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NEWS: News.com.au - 01/11/10 'Alcohol more dangerous than other drugs'

hoptis

hoptis

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Alcohol more dangerous than other drugs
By Maria Cheng
From: AP
November 01, 2010 12:14PM

ALCOHOL is more dangerous than illegal drugs like heroin and crack cocaine - when the ripple effect on society is taken into consideration, a new UK study has found.

British experts said alcohol was most destructive because it was so widely used and had devastating consequences not only for drinkers but for those around them.

The study evaluated substances including alcohol, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and marijuana, ranking them based on how destructive they were to the individual who took them and to society as a whole.

Researchers analysed how addictive a drug was and how it harmed the human body, in addition to other criteria like environmental damage caused by the drug, its role in breaking up families and its economic costs, such as health care, social services, and prison.

Heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine, or crystal meth, were the most lethal to individuals. When considering their wider social effects, alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine were the deadliest. But overall, alcohol outranked all other substances, followed by heroin and crack cocaine. Marijuana, ecstasy and LSD scored far lower.

The study was paid for by Britain's Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and was published online in the medical journal, The Lancet.

"Just think about what happens (with alcohol) at every football game," said Wim van den Brink, a professor of psychiatry and addiction at the University of Amsterdam. He was not linked to the study but co-authored a commentary in the Lancet.

When drunk in excess, alcohol damaged nearly all organ systems. It was also connected to higher death rates and was involved in a greater percentage of crime than most other drugs, including heroin.

But experts said it would be impractical and incorrect to outlaw alcohol.

"We cannot return to the days of prohibition," said Leslie King, an adviser to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and one of the study's authors.

"Alcohol is too embedded in our culture and it won't go away."

King said countries should target problem drinkers, not the vast majority of people who indulge in a drink or two. He said governments should consider more education programs and raising the price of alcohol so it isn't as widely available.

Experts said the study should prompt countries to reconsider how they classified drugs. For example, last year in Britain, the government increased its penalties for the possession of marijuana. One of its senior advisers, David Nutt - the lead author on the Lancet study - was fired after he criticised the British decision.

"What governments decide is illegal is not always based on science," said van den Brink. He said considerations about revenue and taxation, like those garnered from the alcohol and tobacco industries, may influence decisions about which substances to regulate or outlaw.

"Drugs that are legal cause at least as much damage, if not more, than drugs that are illicit," he said.


News.com.au
 

Alcohol more harmful than heroin, cocaine, says study which includes social effects
From: AFP
November 01, 2010 3:08PM

ALCOHOL is more harmful than illegal drugs like heroin and crack cocaine, according to a new study by British researchers.

Scientists looked at the dangers to both the individual and to wider society and found that alcohol was the most dangerous substance, according to the study by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs.

The results fly in the face of long-held opinions about which drugs pose the greatest dangers, with the authors claiming they demonstrate “the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm”.

“They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol... is a valid and necessary public health strategy,” said the authors.

Drug experts on the committee devised their own system to judge substances and believe their consensus provides a valuable assessment which could guide policymakers.

The research, published in medical journal The Lancet, looked at the how much a drug harms the human body as well as other factors such as what its use costs the health care and prison systems.

Heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine - or crystal meth - were found to be the most deadly.

But when the wider social effects were factored in, alcohol was the most dangerous, followed by heroin and crack cocaine, said the study.

Substances were given a mark from zero to 100 based on certain criteria, with alcohol scoring 72 overall followed by 55 for heroin and 54 for crack.

One of the study's authors was David Nutt, a former British government drugs adviser during the previous Labour administration.

He was sacked after a disagreement with the government over the decision to upgrade the classification of cannabis.

The ISCD says its remit is to investigate and review scientific evidence relating to drugs, free from political concerns.

AFP


The Australian
 
NEWS: SMH - Booze Worst Drug

[EDIT: Threads merged. hoptis]

SMH said:
Booze the greater of two evils
Nick Crofts
October 26, 2010

A century of propaganda has blinded us to the obvious: decriminalise and regulate less harmful drugs.

Getting our drug and alcohol policies right is impossible - at best we can keep improving. Debate rages over what ''improvement'' means in this context. Harm reduction proponents believe we need guiding principles to direct and assess progress - the best we have so far is the degree of diminution of harms associated with alcohol and other drug use in a community.

Debate also rages around definition of harms: is dependence on a drug, of itself, a harm? Is use of a drug, per se, a harm? Many, especially from perspectives of religion or morality, would answer yes, even if the use is accompanied by no other measurable harm. And then, harm to whom? To the individual, their family, the community, the nation? What if these are in conflict - what's good for me, in my estimation, is bad for the community, in your opinion?

These are complex and dynamic issues, similar in nature to many other issues we have complex social mechanisms to negotiate - to constantly debate and improve. We continually adduce evidence of what works best, or better, and seek to understand how best we can reconcile competing social interests, while protecting everyone's human rights.

But, for some reason, we do not aspire to apply this to drugs. Evidence abounds; we do not use it. Human rights are continually abrogated; drug users are excepted, because they are in some way less than or other than human. Logic is defenestrated - because these are drugs we are talking about.

The Age editorial on Saturday demonstrates this logicus interruptus - setting up a syllogism and shying away from the inevitable conclusion. As I read the editorial, excitement mounted. A news report showed that, because of rising prices of alcohol, a result of deliberate policy to decrease alcohol consumption in this demographic, young people are moving to ecstasy instead.

"Public policy that tries to change people's behaviour in defiance of market forces which reflect widely held values is going to struggle," the editorial said. For ''struggle'' read ''fail''; the exemplar is alcohol prohibition. In the US in the 1920s, alcohol was prohibited (for moral reasons); a black market flourished; organised crime emerged and has grown stronger ever since. The editorial saw the parallel: ecstasy is prohibited - and a huge criminal trade results.

There are unintended consequences of the policy aimed at decreasing the harm from alcohol: given strong demand, the market simply shifts to another drug - from alcohol to ecstasy. Unintended they may have been, but hardly unpredictable. An informed and accurate editorial.

Ecstasy is not harmless; no drug is. Let me say the unsayable: alcohol is the far more harmful drug.

The move to ecstasy is driven partly by market forces but also by culture, with many young people preferring the psychological and physical effects of ecstasy to those of alcohol. Violence is not associated with ecstasy use, as it is with alcohol and other nasty drugs such as amphetamines.

Does the global impact of current policy, on balance, increase or decrease harm? Policy here has moved young people from the use of a more dangerous drug to that of a less dangerous drug. But more importantly (and predictably) is that public policy now works to make things worse. Because this less dangerous drug is illicit, there is no quality control - ''the result is pills of unpredictable but declining purity, which increases the risks of serious adverse effects for users''.

Working through the logical chain of argument in the editorial, I began to think I might be reading a historic statement. Inexorable logic, inevitable conclusion. But then this: ''This does not mean that society must surrender to the alternative of condoning illicit drug use." A major copout, and a failure of logic.

Society does not need to ''surrender'' - it can make peace. Further, it can abandon useless military metaphors that oversimplify complexity, conscripting thought to uniformed obedience. This is surrender of one's critical and compassionate faculties to propaganda.

Here is a situation in which we've moved young people from using a more dangerous drug to a less dangerous one. But instead of applauding and supporting, we do what we can to make the less dangerous drug more dangerous by stigmatising and criminalising young people, and by exposing them to dangerous chemicals in uncontrolled environments.

The two propositions above give a different conclusion - "of necessity, because these things are so". The alternative - and logical - conclusion is that we have our policy settings half right and very wrong; prohibiting ecstasy and criminalising its users makes things much worse and achieves predictable dire consequences.

That the editorial could not find a logical conclusion, having neatly set the syllogism in place, is not surprising; the weight of a century or more of propaganda is heavy, and a logical conclusion would have brought down a veritable storm of outrage.

Time we faced it, though - in fact way past time: the only logical, evidence-based, sensible and humane thing to do is to decriminalise and regulate less harmful drugs.

Professor Nick Crofts is a senior research fellow at the Nossal Institute for Global Health, University of Melbourne.
Click to expand...
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/booze-the-greater-of-two-evils-20101025-170se.html
 
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great read. the last post echoed my thoughts pretty nicely. too bad it's not gonna change a damn thing
 
They say that alcohol is to embedded in society to remove it and it won't go away??? uuummmmm..... how about Marijuana???? This article reaks of government hypocrisy.
 
Good read, been a few articles lately on alcohol being worse then most other drugs.
I don't know if this is common, but in my two years of bluelighting I have definately seen an increase in the last few months.

However, I agree with Ecstasy, Cocaine and Heroin being less harmful to society as a whole, but I refuse to see it with meth at this point. I have seen too often people get fucked up on Meth and be in a violent state because of it, let alone the personal damage that it causes on the body.

It is great to see some articles noticing the damage of alcohol and saying that decrim/legalisation is the correct direction rather then prohabition.
 
thestudent14 said:
However, I agree with Ecstasy, Cocaine and Heroin being less harmful to society as a whole, but I refuse to see it with meth at this point. I have seen too often people get fucked up on Meth and be in a violent state because of it, let alone the personal damage that it causes on the body.
Click to expand...

It's a study that has actually measured this in the UK. Anecdotal evidence that probably represents a very small percentage of the meth using population doesn't really stand up in the same way the research will. The drug isn't used widely enough to represent a real threat to maintaining societal order.
 
Ahaha. No shit dude. Alcohol has the second to third worst withdrawal symptoms, it fucks up your body beyond measures of comprehension (cancer, chronic long term health problems, you name it, alcohol produces it). I find that in this back-ward arse society that we live in, shouldn't it be more reasonable to sell Cannabis and tax that shit, rather than alcohol? Because, no matter what, people are still going to get caught drunk-driving to work on an RBT, and fuck their lives up, yet driving while under the influence of a natural, planetary-derived drug will possibly get you a criminal conviction/do time in the joint. Share your thoughts with me, BL'ers!
 
haha your just preaching to the converted Mr. Squiggle.
Most bluelighters absolutely think cannabis should be decriminlised or legalised. However I don't advocate drink or stoned driving one bit ;)

Although I do think drink driving is the more dangerous of the two.
 
I have to totaly agree with the title... Alchohol has significantly shortened the lives of several people i knew, drink driving no, stoned driving (on pot of course) yes... fuck thats how i learned to drive, and ive NEVER had a traffic accident apart from sliding off a slipery roundabout one time but that was me and my veichle, one flat tyre... big woop.
 
See I've seen stoned drivers say it's safe and that you never crash when drving stoned, and then watch them freak out at any car that is "too" close to them. It's true you become extra cautious, but I think you lack the reaction speed to be driving high.

Although one time I did the most amazing catch of my life when high haha.
 
^
I've kicked all my mates arses at table tennis stoned as fuck, while they sipped on their 1st or 2nd beer.

Driving + drugs = BAD. Now that's a big blanket statement, we need to start really learning about individual drugs and their effects etc, not just making retarded laws that say DUI of any mind-altering substance should be illegal and punished severely.

Sober drivers kill other sober drivers every single day. I'm not condoning DUI of any substance, just saying the current system... is... well... shit.
 
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NEWS: International Business Times.com Drug experts say alcohol worse than crack, her

[EDIT: Threads merged. hoptis]

NEWS: International Business Times.com Drug experts say alcohol worse than crack, heroin

Alcohol is a more dangerous drug than both crack and heroin when the combined harms to the user and to others are assessed, British scientists said on Monday.

Presenting a new scale of drug harm that rates the damage to users themselves and to wider society, the scientists rated alcohol the most harmful overall and almost three times as harmful as cocaine or tobacco.

According to the scale, devised by a group of scientists including Britain's Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) and an expert adviser to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), heroin and crack cocaine rank as the second and third most harmful drugs.

Ecstasy is only an eighth as harmful as alcohol, according to the scientists' analysis.
Professor David Nutt, chairman of the ISCD, whose work was published in the Lancet medical journal, said the findings showed that "aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy".

He said they also showed that current drug classification systems had little relation to the evidence of harm.
Alcohol and tobacco are legal for adults in Britain and many other countries, while drugs such as ecstasy and cannabis and LSD are often illegal and carry the threat of prison sentences.

"It is intriguing to note that the two legal drugs assessed -- alcohol and tobacco -- score in the upper segment of the ranking scale, indicating that legal drugs cause at least as much harm as do illegal substances," Nutt, who was formerly head of the influential British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), said in a statement about the study.

Nutt was forced to quit the ACMD a year ago after publicly criticising ministers for ignoring scientific advice suggesting cannabis was less harmful than alcohol. [ID:nLV79496]
The World Health Organisation estimates that risks linked to alcohol cause 2.5 million deaths a year from heart and liver disease, road accidents, suicides and cancer -- accounting for 3.8 percent of all deaths. It is the third leading risk factor for premature death and disabilities worldwide.

In an effort to offer a guide to policy makers in health, policing, and social care, Nutt's team rated drugs using a technique called multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) which assessed damage according to nine criteria on harm to the user and seven criteria on harm to others.

Harms to the user included things such as drug-specific or drug-related death, damage to health, drug dependence and loss of relationships, while harms to others included crime, environmental damage, family conflict, international damage, economic cost, and damage to community cohesion.

Drugs were then scored out of 100, with 100 given to the most harmful drug and zero indicating no harm at all.
The scientists found alcohol was most harmful, with a score of 72, followed by heroin with 55 and crack with 54.
Among some of the other drugs assessed were crystal meth (33), cocaine (27), tobacco (26), amphetamine or speed (23), cannabis (20), benzodiazepines, such as Valium (15), ketamine (15), methadone (14), mephedrone (13), ecstasy (9), anabolic steroids (9), LSD (7) and magic mushrooms (5).
Click to expand...

International Business Times.com
 
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thestudent14 said:
LSD and Magic mushrooms were the least harmful? That suprises me.
Click to expand...

How does that suprise you?

Neither have the ability to physically harm you, even with insane dosages and frequency.

Doesnt mean they should be respected any less however, just because they cant hurt you doesnt mean your not gunna get your arse handed to you from time to time ;)

Plus, this study was assesed by overall impact to the user and society. Never seen mushrooms or LSD harm anyone, or seen people commit destructive acts while on them. Any harm that comes from usage of these chemicals is a result of what you do while on them, and not the drugs themselves.
 
and going by this little 'dangerousness' chart, Mephedrone is only a fraction more harmful than MDMA. Everyone seems to think the devil is at work here...

Honestly i saw little to no real 'harm' come from drone use when it was widespread. Sure i saw a lot of compulsive redosing, but the addictive behavior never lasted beyond the weekend.
 
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