and follow-up drug testing, I found the following web article: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/02/10/3621267/tennessee-drug-tests-after-six-months/
The first two
sentences of the article read as follows:
Less than one half of one percent of
Tennesseeans who applied for public assistance flunked a drug test in the first six
months of the state’s experiment with drug screenings for welfare recipients,
according to recently released state figures.
Out of more than 16,000 applicants from
the beginning of July through the end of 2014, just 37 tested positive for
illegal drug use.
When you read those two sentences just
now, did you think what I thought when I first read them? My initial thought was Tennessee gave drug screens to over 16,000 applicants, and only 37 came
back dirty?! However, it’s in the
first part of the third sentence that the writer, Alan Pyke, gives himself
away, and actually reports the proper statistics: “While that amounts to roughly 13 percent of
the 279 applicants who the state decided to test based on their answers to a
written questionnaire about drug use...”
In other words, Tennessee didn’t test over
16,000 people and get 37 positives results, and 15, 963 negative results, the
state tested 279 applicants and got 37 positive results. That’s over 13%, or basically four (3.978) out
of every thirty people screened. And, that
figure is over 61.5% higher that the state’s overall rate of drug use (8%) as
stated in the article.
Now that's a headline that would jump off the page: Public Assistance Applicants' Drug Use 61.5% Higher Than State Average However, the author ends the third sentence by
returning to his disingenuous apples to hubcaps comparison and writes “the
overall rate among applicants is just 0.2 percent.”
Allow me to re-write the first three
sentences with some different data to illustrate my point.
Less than one half of one percent of all
students enrolled at The University of Georgia passed the state bar
exam on the first attempt in 2014, according to recently released state
figures.
Out of more than 35,190 students on
campus during the 2014 school year, just 155 passed the bar on their first
attempt. While that amounts to roughly 94 percent of
the 165 law students who took the bar exam for the first time, the overall rate
among all students is just 0.47 percent.
See how that works? The fact that
over 15,700 applicants were never asked to take a drug screen in the first
place is totally irrelevant to the author feigned statistics, just like the fact that over
35,000 UGA students never sat for the bar exam is irrelevant to mine. Nice try though.
