Bad Math

This "screen shot" of my television screen on December 1, 2016, shows a moment during a 30-second advertisement for a business called Addiction Network.  The large-print screamer is meant to impress the viewer with how serious drug and alcohol abuse is.  But aside from the fact that nowhere do we learn what geographical territory is covered by this statement (if it's the whole world that's considerably less impressive than if it's just the U.S.), the math somehow wasn't done right.

The claim is that 13 people die from drug or alcohol abuse every hour, and we are told there are 125,000 such deaths annually.  There being 8,766 hours in a year, we can check the arithmetic.  If we assume the 13 per hour is correct we can see that 13 times 8,766 is only 113,958, not 125,000, which is 8.8% fewer deaths, so let's hope the 13 per hour figure is correct.

But almost certainly the starting number was the 125,000 deaths annually, and the math problem faced by whoever wrote and approved this ad was to calculate how many deaths that is per hour.  125,000 divided by 8,766 hours in a year is 14.25.  14.25 rounds down nicely to 14, so why does the ad say only 13?

Below is a screen shot from a few seconds later in the ad.  I'm not going to complain about the pointless ellipsis following "Call now for help."  I'm not going to complain about how the the word "Or" should not have been capitalized.  No, look at the guy playing a doctor.

He's wearing a tee-shirt under scrubs under a stethoscope and a name tag lanyard.  So far so good.  But examine his eyeglasses.  You'll see that although he is plainly looking through the left lens of his spectacles as you would expect, he is just as plainly looking over the right lens.