Chittenden County State’s Attorney (and candidate for Attorney General) TJ Donovan kinda stepped in it last week. As was first reported by the Vermont Press Bureau (short version available free here, full story paywalled here), Donovan asserted in a VPR interview that “One in seven babies born at Rutland Regional Medical Center are born opiate-addicted.” It wasn’t the first time he’d used that talking point in promoting his anti-drug agenda.

Problem is, his number is completely wrong. Not even close. The actual figure is less than one percent.

So how did Donovan muff it so badly? The Freeploid’s Terri Hallenbeck does a good job of trying to reconstruct the whole thing — sadly, her article is behind Gannett’s new paywall. If you’re not a subscriber, stop by your local library and give it a read. We’ll give you a non-copyright-infringing preview here.

Seems Donovan heard it in a report last fall by WCAX-TV, which asserted that one in seven mothers giving birth at RRMC are opiate-addicted. Which is different than one in seven babies; Donovan now admits he made that incorrect mental leap on his own.

But WCAX got it wrong, too. At the time of its initial report, a state Health Department official checked the figure and determined that the true figure was less than one percent. Somehow this didn’t percolate through the WCAX newsroom, because it again reported the incorrect one-in-seven-mothers figure in February.

(The WCAX report was based on a remark by an RRMC doctor who was referring to mothers with any addiction issue, in the past or present — and including alcohol. But if most of the mothers are — or were — addicted to plain old alcohol, that doesn’t help promote a War on Drugs, does it?)

After the jump: playing telephone, and playing politics with the truth.

Hallenbeck dubbed the whole thing “a game of telephone.” Which has an added dimension in the age of the Internet, where false reports are passed through the online echo chamber and the original mistakes are archived, little time bombs of misinformation waiting to be discovered.

In this case, discovered by an ambitious politician looking to illustrate the severity of a pet issue. Donovan, to his credit, has acknowledged his error and promised that statistics will be checked more thoroughly from now on.

To his discredit, he fell back on the “Nonetheless…” style of political unreasoning: the one-in-seven figure may be vastly exaggerated, but nonetheless, the issue is just as important. Governor Shumlin did the same thing in April (as the VPB points out) during the Legislature’s debate over giving police warrantless access to the Health Department’s prescription drug database.

The Governor was depicting the legislation as a sorely needed weapon in the battle against a raging epidemic of prescription drug abuse. But then the Associated Press unhelpfully noted that his own Health Department’s statistics showed that prescription drug abuse “is declining or remaining steady.” Shumlin’s response was classic: “It is an epidemic.” Because he says so.

Donovan gets better marks than Shumlin, who ignored the facts when they were presented to him. But both make the same fundamental, self-serving mistake: insisting that, whatever the facts are, their issue is crucial and must be addressed swiftly and forcefully.

To be sure, drug addiction (and specifically its effect on pregnant moms and newborns) is an issue that needs attention. But, as Hunt Blair, deputy commissioner of the division of health reform, put it: 



Clearly even a single baby born in this unfortunate circumstance is one too many, but this kind of exaggeration does not help the cause of public information or public health.

It can, however, add a little juice to a favorite campaign theme.

I also have to wonder if Donovan’s agenda was shaped by his mistaken belief. One would think so; if 14% of Rutland’s newborns were drug addicts, drastic measures would be justified. If the real figure is less than 1%, then there’s a lot less urgency to the issue. Donovan, in admitting his mistake, said “It’s been corrected. We’re moving on.”

“Moving on” with a platform based on a vastly overinflated statistic? Is your approach to the issue really the same, whether the actual figure is 1% or 14%? Hard to believe.

One more purely political note: Rutland’s real-life statistic is actually lower than the state’s as a whole. Do you think Donovan cost himself a few votes down Rutland way, with his baseless characterization of the city as a breeding ground for crack babies?