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Math fail by Royal College of Psychitrists in UK?

CrunchyMcGee

New member
So I was just doing a little search on the long-term psychological effects of cannabis, and I came across this article on rcpsych.ac.uk:

http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mentalhealthinformation/mentalhealthproblems/alcoholanddrugs/cannabisandmentalhealth.aspx


It looked like the usual propaganda garbage, but I decided to start reading. Then I stopped reading when I came across what seems, to me, to be a glaring error right in their introduction paragraph, which I have posted here for convenience:
Cannabis is the most widely used substance in the UK. Even though there has been a steady reduction of use since 1996, about 2.3 million 16-59 year-olds have reported using cannabis in the past year. Frequent use of cannabis is about twice as likely amongst young people, and nearly 5.3 million 16-24 year-olds have used it in the last year.
Did you catch it?
...2.3 million 16-59 year-olds have reported using cannabis in the past year.
vs.
...5.3 million 16-24 year-olds have used it in the last year.

If I'm not mistaken, the 16-24 age set is inside of the 16-59 age set, therefore, they're claiming that the 5.3 million of youth users are WITHIN that 2.3 million total user set. How is this possible, unless they somehow botched the reported numbers somewhere? Am I too baked to comprehend the math at work here?

My partner thinks they used numbers from two different studies, but I sure wish they'd linked those studies within the article itself. I personally theorize that they meant for the 2.3 million user set to be between ages 25-59. What do you think?
 
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