By Steve Hynd
A new report in medical journal The Lancet is stirring some notice, particularly since one of its authors is the UK government's former chief drugs adviser, sacked after he publicly disagreed about the decision not to decriminalize cannabis. The study looks at the effects of various drugs on their users and on those around the users and comes up with the following chart of comparative harm:
The study shows alcohol around three and a half times more harmful in aggregate than cannabis or marijuana, something advocates of decriminalizing weed have long claimed.
the paper's authors argue that their system - based on the consensus of experts - provides an accurate assessment of harm for policy makers.
"Our findings lend support to previous work in the UK and the Netherlands, confirming that the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm," the paper says.
"They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy."
Needless to say, lobbyists for the alcohol industry are less than pleased.
Linky-loved.
ReplyDeleteI have my doubts about that study. The idea that meth is less harmful than heroin strikes me as highly questionable. Meth does serious permanent damage to your brain, fast, and the paranoid violence is legendary.
ReplyDeleteI don't think expert consensus is the way to do it. Look at hospital admissions and other hard data.
The question is in how they weighted the various types of harm in coming up with that chart. One note I got from the article was the point that one of the main reasons for alchohol being on top of the list is its pervasiveness and availability compared to some of the others, which greatly upped its societal impact. When it comes to personal harm, the article itself wasn't very clear on what was being measured, whether long or short term health effects or both. If they were measuring long-term effects, I would have expected more of a boost for tobacco given the societal cost of cancer treatments. Still worth noting in any case.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first arrived in the Arctic I had a Deputy Minister of Justice tell me that we should put bales of cannabis in all Nunavut's communities. Why? Because on pot you get mellow or worse silly on booze you kill or beat your wife, or kids or friends then commit suicide because you are ashamed.
ReplyDelete