Notes

THE ‘ECSTASY PILL’ SCANDAL

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether what I'm going to say is true or not. I can’t comment any further due to legal reasons.

The heart rate for people aged 18 to 25 years old - including the typical ICMS undergraduate student - should be around 65 beats per minute (bpm).

In other words, if you repeatedly measured a typical student’s resting heart rate, you'd get data points randomly fluctuating like this:

66, 62, 65, 65, 65, 62, 69, 63, 68, 66, 65, 64, 64, 67 and so on.

(In case you wondered: the x̄ for that is 65 bpm, with an s of 3.5 bpm).

Now here’s a story from many terms ago.

An infamous Manly drug dealer formerly known as ‘Eddie E’ and whose location is currently unknown once convinced a group of students to buy his Ecstasy pills.

His argument:

- the pill significantly reduces the heart rate to very low levels
- users will feel ultra-relaxed, experiencing near-zero stress
- even if an assignment is due the next day and they’ve not done it, students will still go “Cheers, mate!” with their cold beer bottles at Donny’s Bar that night

The pills were allegedly sold for $1.50 each (black market price in NSW is $3.70 to $4.50: see https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/negkzk/new-south-wales-has-the-cheapest-pills-in-australia).

The students could not resist.

Do you think the students duped, or was the drug dealer honest?

The two hypotheses that were floating around at that time were:

(A) “Nah, the drug could have been a fake sugar pill: it didn’t work. Ecstasy selling for $1.50? No way.”

(B) “Holy cow! If it was Eddie E, then it must have been the real thing: it should have worked!”

I bet most of you today would say, “it’s a scam, the pills were fake”.

But the heart rate of one of those students who ingested the pills was rumoured to be about 55 bpm, as reported by Manly Police Dept. that investigated the scandal.

The troubling questions the cops were grappling with at that time were:

1. If the pills were fake (that is, there was no real ‘Ecstasy’ effect), is it normal for a student’s regular resting heart rate to hit 55 bpm?

2. What is the chance/probability of recording a 55 bpm under a ‘no ‘Ecstasy’ effect’ scenario: is it 5% or smaller? Or is it higher, meaning, having a 55 bpm can happen even when not consuming Ecstasy (like there’s a 20% chance, a 50% chance etc. of it happening)?

Can you answer those questions and settle this mystery?

Was Eddie E guilty of selling them real Ecstasy pills and were the students guilty of consuming them?

The case is still ongoing pending the manhunt for Eddie E, who is presently in hiding, so let’s keep this story between ourselves, alright fellas? I don’t want to get into trouble.