June 16, 2015
Briefly
- NZ Defence Force say they have seized “260kg of high-grade heroin worth about $235m” (via Stuff). That would be $900/gram. Presumably the figure is supposed to be street price ignoring any distribution costs and assuming it’s all sold. Even so it seems steep. NZDF also say “they were destined for east Africa and likely into Europe.” European street prices for heroin vary depending on who you ask, but they aren’t anywhere near that high.
- 3News had a story on the rise in Indian-style weddings in New Zealand. I noticed the line “The average Indian wedding costs up to $100,000 – that is more than three times the average New Zealanders spend on tying the knot.” We know the figure of $30,000 for an average NZ wedding is bogus; it’s hard to tell whether the figure for Indian weddings is more or less inflated.
- When the FDA doesn’t approve an application to market a new drug, it sends what it calls a “complete response letter”. An analysis in the medical journal BMJ compares the letters to company press releases. In 21% of cases no information in the press release matched the letter. In 19 of 32 cases where the FDA had said more clinical trials would be needed, there was no mention of this in the press release.
- The top ten finalists from a competition for optical illusions. Knowing about optical illusions is useful for data visualisation: they are extreme versions of things you want to avoid.
- From the Washington Post, an illustration of why you want to avoid the optical illusion of 3-d in your graphics. The box on the right is 21% smaller than the box on the left. Really. Do the maths.
- A good example of risk communication, from the British NHS:
(via David Spiegelhalter who also writes about the conflict between targeting information at the people who theoretically need it versus the people who will actually take advantage of it)
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I assume the heroin picked up is pure whereas the street price is based on cut heroin.
9 years ago
Even that doesn’t explain all of it: the heroin picked up is 60-80% pure, and the European Monitoring Center is reporting prices under 50 euros/gram for 10-20% mean purity.
9 years ago
I see that the USA is continuing to fight against the metric system by promoting a new international standard with dimensions in inches.
9 years ago
That IATA proposal has to be the work of lobbying going haywire. There is no logical reason to reduce the size carry on bags, even the overhead compartments of all existing planes are designed for the current dimensions, and planes tend to stay in service for 30 or more years. But changing it would mean every single carry on sized bag in America, and to some extend the rest of the world, would be ‘obsolete’ and new ones would need to be bought. Good news for samsonite.
9 years ago
Hi Thomas, been talking to some friends who know the local drug scene — especially around heroin. They think about $900 a gram would be a decent price, if it got to the street at the purity that it was reported as
My friends say it would reach that price because
a) we just don’t get that much heroin in NZ, so it’s pretty much priceless.
b) prices fluctuate but they said a point (.1 of a gram) sells for about $200.
c) Because the real stuff is so scarce people tend to pay inflated prices.
d) If it was high grade it would probably get stepped on a few times — up to four so perhaps if anything this may be an under-estimate.
9 years ago
I wouldn’t be surprised at that sort of price for NZ, and I assume the Defence Force had some sort of NZ street price estimate to work with, but that isn’t where the cargo was headed.
It’s bad enough that everyone quotes ‘value’ for drugs as the retail price per gram times the weight even for wholesale quantities — they wouldn’t do this for other products — but using the (very high) NZ price to estimate value of heroin that’s never coming anywhere near NZ is just too much.
9 years ago