New British Drugs and Alcohol Study a Big Yawn
Friday, March 23 2007 @ 10:47 PM EST
bbsnews.net
Governments do not want to follow science on the recreational drug issue
BBSNews Commentary 2007-03-23 -- A new study in The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, shows that anti-drug laws are not based upon actual harm and if this is news, it certainly is old news. Sure it's great that there is more scientific evidence on hand to show that classification of recreational drugs is arbitrary and certainly contrary to reality, but it is not new knowledge. Any drug policy reformer worth their weight in salt can cite chapter and verse about how government statistics, particularly in the United States, are manipulated and misleadingly reported year after year to uphold the farce that is the War on Some Drugs.
The study, "Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse" takes two groups of professionals, one set from the fields of health and the other from law enforcement and they had the two groups rate common recreational drugs harm from worst to least. Five legal drugs were included, especially the two most glaringly obvious, tobacco and alcohol. The tobacco and alcohol lobbyists will no doubt not be amused that reality is finally catching up with them. Not that there is a chance that either one will be outlawed even as the less dangerous drugs will continue to garner time for a citizen in a steel cage for their use, sale or production.
"We also included five legal drugs of misuse (alcohol, khat, solvents, alkyl nitrites, and tobacco) and one that has since been classified (ketamine) for reference. The process proved practicable, and yielded roughly similar scores and rankings of drug harm when used by two separate groups of experts. The ranking of drugs produced by our assessment of harm differed from those used by current regulatory systems."
The researchers point out that current assessments of drugs harm in almost every case have little scientific basis and are based upon largely arbitrary criteria, decades old and apparently quite wrong.
"Our findings raise questions about the validity of the current Misuse of Drugs Act classification, despite the fact that it is nominally based on an assessment of risk to users and society. The discrepancies between our findings and current classifications are especially striking in relation to psychedelic-type drugs. Our results also emphasize that the exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary. We saw no clear distinction between socially acceptable and illicit substances. The fact that the two most widely used legal drugs lie in the upper half of the ranking of harm is surely important information that should be taken into account in public debate on illegal drug use."
Drug policy reformers have long known that if actual harms from currently illicit drugs were considered rather than emotional knee-jerk reactions, and often times right-wing evangelically driven hysteria, then drug laws would actually be tailored to the reality on the street instead of the way some foolish moralizer's would rather pretend it could be, just by wishing. And a sensible classification system would of course include tobacco and alcohol. They are dangerous and addictive drugs.
For instance, Brian C. Bennett, author of "Assessing the Marijuana 'Gateway' Theory" ["Teen Drug Abuse" Thomson Gale 2006 p. 51-55] has been debunking numbers from the Office of National Drug Control Policy for many years. Bennett's Web Site is a treasure trove of data, charts and graphs that uses US government provided facts to show that the War on Some Drugs is terribly misguided and not at all based upon truth.
Another book, just out, that also looks at the data the ONDCP publishes comes to the same conclusion as Bennett's work. "Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics: A Critical Analysis of Claims Made by the Office of National Drug Control Policy," by Matthew Robinson and Renee Scherlen [2007, State University of New York Press.]
A Drug Reform Coordination Network (DRCNet) book review brings the author's points to bear:
"In order to gauge the accuracy of ONDCP pronouncements, the authors look at three broad sets of claims made by ONDCP: Claims of success in reducing drug use, claims of success in "healing" America's drug users, and claims of success in disrupting drug markets. Robinson and Scherlen examine the annual National Drug Strategy reports beginning in 2000 and extending through 2005 to look at what ONDCP says it is accomplishing in these three broad areas. These three categories describe what it is ONDCP is supposed to be achieving, but, as the authors so comprehensively illustrate, ONDCP is all too ready to resort to deceptive and misleading information."
The Lancet study is important to those that care about the facts and science of world drug policy, but it is meaningless to policy makers who are steered by the religion, tobacco and alcohol lobby's as well as the mega pharmaceuticals companies. This study as well as the work by Bennett, Robinson and Scherlen et al will simply be ignored.
Even though it is the ultimate in common sense to include tobacco and alcohol in a rational list of recreational drugs, there is little chance that any government will change the status quo even in the face of the facts. The lobbyists are just too powerful in the United States in particular. It's a crying shame as well as a hugely expensive boondoggle this War on Some Drugs.
But policy makers seem to be hooked on it. Sadly, by continuing to support this completely failed policy that keeps the criminal underworld in business, and even worse, by not regulating in a legal framework the lucrative business of currently illicit drugs, policy makers are enablers of terrorists who wish to reap the huge sums that only a drugs black market can garner them. The policy makers and their willful ignorance enable the terrorists to have this lucrative market giving them access to obscene amounts of cash.
This is not mere conjecture, there actually is an idea floating around to buy all the opium from the Afghan farmers who grow opium poppies to keep it off the streets. That might be a laudable policy. But without looking at all the other much more popular drugs and creating a legal framework for their use, the black market for drugs will continue to rake in huge profits.
Roughly the same number of twelfth graders in the US each year try marijuana, about half. That number has stayed relatively flat for more than 28 years. That translates to huge numbers of actual people over decades that US drug policy has labeled as criminals. Even though this latest study from The Lancet concludes that tobacco and alcohol are more harmful than marijuana and ecstasy, don't look for any sensible changes to drug laws in the United States soon. |
