"Akmal Shaikh was convicted and sentenced to death penalty for serious drug trafficking on solid evidence. In fact, 150mg of heroin of high degree of purity would be lethal. The amount of heroin he carried was 4030g, enough to cause 26800 deaths."
On Christmas Eve this was part of the Chinese statement about the impending execution of Akmal Shaikh.
Of course, this is misleading claptrap and anyone with a firing neurone will raise an eyebrow at these numbers. It is possible to do a 'back of an envelope' calculation of how many deaths 4kg of heroin might cause.
Let's imagine that the whole 4kg of heroin got through to London. In the UK purity runs at around 40% so by the time the heroin is cut with the usual crap then there might be approximately 10kg to sell. Now, generally heroin is sold in £10 bags and the NTA Treatment Outcome Profile form (used to monitor drug treatment in the UK) regards 0.2g as the equivalent of a street bag. The annual Drugscope survey suggested it is more likely to be about 0.15g but for this simple calculation we'll stick with 0.2g heroin per bag. So, that gives us 10,000 grams or approximately 50,000 street bags.
I would suggest that a moderate heroin habit might be around 3 bags of heroin daily – that's pretty middle of the road and possibly on the low side if anything. It would need around 46 users taking 3 bags per day for 365 days to use up the 4kg. Let's say they eke it out a bit and we will round it up to a nice even 50 users.
The estimated mortality of heroin users is undeniably high. One study in Spain which followed a cohort of heroin users showed an annual mortality of 3.4%. However, a UK cohort study over 22 years in London gave an average annual mortality of 1.84%. For this calculation we'll go for 2% - I suspect this is probably a bit on the high side; treatments have improved and the first study readily admitted that it had an unusually high mortality.
But we'll go with it and a mortality of 2% works out at as one death in our notional cohort of 50 users smoking 3 bags daily until the 4kg of heroin is gone.
The statistic presented by the Chinese is clearly misleading. There is a bleak irony in Shaikh's death by injection and in a stroke the Chinese have doubled the death toll attributable to 4kg of heroin.
Of course, this is all largely a side issue and the arguments around the death penalty seldom dwell on such a trite analysis of the numbers. Perhaps the Chinese (and certainly a large number of Daily Mail readers) may suggest justice is still served if there is a single death that can be blamed on drug smuggling. And I would readily agree that the wider costs of heroin addiction have a much wider impact.
However, we may not agree on how to manage the issue of drugs. If the Chinese are going to bandy around meaningless statistics to justify their tawdry policies then the numbers deserve some scrutiny.
Particularly when they are used to justify a grim act of abject inhumanity.
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This is a well observed and important point but you omit to mention that the vast majority of heroin mortality risk is associated with the drugs illegality; unknown strength and purity contributing to overdose risk and infection (note the recent anthrax deaths in the UK), with marginal unhygienic/unsupervised using environments and the high risk behaviors they promote (sharing etc) compounding the problem and maximising risks.
Illustrating the point is the fact that no one has ever died of an overdose in a swiss-style supervised heroin clinic, nor has anyone received anthrax infected heroin or contracted blood borne diseases through sharing and dirty needles. In such scenarios (supervised use and pharmaceutical supply) heroin related mortality falls to near zero, indeed prescribed heroin users have the same life expectancy as non users.
There is nothing new in drug war propaganda twisting statistics, and whilst the murderous Chinese need it more than most, we play much the same games here.
Spancy, I don't think the point was about Chinese policy, or the inadvisability of disobeying it. It was about the awful use of statistics as some kind of justification. By the same logic, asprin and paracetemol makers must be quaking in their boots since many tons are made. There is no problem (per se) with a rigorously enforced policy ... but the statistics are disingenuous at the very best.
The other issue here is whether it was 'fair' to Akmal, if he indeed was mentally challenged. I have no knowledge of his mental abilities, but if an adult convinced a child to carry 4Kg of Herion then I'd expect the adult to be convicted, not the child.
None of this says that illegal drugs (and legal ones for that matter) don't bring very real issues and heartache to people.
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