Misleading Headline Says 10% of Americans Go to Work Baked

There is a headline making the rounds from Mashable.com right now whose headline bluntly states, “Nearly 10% of Americans Go to Work High on Weed“.
Now, if you visit Mashable.com for news about anything other than maybe potato recipes, you were likely too blinded by the cutesy illustrated infographic attached to the article to have noticed how shoddy the actual attempt at journalism was.

Let’s face it; all too often stats can be skewed in the favor of whoever is spitting them out to support their case. But at the heart of any statistic is numbers, and the Mashable survey admits right out of the gates that you can find bigger numbers at a high school JV soccer game than you will find surveyed in their poll.
The author of the piece, Yohana Desta, says, “About 534 Americans shared their marijuana and prescription drug taking habits when it comes to the workplace. The sample was gathered using SurveyMonkey Audience.”
So, we’ve got a poll of a mere 534 people on something called Mashable, powered by something called SurveyMonkey – who can argue with that science?!
Of that micro-sliver of a sample group, Desta tells us that “9.74% of Americans have gone to work under the influence of marijuana”.
Wait… is it that roughly 9.74% of those polled “have gone to work” baked, or that roughly 9.74% of those polled “go to work” baked?
It is a matter of past tense versus present tense, or past habits versus current ones. Two distinctly different questions, ignorantly wrapped into one by Desta’s half-baked reporting of Mashable’s poll results.
In fact, their very own illustrated infogasm clearly states that of the 534 people who participated in the poll, 92.13% said they would not go to work high in the future, and 94.38% said that they would not get high at work in the future.
At the end of the day, the poll is just about as pointless as it is harmless.
So what if 10% of “Americans” are getting stoned before work?
If they couldn’t get the job done, they wouldn’t have the job to begin with!
Show some real numbers regarding the productivity of that sativa-fueled employee compared to his or her co-workers who might never touch the devil’s weed, but suck down coffee and cigarettes every hour, on the hour.
If anything, the click-bait-style Mashable poll results show how unreliable anonymous polling is on socially taboo subjects, especially when your sample group is outnumbered by your average movie theatre audience.