Practising the skills

Identify and evaluate the reasoning in each of the following passages.
1 Fluoride dangers
Sir: I was concerned to read of the proposals for compulsory fluoridation of water.
Fluoride is a medication and one with well-reported side effects, such as increased
incidence of osteoporosis. Those not wealthy enough to afford water filtering systems
will be forced to consume it; the dose will not depend on any perceived ‘need’
but on the amount of water consumed: I get through up to seven litres a day so my
dosage would be up to 14 times that of many people.
Additionally, the measure merely serves as a temporary cover for the real problem –
that of sugar consumption; it is not unfluoridated water but sugar which causes
tooth decay; it also causes diabetes, immune system impairment and obesity.
Fluoridation therefore merely enables people to salve their consciences in the short
term regarding bad diet and to do themselves long-term damage; it is like shooting
the miner’s canary.
It is a civil liberties issue; if fluoride, why not any other medication? It is frightening
to think that this question is even being raised.
(Karen Rodgers, Letters to the editor, The Independent, 11 September 2003)
2 Organic farming
Sir: Those who believe organic food is good for the countryside and the environment
should think a little harder.
Organic yields are significantly lower than intensive yields. To grow the same
amount of food, organic farming therefore requires land that could otherwise be
used for nature reserves, forests or wetlands – or golf courses and low-cost housing
if we so choose. To irrigate the additional land more water is required, reducing
rivers and aquifers. Moreover, since organic farms still use tractors, water
pumps, harvesters and other fossil-fuel powered implements, and these have to
travel over a greater area to produce a given quantity of food, they produce higher
CO2 emissions.
As for farmers’ markets, consider what would happen if the eight million people in
London were forced to drive out to rural areas to source their food – not only would
there be chaos, but also the resultant emissions from cars would dwarf the emissions
of the relatively few large lorries that currently bring food to supermarkets in town
and the short car journeys we make to the supermarket.
Since energy and land are both costs, the market will ensure structures that make
the most efficient use of both. Organic farming does the reverse, to the detriment of
all.
(Tim Hammond, Letters to the Editor, The Times, Thursday 11 January 2007)
3 Extract from ‘Television – a force for good in our
nation’s prisons’
. . . it would be mad for Mr Straw [the Home Secretary] not to proceed with the
proposal to unleash the BBC and commercial TV companies on the prison population.
It is the right thing pragmatically and in principle too.
Why? First because of what British prisons are like. In the main, they are grossly
overcrowded, very uncomfortable already and constant hives of crime-behind-bars.
Men who are left with nothing to do, many of them being illiterate, currently amuse
themselves with drugs, sex, constant little vendettas and a little light violence.
Because of overcrowding, they spend more and more time in their cells. Is ‘Have
We Got News for You’, or ‘Casualty’ or ‘Brookside’ really a worse alternative than
cannabis and recreational buggery? Furthermore, increasingly, television means
communication with the rest of us, albeit one-way communication. For the modern
citizen, TV is the ubiquitous window on society, a prime source of thinking and
information. It shapes us. Now, granted, prisoners are physically cut off from society,
but that is as much for our safety as for their punishment. Assuming that we
hold to the idea of rehabilitation and the return of prisoners to ordinary life after
their sentences, then cutting them off from social trends, thinking, entertainment
and news is pointless, even stupid. Prisoners who watch television for hours are not
only likelier to be easier to guard and oversee; they are also likely to end up more like
the rest of us.
The second reason we approve of television in jails is that inmates would not be
given them free, but would have to pay for the privilege, using money earned inside
jail. TVs would be removed for bad behaviour. Prison is such a bizarre and alienating
environment that anything which keeps inmates in touch with ordinary life is
useful; earning and paying is useful because it increases, however marginally,
responsibility. It is what prisoners will quickly have to learn to do outside.
This is, in short, a proposal which is sensible in security terms, mildly rehabilitative
and – yes – humane.
(David Aaronovitch, The Independent, 30 November 1997)
4 Extract from ‘The economic case for drugs’
America spends at least $20 billion (£13 billion) a year on drug enforcement, and
arrests more than one million people a year on drug charges. Yet, according to
standard economic analysis and existing evidence, drug legalisation would be a far
superior policy to drug prohibition.
Drug prohibition does not eliminate drug markets or drug use; it simply moves
them underground. Prohibition raises some costs of doing business for drug
suppliers, and it probably reduces demand by some consumers.
But substantial drug consumption persists even in the most repressive prohibition
regimes. Data in the US suggests that more than 30 per cent of the population aged
12 and over has used marijuana, and more than 10 per cent has used cocaine.
Violation of prohibition is widespread.
Prohibition increases violence, because buyers and sellers of drugs cannot use the
official justice system to resolve disputes. Prohibition also plays a key role in nonviolent
kinds of crime, by diverting criminal justice resources from the deterrence of
non-drug crime. It facilitates the corruption of police, judges and politicians, partly
because huge profits are at stake, partly because the legal channels of influence are
not available.

The homicide rate rose rapidly in America after 1910, when many states adopted
drug and alcohol prohibition laws, and it rose through World War I and during the
1920s as efforts to enforce alcohol prohibition increased, but then fell dramatically
after Prohibition’s repeal in 1934. In the late 1960s, homicide again increased
dramatically and stayed at historically high levels throughout the 1970s and 1980s,
coinciding with a drastic increase in drug law enforcement.
Prohibition also means diminished health. In a black market, the drug users face
a heightened uncertainty concerning the quality and purity of the drugs they
purchase, plus an incentive to consume drugs using methods, such as injection, that
are unhealthy but give the biggest bang for the buck.
During alcohol Prohibition in the US, deaths due to alcoholism rose relative to other
proxies for alcohol consumption, presumably because consumption of adulterated
alcohol increased.
On top of these deleterious effects, using prohibition to deter drug consumption
means society cannot levy taxes on sales of drugs or collect income taxes from those
working in the drug trade. This means drug suppliers and drug users – persons
deliberately breaking society’s rules – gain at the expense of taxpayers generally.
(Jeffrey Miron, The Observer, 15 August 1999)
5 Extract from ‘There are greater dangers to children than
mobile phones’
Yesterday’s report by the distinguished experts on the risk posed by mobile phones
is a good review of the current state of knowledge, and its conclusion can be
summed up as a large ‘Don’t know’. That is the kind of conclusion which modern
society, with its lust for certainty, is bad at handling.
Their recommendation that the use of mobiles by children should be minimised errs
on the side of caution, as it should. But then, a similar committee in the 1950s,
if told that people would spend 25 hours a week in front of a cathode-ray tube,
would probably have recommended that children should not watch ‘inessential’
television.
Only three effects of using mobiles have been proved. One is a slight heating of the
brain. On that basis, we might as well prevent children from wearing hats.
The second is a speeding up of reaction times in robust, controlled experiments that
compare random groups of people whose heads were subjected – or not – to the low
levels of microwaves emitted by mobile phones. That is worrying, because it suggests
that this kind of radiation has some biological effect. That warrants caution and
further research.
The third is an increased chance of death or injury from using a mobile while
driving. The risk is greatest when the phone is hand-held but still significant when it
is hands-free, because the driver visualises the disembodied other party and cannot
see the road or its obstacles.
Let us, therefore, get the priorities in the right order. We should stop the parents
using mobiles in the car, not the children using them in the street.
The serious threats to the health of children – apart from being run over by an adult
driving without due care and attention – include teenage pregnancy, drugs and
abduction. The trick is how to balance information and education with allowing
children to take responsibility for their own choices.
One of the joys of mobile phones – all right, well not joy exactly – is that they do
allow the parents of teenagers to give them some independence while preserving an
invisible electronic umbilical cord.