Relative Risk

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A pretty decent article today on OttawaCitizen.com about the relative risks we take all the time, and how some are perceived to be horribly dangerous, while others are perfectly fine.

The article correctly plays risks against each other that make very little sense when taken together. Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is an enormous sport (albeit one that makes very little sense to me) that is gaining more and more mainstream credibility, while at the same time being really really dangerous to it’s participants, who get injured more or less every time they actually take part in the sport.  Take that into contrast with the illegality of marijuana, which as mind altering substances go is almost incredibly safe (essentially impossible to die from ingesting in humans: likely eating about 1500 pounds of the stuff at once ), and safer by far than almost anything found in a medicine, or liquor cabinet (for instance two aspirin is the generally accepted dose, but 40 aspirins will kill 50% of adults).  Strangely enough, apparently eating ten raw potatoes can cause a toxic reaction in some people.  Do you have your potatoe license?  I don’t.

Similarly the article quotes a British researcher on the topic of banning steroids:

 “I would prefer my child take anabolic steroids and growth hormone than play rugby,” a British scientist who studies doping told the Financial Times. “I  don’t know of any cases of quadriplegia caused by growth hormone.”

It puts things into a new perspective, actually.

Read on:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/smoking+dope/6045068/story.html

 

2 thoughts on “Relative Risk”

  1. On the other hand I’ve never seen a sport trigger off a psychotic episode which leads to lifelong schizophrenia. Whereas for a period of seven years I’ve seen that happen to one or two young cannabis users every month.

  2. Fair, and I’m sure depending on your day job I suppose there are lots of edge cases, no doubt the folks that investigate plane crashes are not that avid when they get on a plane themselves, but statistically planes vs cars isn’t even close. The point about marijuana was that it’s relative safeness compared to something legal like aspirin in not reflected in our laws and consciousness. I think the point of the article was that we don’t do a very good job of measuring risk as humans, or “math is hard”. 🙂

    thanks for the comment, btw.

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