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| Clanger |
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Clanger
Stirrer
Joined: 27 May 2004
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 Posted: 16:46 - 26 May 2009  Post subject: |
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| Vin wrote: | If there is a case for this being illegal than there is also such a case for booze being illegal. |
I went to a conference a couple of years ago (as I ran a community/youth centre), and it was about drugs, illegal and otherwise, and there was someone from the Ministry of Health government department, saying that had they the time all over again, to re-classify all the drugs properly, nowadays with all the evidence given, they would have alcohol rated as one of the top killers, as it IS addictive, users CAN GET abusive, create destruction, cause death, that it has a higher dependency than most current class A drugs.
The reason the government WON'T reclassify it now, is because it has been legal for so long, re-education would be enormous and would far outweigh the revenue they get for it as it stands. That is why both alcohol AND tobacco (another legal killer) get heavily hit by the taxes each year.
I wish I could find the paper I got for it, as I'm sure the list of negatives towards both alcohol and tobacco were much longer than of which I listed...
But it just goes to show, that people can be so damn ignorant of what legal/illegal drugs can do. Branding something illegal then warrants all ignoramuses to come out of the woodwork and preach...is just as bad as all those born again Christians!!!
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Shay HTFC
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Joined: 18 Mar 2007
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| Kickstart |
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Kickstart
The Oracle
Joined: 04 Feb 2002
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| Posted: 14:20 - 28 May 2009 Post subject: |
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Hi
I have a feeling the above graph is being misused.
It is from classing all those substances based on 3 factors of "Physical harm", "Dependence" and "Social Harms", each rated between 0 (no risk) and 3 (extreme risk), each of which are the average of 3 other parameters (Physical Harm from Acute, Chronic & IV harm, Dependence from Intensity of pleasure, Psychological dependence & Physical dependence, Social Harms from Intoxication, Other social harms & Healthcare costs). The graph is just the average of those 3 major groups. Might well be more meaningful to give some kind of balance to each of those (eg, would it make sense to mulitply the physical harm and social harm values by the dependence value?), let alone rating the sub groups by their importance.
Further example one of the parameters for "Social Harms" was healthcare costs, and not certain that this (or other points) take into account the level of useage in this study. Ie, if there was a 10 fold increase in the use of ecstasy to bring it up towards the level of use of alcohol would that have affected the
From the study linked to in the BBC article on those ratings (last page):-
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Our analysis gave equal weight to each parameter of harm: individual scores have simply been averaged. Such a procedure would not give a valid indication of harm for a drug that has extreme acute toxicity, such as the “designer” drug contaminant MPTP, a single dose of which damages the substantia nigra of the basal ganglia and induces an extreme form of Parkinson’s disease. Indeed, this simple form of the system of scoring might not deal adequately with any substance that is extremely harmful in only one respect. Take tobacco, for instance. Smoking tobacco beyond the age of 30 reduces life expectancy by an average of up to 10 years (A1) (Ref 2). It is the commonest cause of drug-related deaths, and it is a huge burden on the Health Service. But its short-term consequences and social eVects are modest. Of course, the weighting of individual parameters could easily be changed, to emphasize one aspect of risk or another, depending on the importance attached to each. And other procedural mechanisms could be introduced to take account of extremely high values for single parameters of harm.
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After all, for social harms (including healthcare costs) Heroin only rated 2.54, compared to 2.21 for alcohol. Does that seem vaguely accurate for a single individuals use of these? From the figrues here it appears that heroin in 2007 killed 876 (587 England and Wales, 289 for Scotland) with 0.1% of the population using it. If that useage was 50% (so getting towards that of alcohol) with the same ratio of deaths then that would be ~440k a year, well over triple the death rate even vaguely attributed to alcohol. Doesn't really seem to square the rating if that rating takes into account useage levels.
All the best
Keith
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