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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

#11

Post by sk5t »

pervycreeper wrote: post #2

>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…

Probably no mathematical basis at all. Asking drug-harm experts to rank them is thoroughly unscientific, unless the topic of study is the opinion of drug-harm experts and nothing else.

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

#12

Post by Alex3917 »

themgt wrote: post #7
pervycreeper wrote: post #2

>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…

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…

"they asked the experts in the field to rate the harm on various factors"

IIRC they asked psychiatrists and not pharmacologists.

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

#13

Post by phren0logy »

themgt wrote: post #7
pervycreeper wrote: post #2

>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…

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.

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

#14

Post by jlgreco »

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 thing seems very bullshitty to me.

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

#16

Post by pervycreeper »

themgt wrote: post #7
pervycreeper wrote: post #2

>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…

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…

> and they aggregated and compared those ratings

Well, see, that's the tricky bit right there.

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

#17

Post by themgt »

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.

The fact that you can quantify a thing by a given metric doesn't change the subjectivity of the choice. You can measure the amount a drug causes the average user to miss work, or die sooner, or number of missing teeth, or anything, but any combination of these will still always be: a) missing other relevant metrics b) representative of one perspective on what is valuable to measure, and what constitutes harm

The idea that any one set of metrics and measurements have more intrinsic truth-value than simply aggregating the internal mental weights of all the relevant experts in the field is just like, your opinion man.

If you want to present an alternate, mathematical model for drug harm and explain and argue for the validity of the choices you make for how to measure harm and how the data was gathered over what time period, etc etc - no one's stopping you.

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

#18

Post by fennecfoxen »

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. :P

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

#20

Post by bcoates »

themgt wrote: post #7
pervycreeper wrote: post #2

>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…

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…

I wouldn't ask experts about application frameworks, I'd ask the people who use them. Similarly, drug experts, despite their profession, are not in a position to know the aggregate harm levels of various drugs. It's a misapplication of expertise and statistics, which apparently is the sort of thing the lancet has a fondness for.

If you wanted to make a legitimate measure of the harm of various drugs despite the inability to build a mathematical model, you could do a survey asking people about how often they use various drugs and their opinion of the harm they've been caused by various drugs (as user or non-user). You'd get systemic bias from peoples imperfect ability to judge harm but at least you'd have something instead of nothing.

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