In 1954 Darrell Huff published How to Lie with Statistics. The cover blurb added, “Now you, too, can out-double-talk your accountant; confuse your political opponent; prove that your product has secret built-in goodness!” The introduction spelled out that “This book is a sort of primer in ways to use statistics to deceive,” but also so “honest men [can] learn them in self-defense.” Or the only thing that stops a crook with a statistic is an honest man with a statistic.

Yesterday I questioned the statistics in an editorial arguing that Medicaid expansion has led to more opioid abuse. The statistics were old, cherry-picked and at best failed to prove the conclusion that the author was arguing and was predisposed to believe (Medicaid expansion=bad). That’s human nature, I guess.

Here are some other statistics from Blue Cross Blue Shield:

• The number of people with an opioid use disorder increased almost 500 percent from 2010 to 2016.
• The number of people who sought medication-assisted treatment for an opioid use disorder increased only 65 percent from 2010 to 2016.

Those numbers would have better served the editorial writer than the ones he used because they are from the period Medicaid expansion, but as Darrell Huff might have said, “Correlation does not imply causation.” Or, as William S. Gilbert wrote in HMS Pinafore, “Things are seldom what they seem; Skim milk masquerades as cream.”

What those substance use disorder rehab treatment statistics show is that it is easier to halt withdrawal pains by getting more drugs – Methadone, OxyContin, Vicodin, even Suboxone – than by getting into treatment. Junk food is often easier to find and cheaper than healthy fresh food, too.

Cutting Medicaid funding might mean fewer people would start taking opioid prescription painkillers – without treating the pain that often leads to the opioid addiction in the first place – but by itself it would do nothing to cure the people already addicted.

Andrew Kolodny of Brandeis University told Vox.com that the way to fight opioid abuse would be not only to make opioids less accessible but to simultaneously make treatment for opioid addiction both more accessible and free. New York did something similar with tobacco use, such as a hotline and free nicotine gum and patches.

The problem is that although the Surgeon General’s Report and some politicians on both sides of the aisle (even conservative) now accept that addiction is not a character flaw but a genetic propensity, a chronic health problem akin to diabetes or hypertension, others see it as a moral failing and begrudge the billions needed to treat it. Middletown, Ohio, City Councilman Dan Picard wants to restrict when and if first responders can use anti-overdose drugs to save addicts because of the expense.

If there’s a shortfall, get it from the pharmaceutical companies that downplayed the addictive risk to new painkillers in the 1990s, even presenting seminars to doctors encouraging them to prescribe opioids to patients with chronic pain. At least 25 states have already filed suit. May many more follow.