Here's my favorite ramp for the day excerpted from our podcast which you can find over at

Tom Harbin.com.

Welcome back to the Tom Hartman program.

I'm Alex Austin filling in for Tom and I'm going to just go to Steve in Chicago.

Steve, you're on the air.

Yes, I wanted to make a couple of points.

With regard to the previous caller, I certainly respect her opinion, but I think that there's a fallacy at work here.

She's confusing correlation with causal relationship.

There are all sorts of things that happened during this time frame.

I mean in the late 1970s we start to see a decline in terms of the stability that Americans feel

about their lives, their economic situation.

You know after four decades beginning you know at the end of

the great depression until the late 1970s Americans consistently

saw a rise in their standard of living a stability in their, and then all of a sudden that falls off a cliff,

and it's not a coincidence that in the 1970s, by the way,

before these drugs were introduced

is when we had an all-time high crime rate in this country so you know it's it just doesn't

add up that the question isn't the drugs which again as you point out rightly you know we

are over-prescribed sometimes it's that the conditions that cause us to need these drugs are what was aggravated during this period.

So Steve, a lot of times, a lot of times in science, you know in social sciences you say it's the it's the

other z's right so the correlation causation there are a lot of factors going

in and controlling for all those factors is part of what

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