re: "Recreational use 'doubles' since delisting" (BP, October 31, 2022)
Dear editor,
"Recreational use 'doubles' since delisting", the Bangkok Post's lead article for most of Monday, front and centre on the website's homepage, certainly catches the reader's attention. It is also a shameful piece of alleged journalism. Admittedly, the Post is not an academic journal. Nonetheless, if such a claim is to be made as that "the number of people aged under 20 who use cannabis recreationally has doubled since the plant was formally decriminalised this year," then at the very least, the before and after numbers must be cited. Did the number allegedly double from one to two? Or was it from 100 to 200? Perhaps 10,000 to 20,000? One million to two million? Without those numbers, the claim is worthless.
Equally important is to explain the research behind those statistics. As far as this piece of reporting goes, it might just be numbers made up by someone at the Centre of Addiction Studies making a more or less educated guess to push an agenda that the Bangkok Post apparently favours. Did the statistics come from polls? From records of hospital admissions acting as proxy for the number of users? Did they come from arrest records? Did they come from the same or different methodologies? Again, without this information being given, the Post's loudly touted headline "Recreational use 'doubles' since delisting" is at best garbage, and possibly deceitful.
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on November 2, 2022, under the title "Double gibberish" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2427890/partially-understood
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