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

economist.com

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

#21

Post by seandougall »

phren0logy wrote: post #13
themgt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They explained it pretty simply - they asked the experts in the field to rate the harm on various factors, and they aggregated and compared those ratings. Drugs and the harm they cause to an individual and others is highly subjective and contextualized within a culture/society. There is not going to be some math formula to give you the answer. If you wanted to know the best web application framework to build your nex…

>Drugs and the harm they cause to an individual and others is highly subjective and contextualized within a culture/society. There is not going to be some math formula to give you the answer. I disagree. I am a psychiatrist and participated in some clinical research. Step 0 is quantifying. It's not always perfect, but if you don't know what you are measuring, your measurements are useless.

But there's a bar graph! What more could you possibly ask for? Units? Definitions? Those just add visual clutter and make the bar graph less pretty. Beauty is truth, after all.

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

#22

Post by MacsHeadroom »

kghose wrote: post #5

Expanding on an point by grimtrigger, is this related to damage per user, or overall damage? If governments no longer controlled heroin, and the number of users spiked to be the same as the number of users of alcohol would the graphs change. I suspect that because of dependency, strong drugs would still lead to increases in crime, since they would still cost something, and their users would still not be in a position…

You suspect wrong on both accounts. Many governments have legalized Heroine. Doing so has always lead to marked decreases in use. Lower use means lower demand means less drug related crime.

Additionally, when money saved on drug enforcement is appropriated for needle exchanges and rehab centers, the price of a days worth of heroin drops to 0 for the user. Areas with decriminalized heroin and needle exchanges see the greatest reduction in use and drug related crime.

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

#23

Post by ISL »

sk5t wrote: post #6

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.

Indeed. If everyone were using shrooms like they drink beer, highway driving would be an adventure.

Doing this sort of analysis "right" (trying to determine which drugs are least-bad, quantitatively) would be a daunting challenge.

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

#24

Post by jahabrewer »

jlgreco wrote: post #14

Where does the societal harm from anabolic steroids come from? Is it because anabolic steroids have an illegal black market? Why don't LSD and mushrooms have that same black market induced societal harm then? And how does harm to self from anabolic steroids come under harm to self from cannibis? Has anyone ever killed their liver with cannibis? Anabolic steroids can do that, and much more, to your body. This whole th…

> Where does the societal harm from anabolic steroids come from?

I think the argument for this would be similar to the argument for using models with less atypical body types. If all the guys I saw on TV when I was a kid were super jacked, I'd probably feel more pressure to be that way and possibly use anabolic steroids to get there.

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

#25

Post by [deleted] »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #18
sk5t wrote: post #6

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.

Are stairs more dangerous? No. Is the sum of all accidents on the stairs more costly to society than all accidents mountain-climbing? Probably. There's a reason the occasional mandatory workplace-safety education sessions you have around your office focus on things like ladders and picking up packages: people actually do those things. Postscript: Also, auto accidents cause kill more people in the US than terrorism. :…

[deleted]

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

#26

Post by Encosia »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #18
sk5t wrote: post #6

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.

Are stairs more dangerous? No. Is the sum of all accidents on the stairs more costly to society than all accidents mountain-climbing? Probably. There's a reason the occasional mandatory workplace-safety education sessions you have around your office focus on things like ladders and picking up packages: people actually do those things. Postscript: Also, auto accidents cause kill more people in the US than terrorism. :…

That was sk5t's point.

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

#27

Post by MacsHeadroom »

mattangriffel wrote: post #9

Wait, how is methamphetamine use not harmful to others? Doesn't methamphetamine use specifically lead to erratic behavior?

Very very rarely. For most methamphetamine users, you can't even tell when they're using.

Markedly different from alcohol, which frequently causes erratic and even extremely dangerous behaviour.

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

#28

Post by aresant »

From the original study:

"Many of the harms of drugs are affected by their availability and legal status, which varies across countries, so our results are not necessarily applicable to countries with very different legal and cultural attitudes to drugs." (1)

And I'm still confused - are they weighting for per-user, or overall?

Under a per-user model this is interesting.

Under an "overall" model this is obvious (legality of alcohol)

Since neither the linked article or the original study make this clear, I'm voting by clicking "flag"

(1) Source: http://www.chanvre-info.ch/info/en/IMG/pdf/drug-harms-in-the...

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

#30

Post by ams6110 »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #18
sk5t wrote: post #6

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.

Are stairs more dangerous? No. Is the sum of all accidents on the stairs more costly to society than all accidents mountain-climbing? Probably. There's a reason the occasional mandatory workplace-safety education sessions you have around your office focus on things like ladders and picking up packages: people actually do those things. Postscript: Also, auto accidents cause kill more people in the US than terrorism. :…

Funny you should mention workplace safety.. where I work there is a campaign to have people take the stairs instead of the elevators, a typically busybody approach to improving employee fitness. However an employee is far more likely sustain an injury by using the stairs compared to riding in an elevator, and particularly as they were encouraged by the employer to do so, they would have a pretty clear worker's compensation claim.
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