OK, so while I obviously applaud Labour MP Bob Ainsworth's recent argument [BBC] for drugs reform, I can't help but be slightly annoyed that he's left it until now to say anything about it. It's a bit rich to start coming up with radical and controversial schemes when you're the only major party who doesn't make up part of the government.
I find that whenever someone gives me a figure as a percentage, the first thing I do is subtract it from 100 to see how the figure compares to the opposite. This is usually most useful when watching or listening to adverts. For example, when an advert says "40% of people found they were paying less when they switched to our insurance company", that actually sounds quite braggable on the face of it. But the critical mind should be saying "hmm, that means that 60% ended up paying the same or more", and that's before you get into more detail, such as whether the stats include existing customers or just those switching, etc. Give it a go, next time you hear a percentage as a statistic, try that trick and see if it changes the way you look at things.
I've just seen a brilliantly contrived one on the Channel Five show "Shops, Robbers and Videotape". The episode talks about how drugs and crime are apparently intrinsically linked. At the top of the show, a police officer was quoted as saying that 80% of crime is comitted by only 20% of offenders, and of these some 18% are drug addicts. Well the last time I went to school, 18% of 20% was 3.6%. Subtracting that from 100 means that 96.4% of offenders aren't drug addicts, or at least aren't known to be drug addicts. Even if he actually messed his words up and meant 18% of all offenders, it still means that 82% of offenders aren't known druggies. Mind you, saying "82% of offenders aren't known to be drug addicts" in a show trying to illustrate the link between crime and drug use would have been a bit counter-productive though I guess.
