Howard Kurtz writes on a bogus poll the American Medican Association conducted, and how the media lapped it up without a hint of skepticism:

Call it binge journalism, as out of control as a crazed keg party.

“Girls Behaving Badly,” said the Louisville Courier-Journal

“Girls Go Wild for Booze, Sex,” said the Boston Herald.

“Spring Break Can Be Hazardous to Your Health,” said the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“There may be some truth to the image of spring break as an orgy of wet T-shirt contests, booze parties and sex on the beach,” said USA Today.

“Stop the presses: Sex and intoxication among women more prevalent during spring break,” said MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson.

The breathless coverage was fueled by a survey of college women and graduates under 35, released in March by the American Medical Association. Some 74 percent said women use drinking as an excuse for outrageous behavior. Fifty-seven percent of women agreed that being promiscuous is a way to fit in, while 83 percent said they had friends who drank most nights while on spring break.

At the risk of spoiling the fun, it must be noted that this poll had zero scientific validity.

For starters, it was an Internet survey of women who volunteered to participate, not a poll relying on randomly selected respondents — even though the AMA mentioned a “margin of error” common to such polls.

Nonetheless, AMA President J. Edward Hill had warned in a statement that “spring break is broken. . . . These survey results are extremely disturbing because it brings up an entirely new set of issues including increased risk of sexually transmitted diseases, blackouts and violence.”

As first reported by the Mystery Pollster blog, which covers debates about the field, Cliff Zukin, president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, has dismissed the survey as scientifically useless.

“I think it’s irresponsible to put that in the public domain,” says Zukin, a Rutgers University professor. “There is no scientific basis. I don’t trust those numbers. . . . It’s silly and it shouldn’t have seen the light of day.”

J. Edward Hill is the same guy who called CNN to complain after my op-ed in the Washington Post last year questioned the wisdom of arresting parents who throw controlled parties for high school kids, on the assumption that if teenagers are going to drink anyway, it’s best to keep them off the road. It’s also under Hill’s watch that the AMA released another silly poll showing that most minors get their first taste of alcohol from their parents. Hill was “alarmed” at this. Frankly, I’d say that parents are precisely the right people we want introducing their own kids to alcohol.

In any case, the point here is that the AMA has long ceased to be an advocate for doctors, and today is little more than a mouthpiece for the public health industry, similar to the way MADD is more concerned with neoprohbition than it is with highway safety. The AMA has been silent, for example, on the issue of the chill the DEA’s campaign against opiates has had on the treatment of pain. It’s been passive on the odious HIPAA regulations that can send a doctor to jail for honest errors in paperwork. And the organization has bought the government’s line on medicinal marijuana, despite the fact that the AMA had previously established a long and distinguished record of dissent on the issue, objecting to the idea that some drugs shouldn’t even be allowed for research into possible health benefits.

Instead, the AMA today spends a good deal of its time, resources, and clout telling you how to live your life, and telling parents how to raise their kids. That it would take the time to commission a poll to show that — gasp! — college students drink and have sex on spring break is rather telling. The organization seems particularly obsessed with alcohol, despite the fact that study after study after study has shown enormous health benefits associated with moderate alcohol consumption.

As Kurtz notes, what’s even worse is that the organization has stooped to using bogus science and fake polls to make its case.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 3:51 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Alcohol, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.