It is cocaine. "Cocaine use among children has doubled in a year as the fashionable drug of the middle classes extends its reach from the dinner party to the playground," said The Times a couple of weeks ago.
It reported newly published figures showing that cocaine use among 11- to 15-year-olds doubled from one per cent to two per cent between 2004 and 2005.
An increase of one per cent is significant - and would be a doubling.
But the close attention of The Guardian's moonlighting doctor and bad science expert showed that it wasn't even that big. Ben Goldacre noted that the figures had been rounded off. The actual figures were 1.4 per cent for 2004 and 1.9 per cent for 2005. "So it hadn't doubled," says Goldacre. The increase was 0.5 per cent. In other words, of the 9,000 young people who were surveyed, about 45 more of them replied "yes" when asked if they had taken cocaine in the past year.
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