Urban Legends Rule- Experts on the Spot

Walked into my neighborhood coffee hangout and looked at the daily trivia question:

True or False: More people are killed each year by donkeys than in plane crashes.

The answer that got me 10 cents off my coffee, was "True."

Well I Googled the question and, not surprisingly, got taken to Snopes.com. There I find, again not surprisingly, that there is no such statistic available. In fact it probably started from an off-hand kind of remark from an "expert" being interviewed in London about airplane safety.

One expert has estimated that more people in the world are kicked to death by donkeys than die in plane crashes.

That's it. The whole statistic. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Which is not unlike an urban legend that has dogged my field of employ for a number of years- that it is much more difficult for a person to get clean and sober from meth than from other drugs. A number of 80% or more is often stated as the number of people who don't get sober. As I understand it this too came from one of those experts put on the spot by a reporter wanting to make a story.

In reality there were no statistics to prove what he said- and still aren't. In fact we know that while meth is a dangerous and highly addictive drug, addiction is still addiction. Believe it or not, all things being equal they are all equally as difficult to break. The same thing works for all of them. The same tools will work.

So be careful of experts quoting statistics. They are often made up on the spot.

But I think I will stay away from donkeys anyway.

(And no, this is not an April Fools' Day story. I couldn't think of one for this year.)