he’d done a back-of-the-envelope calculation comparing the injuries and deaths caused by horseback riding—which he dubbed “equasy”—to those produced by MDMA. But even when he discounted the downstream costs of drug use such as addiction, violent behavior, and traffic accidents, his numbers showed the dangers of equasy and ecstasy several orders of magnitude apart. For every 60 million tablets of MDMA consumed, Nutt found 10,000 adverse events, or one for every 6,000 pills popped. He then compared that number to the 1-in-350 tally for horseback riding and published the results.
