A new study suggests alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack

>to rank 20 drugs (legal and illegal) on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society, such as damage to health, drug dependency, economic costs and crime

What I don't understand about these studies is what mathematical basis they use for comparing the relative impact of these various factors. I would assume that these would all be completely different, and as a consequence, incommensurable. However, studies like this seem to have found appropriate relative weights for these factors, and were able to add them all together. I would be interested in knowing if it's really possible to do this without producing a figure that's totally bogus, and if so, how.

Pdf: http://www.chanvre-info.ch/info/en/IMG/pdf/drug-harms-in-the...

This seems to me like a really simple-minded article--who is surprised that the most available, legal, inexpensive, socially-acceptable drug has the largest impact? By this measure walking down a flight of stairs is more dangerous than mountain climbing.

Ive never thought about it like that, thanks.

tl;dr If you want to be healthier, switch from drinking wine to huffing butane.

I've posted this before, but since I can't seem to find it in the search I'll just copy paste the explanation of why this is propaganda rather than science:

- The full methodology isn't actually published anywhere.

- The rankings are created by combining a lot of different factors that don't have anything to do with each other, e.g. by combining harm to the user with harm to society. This means that drugs like coffee end up being more dangerous than drugs like heroin, simply because more people use coffee than heroin so the total social costs are greater.

- The harms for drugs are measured as they are typically used, rather than correcting for things like differences in demographic and route of administration. This leads to drugs like heroin looking more dangerous than they are, because people who have drug abuse problems tend to gravitate toward drugs like heroin. (Whereas people who use, say, Khat tend not to be the worst of the worst as drug abusers go.) This is especially problematic since how drugs are typically used depends on the laws that exist to encourage or discourage their use. E.g. when drugs like tobacco and coffee used to be illegal, they were used more similarly to how crack and heroin are typically used today. So the idea of using these rankings, which are meaningless to begin with, as an argument for setting public policy is completely nonsensical.

- The harms of the drugs caused by prohibition are not accounted for. (E.g. they are counting people using dirty needles and impure/unknown/fake drugs as being a harm that stems from heroin, but they aren't counting using dirty needles and fake Starbucks as being a harm that stems from drinking coffee.)

-The way they assess the harms is by doing a survey of mainly psychiatrists and just asking their opinion. It's not scientific at all. If the people they were asking for their opinions were experts this wouldn't be scientific, but the people they're asking aren't even experts.

-The idea that some drugs are more harmful than others is anti-scientific to begin with, since the dosage makes the poison. E.g. there is no way to say whether weed or heroin is more harmful, since it's all about patterns of usage. Same for the idea that some drugs are more addictive than others.

- They're not accounting for the benefits of drug use, only the harms.