An editorial in the Vancouver Sun carries the headline: "CASA built on falsehood, not fact —
Family dinner vs. drug use just the latest howler from Joe Califano’s fanciful ‘U.S. research centre’."
The editorial provides an interesting real-world dissection of a research report and how to interpret the press releases from it — useful if you want to increase your critical reading quotient.
The editorial goes on to say:
"You might have seen the former U.S. first lady’s anti-drug commercials on American television recently. But it wasn’t Nancy Reagan telling kids to “Just say no,” it was Barbara Bush encouraging families to just say yes — to family dinners, that is.
The commercials accompanied the release of a survey by the U.S. National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) titled The Importance of Family Dinners II. The survey, widely reported in newspapers across North America, including The Vancouver Sun, found that the frequency of family dinners is a “powerful indicator” of whether children will use drugs:
Compared to kids who eat five or more family dinners a week, children who dine with their parents twice or less a week are three times likelier to try marijuana, two and half times likelier to smoke cigarettes and more than one and a half times likelier to drink alcohol.
These results led CASA chairman and president Joseph A. Califano Jr. to conclude: “If I could wave a magic wand to make a dent in the substance abuse problem, I would make sure that every child in America had dinner with his or her parents at least five times a week.”
Alas, there is no magic wand, but Califano’s comments certainly resemble magic. Black magic."
Read on for an entertaining, err educational "dis-memberment".