In our discussions predicting the answers to some questions about drug use and abuse, I added a fifth to Hartmann's five questions (2007, p. 204): of the popular addictive drugs that people like to use for fun, which are the most and least harmful? The answer is that alcohol is by far the most harmful drug in popular use.
 |
Harm to users and to others for
some popular drugs of addiction. |
As Nutt, King and Phillips tell us in their paper
"Drug Harms in the UK: A Multicriteria Decision Analysis" (MCDA), although "heroin, crack cocaine, and metamfetamine were the most harmful drugs to individuals" (2010), when harm to others and society is taken into account, alcohol is the addictive drug that causes the most harm, easily beating both heroin and cocaine in the harm it causes to users and to society.
This article by Professor Nutt and other experts caused a lot of controversy when it was published in
The Lancet, one of the worlds most prestigious academic medical journals. The controversy was not among experts in the field, who are in agreement, but among politicians and ordinary people, who were upset because the solidly supported conclusions of the paper flatly contradict some popular ideas about drugs: it is false that heroin is more harmful than alcohol, for example. It is also true that many illegal drugs, such as marijuana, are much, much less harmful than the legal drugs alcohol and tobacco.
 |
Breakdown of criteria contributing
to harm ranking of addictive drugs. |
This upset politicians and some others because they want to keep heroin illegal, and champagne legal, they want cocaine to be illegal, but red wine legal, they want beer to be legal, but marijuana illegal. And they need a good reason for discriminating, to say which popular drugs should be legal and which illegal. Expert opinion, supported by the facts, is that if harm, especially harm to others, is the reason for deciding which drugs are legal and which illegal, then the drug that should be most severely punished is alcohol. But we don't see politicians or citizens in the pub saying that people who produce and sell champagne, cognac and Singha beer should be executed or imprisoned for a very long time, nor do we see those people saying that beer drinkers are criminals worse than marijuana and
yaa baa addicts - but the facts are that alcohol is the most harmful drug that is in popular use.
Either current law in many countries, including Australia (my country), the US, the UK, and Thailand, is both seriously irrational and immoral, or there is some other good reason for the popular discrimination in favour of some drugs, the ones that politicians and many people happen to use, so that it is not merely blind prejudice to force the personal preferences of one group on everyone.
Is there any such good reason why such a harmful drug as alcohol, which is especially harmful to others and to society, is legal, while less harmful drugs such as heroin and
yaa baa are illegal? I can think of no such reason, but perhaps someone else can. Can you?
Hartmann, P. (2007).
Quest 2 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York McGraw-Hill.
Nutt, D. J., King, L. A., & Phillips, L. D. (2010, November 6). Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis [Abstract].
The Lancet, 376(9752), 1558 - 1565.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61462-6 (As indicated, this link is to the article abstract (summary). The full journal article with the support is available from the webpage, but requires registration with The Lancet.)
I've already foreshadowed this question in previous comments: What do my answer to discussion question 5 above and Hartmann's answers to her discussion questions 1 - 4 have in common?
ReplyDeleteThis will be important for the essays you are writing next week, and is also raised by Hartmann in her questions analysing the example persuasive paragraph on page 227 of Quest.
As well as responding to the ideas in my blog post, you might also like to share your ideas on the question here.
In my post, I used a doi (digital object identifier). This is a recent innovation in academic citations. It aims to overcome the problem of broken web links to academic sources by replacing them with a unique reference ID that will always work.
ReplyDeleteIf your source has a DOI, you should use that in preference to a URL web link.
DOIs are used only for academic sources such as journals - newspapers, magazines and other non-academic publications do not use them.
The Economist, whose editorial policy has long supported Hartmann's proposal in her paragraph on page 227 that all drugs be legalized, has a response to the paper in The Lancet, along with a slightly different graph of the main results reported ("Scoring Drugs", 2010).
ReplyDeleteReference
Scoring drugs: Drugs that cause most harm. (2010, November 2). The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_cause_most_harm
In my point of view, governments around the world let harmful drugs such as alcohol and tobacco be legal because they gain a large sum of money from taxing those drugs. Moreover, most people also agree to keep them legal and willingly pay for them. They probably think that there must be some legal drugs causing them get drunk in order to feel relieve and relaxed.
ReplyDelete