If only one-third of these savings were spent on treatment programs, the current number of users treated could be doubled, more than compensating for the 8 percent increase in use. If you have criticisms of these analyses, I would be interested in discussing them. They offer not a definitive analysis, but a comprehensive one that still awaits challenge by the DEA, Federal Dept of HHS, or by statistical skeptics such as yourself. I am afraid that you have missed the point of the 300 Jumbo Jets crashes analogy entirely. Hunger is largely a chronic condition, not one that arises from natural disaster or aggregate food scarcity.
Hunger affects nearly one-seventh of the world's population, and is inexpensively averted.
The scientific principle of objectivity, that the truth of a thing is independent from the observing subject, can easily be challenged in the practice of any scientific field. The statistics of science are just as easily influenced by the biases of researchers. While science may be marginally more protected from the influences of philosophical, thematic, religious, cultural, political, and economic beliefs than, say, sociology, it is easy to find many examples where scientific judgment has been shaped by these influences in fundamental ways. Another example is the ideological rejection of Mendelian genetics in the Soviet Union beginning in the 1930s, which crippled Soviet biology for decades.