Cocaine found at Breighton
 

Oh dear oh dear. :ugh:

Cocaine worth £5 million found at Yorkshire airfield - Yorkshire Post

:ugh: is one of the most inappropriately used emoticons on forums.

It would be justified if we learned that cocaine was known to be coming into Breighton and wasn't stopped by an arrest.

As it is, the police, Border Force and whoever provided the intelligence have done exactly what we want them to do surely? :D Over to you, CPS.

Terrific result methinks. Proves the cooperation between GA and enforcement is actually working.

We had a visit from the Pegasus team at our place and rather trying to be heavy handed an Draconian they wanted to get us on side. Seems to be working and helps keep this filth of our streets.

In others news, Cessna p210 for sale, good range flyer, excellent useful load capabilities, owner lost license.

I took the :ugh: emoticon in the OP as expressing 'stupid b@stard' at the person who has allegedly (we don't know who is guilty of what yet) perpetrated a nasty anti-social crime using a GA aeroplane, and thereby bringing GA into disrepute with the public.

A great result, but what constitutes unusual activity from the above when operating in to normal airstrips, aerodromes etc.

I guess someone lugging a suitcase around with 25kg of dope in it? :p

bose-x :p I never thought of that :p

But to the general public what is strange about your average bizjet pax carrying a 25 Kg case, or a private twin with a couple of pax carrying small cases, don't get me wrong it is great that these sort of people are caught and swift justice applied.

I reported "suspicious activity" once. An unfamiliar Piper Arrow parked overnight after a 100+ mile trip at our 400m untended strip when the pilot could have used an 800m runway with fuel and services 4 miles away. That and a cockpit left with absolutely no junk in it, which is totally unheard of anywhere in GA !

The border chappies were very interested, but I never found out if anything came of it.

G

I think I know what you meant Bose.... ;)

Out of curiosity, I was trying to work out just how nasty cocaine is. Trying just using standard internet sources to find out much about the effects of cocaine in Britain. Eventually I found this from the Office of National statistics http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_320841.pdf

This document believes that 2.2% of the adult population have taken powder cocaine in a given year.


What does this mean? Well playing with stats a minute:-

4.3/1m = 0.43/100,000

However that's for the whole British population, and we know that only 2.2% take cocaine. So, we get per user, a fatality rate of

0.43/0.022 = 19.5 fatalities / 100,000 users.

By comparison, the fatality rate for GA is about 1 per 100,000 flight hours.

I'm not sure we have a reliable estimate anywhere for hours per year flown by an average GA pilot, but let's go for 40.

So, per year, the risk of being killed by being a regular GA participant 1 per 100,000 times 40, or 40 fatalities per 100,000 users. I'm going to assume that's male pilots (in practice probably slightly worse, as I suspect that statistically women do less daft things when in charge of aeroplanes.)




Now, I'm no drug use promoter - the only recreational drug I've ever taken is alcohol, and I have no plan or desire to ever take any other. But it does rather look like the risk per year, for an adult male, of being killed taking this drug is about half that of being killed flying a light aeroplane, for a PPL.

Or put more bluntly, being a PPL is twice as likely to kill you as being a coke-head.

Feel free to pick apart my statistics anybody, but I thought it was an interesting little thought experiment. I'm sure that cocaine is worse than I show because, for example, I'm not showing HIV deaths from needle originated infections, and nor am I showing the people damaged but not killed by drugs (on the other hand, nor am I showing people injured but not killed in flying accidents.)

G

Fan of Professor David Nutt.

The issue isn't death - it's the other long term damage done to self, close relatives, wider society and the supply chain that makes it worse than blatting around the skies in a C150.

Ah, but is this death directly by the effects of cocaine use? Or does it include the fatal accidents accomplished by stoned coke heads too?

I really hate simple minded, context free, statistical analysis :mad:

Continuing to play devil's advocate, so please attack my arguments at your leisure...

Some context might be the amount of money that gets spent on a cocaine versus a flying habit.


A bit of searching around the internet suggests that a gramme of cocaine costs about £50, and a typical dose is about 1/10th of a gramme. So, about a fiver a dose. Toxic levels apparently start about a gramme a day.

Let's say that a reasonably heavy users takes cocaine twice a day. So that's 365 x £5 x 2 = £3,650 per year spent in cocaine. [Disclaimer, I have no idea if this is high or low, my total personal knowledge of drug use was a few people who smoked cannabis when I was a student.]



Comparing that to our 40 hr per year PPL, York flying school at Breighton show C150 hire at £100/Hobbs hour, so that'll be around £110 per logged flying hour. So, the sum is straightforward - a reasonably keen PPL will be paying about £4,400 per year to feed their habit.


So, my...
(Yes absolutely) shows that as well as being half as likely to kill you, being a coke-head saves you about £1k per year compared to being a PPL.

G

Not going to save money by giving up his flying habit to become a coke-head, but finds the numbers interesting.

The main problem with illicit drug trafficking, is that they can't tax it. It also takes people with addictive personalities away from the legal, taxable forms of recreation.

Good point!

Going back to my example, that 40 hours in a C150 probably used about 1000 litres of AVGAS. Fuel duty is 40p/L, so that's about £400 in fuel duty.

The rest of the £4.4k, so £4k, probably all attracted VAT, so that's about £660.


Interesting, so the basic cost of a PPLing habit is about the same as a cocaine habit. The difference being that a PPL pays an extra £1,060 in tax which the cocaine user doesn't.

Good for society, but not a great advert for flying as a hobby in itself !

G

Unfortunately drug addiction does not stay isolated to a fixed dosage at a fixed price. It becomes ever more addictive and then the spiral starts as th habit needs to be fed. This leads to crime and violence when the money runs out to feed the habit. This is when the rest of society starts to suffer the effects.

Drugs have a far reaching spider of influence that is dark and nasty. I care little if an addict kills themselves as its a individuals right to chose stupid or not. But it's not isolated to their own personal demons it effects the rest of society.

Astoundingly, the governmint have the brass neck to charge VAT on fuel duty.

Your points Bose are clearly the given wisdom.

Interestingly however, when I googled "social effects of cocaine use" and several variants on that - I could find basically nothing that described any reasonably rigorous research which actually described these sort of effects.

It reminds me of the former home secretary who fired David Nutt for daring to compare the risks of legal and illegal activities. Talking of whom, he had a go a few years ago at providing some evidence here: Drugs that cause most harm: Scoring drugs | The Economist

Specifically this...

http://media.economist.com/sites/def...6_WOC504_0.gif

Which puts the damage caused by powder cocaine a long way behind alcohol, and about the same place as tobacco.

G