HUNGRY BEAST

[thatcherschild]

Fab feature on drugs policy etc from the Hungry Beast site:

 

http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/drug...icy-horses-arse

[Crunchy]

not a bad article, hopefully it goes to air.

OPINION PIECE

 

‘Equasy’. That’s a word invented by Professor David Nutt, the recently sacked head of the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Nutt’s a bit of a smartarse. But not a nutter.

 

Equasy is his term for Equine Addiction Syndrome. He used it in an article comparing the risk of harm from horse-riding with that of taking ecstasy. Sadly, Nutt’s study failed to also evaluate the risks involved with riding a jinged-up horse while under the influence of ketamine. Which it’s probably fair to assume are pretty high.

 

He got some pretty narky glares from Gordon Brown & Co when that report was published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. And he really started ticking people off when he quoted from a New Scientist editorial which argued that it’s safer to give ecstasy to a stranger than peanuts. But last week was the last straw.

 

Nutt gave a speech to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London where he made the grossly irresponsible evidence-based assertion that contrary to his government’s view, cannabis should not be classified as a lethal drug. He also compared the likelihood of having a psychotic-like experience due to pot-smoking (2.6 times more likely than non-smokers) with that of getting lung cancer from tobacco-smoking (20 times more likely than non-smokers).

 

This is pretty much how politicians responded:

 

“But that’s just silly! You can’t compare apples with oranges. Cannabis, unlike tobacco, is an illegal drug. Which means that it’s illegal. And therefore, exceedingly dangerous. Which is why and because it’s illegal. Obviously. Tobacco might also be really bad for you – but it’s legal. Meaning, it’s safer than it would be if we made it illegal. You follow?”

 

THIS IS THE LOGIC WE CURRENTLY LIVE UNDER PEOPLE. Essentially, illegality garners a substance the equivalent of a risk-assessment handicap. Which is great news for those of us who like our government policies deeply rooted in medieval irrationality with a side of hysteria. But not so good for people employed by the government to provide “simple, accurate and understandable statements of scientific fact”.

 

Nutt is just one of a growing number of voices calling for a rethink of drug policies. One of the leading organizations driving this campaign is LEAP – Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. As you might have gathered from the name, its members include current and former cops, judges, lawyers and correctional services workers – the coalfacers, if you will. They are urging countries like the US, UK and Australia to move away from the criminal ‘War on Drugs’ and reframe the issue of drug use as a social and health concern. None of these people claim drugs aren’t harmful or endorse drug use. They explicitly acknowledge that taking drugs is dangerous. Their position is that human beings engage in a multitude of risk-taking activities – boxing, sky-diving, dating footballers, etc – that we don’t feel the need to criminalise, and that the consumption of a number of currently-illegal drugs should probably fall into the same category.

 

The fact that public perception of ‘illicit drugs’ has been wildly distorted by imbalanced media coverage is also now abundantly clear. Consider the analysis of drug fatality reports in Scotland from 1990 to 1999, part of Alasdair J M Forsyth’s PhD “Distorted? A quantitative exploration of drug fatality reports in the popular press”.

 

Forsyth compared the coroner’s ‘official’ toxicological statistics with the reporting of drug deaths in Scotland’s most popular newspapers to find a ‘toxicology to newspaper’ ratio.

 

• Paracetamol – implicated in 265 deaths – was reported once. 265:1.

• Morphine: 431 deaths x 6 newspaper reports = 72:1.

• Aspirin/Salicylate: 12 deaths x 0 reports.

• Heroin/Diamorphine: 342 deaths x 75 newspaper reports = 5:1.

• Amphetamines: 36 deaths x 13 reports = 3:1.

• Ecstasy/MDMA: 28 deaths x 26 reports = 1:1 (almost).

 

Those odds don’t come close to stacking up against a comprehensive ranking of harm published in The Lancet in 2007. The assessment – coauthored by Nutt – of 20 legal and illegal substances took into account factors relating to physical harm, dependence and social harms. It found heroin and cocaine topped the ladder while cannabis, LSD and ecstasy were less dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. Read between the lines: your local pub is probably more dangerous than a rave.

 

Portugal took a cold shower back in 2001 and decided to decriminalize all personal use of drugs. And while the number of users has remained about the same, they’ve seen a significant fall in ill health and deaths from drug taking. According to one recent report on the move, the data shows that “by virtually every metric” their framework “is a resounding success”.

 

How long is it going to take for the collective hallucination our policy makers seem to be suffering to subside, and for us to start making rules that actually reflect reality?