Showing posts with label David Nutt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Nutt. Show all posts
Drug stats
"In 2009 David Nutt was the chair of the UK's government's Advisory Council on t Misuse of Drugs. He shared the view I have described here: that drugs should be legally classified based on how harmful each drug is to individuals and to others. So, for example, if heroin is the most dangerous drug it should be the most restricted drug with the harshest punishment attached to its possession or distribution; if alcohol is the least dangerous drug, that would justify legal access compared to other recreational drugs. This method of classification seems so rational that many people in the UK probably assume it happens de facto, and by extension assume that alcohol is the safest drug because it is one of the easiest to acquire.
This metric of risk has been quantified by Nutt and his team in multiple papers. In one study, to come up with an unbiased way to determine the 'danger' of a drug, they calculated a score for each drug based on various types of harms: mortality rate, damage to physical health (e.g. cirrhosis; viruses), the degree to which it impaired mental functioning, likelihood of injury, committing a crime, family adversities, economic cost to society and so on (there were sixteen types of harms in total, nine describing harms to oneself and seven describing harms to others in society). Once these dangers were combined mathematically, each drug was given a relative score to every other drug, such that a drug scoring 50 was half as harmful as one that scored 100. Because not all types of harms are equally bad this was also reflected in the drug's score: drug-related mortality – the extent to which your life is shortened by that particular drug – was mathematically weighted as the most important harm of all.
The drug with the highest score on this danger scale overall (across both self and other danger categories) is alcohol. Alcohol scored over 70 on the scale of relative harm. This is because although the top three most dangerous drugs for harm to oneself are heroin, crack cocaine and methamphetamine, alcohol is the drug associated with the highest danger of harm to others (and is also associated with a relative high danger of harm to oneself). Tobacco placed sixth – less harmful than alcohol, heroin and cocaine.
In comparison, other recreational drugs such as magic mushrooms were associated with almost no harm at all. In fact, ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms were all at the bottom of the chart with scores of almost zero (in the case of magic mushrooms, actually zero) for danger to others; both scored below 10 for harm to oneself. Cannabis, although more harmful than mushrooms, was still less harmful than alcohol and a little bit less harmful than tobacco.
This scale was first developed and used to rate alcohol along with other drugs in a paper from 2007. Two years later Nutt wrote an editorial in the 'Journal of Psychopharmacology' arguing that the risks involved in horse riding – which is associated with one serious adverse event per approximately 350 'exposures' – exceeded those associated with the drug ecstasy, which is associated with one serious adverse event per approximately 10,000 exposures. (The article was entitled 'Equasy – An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms'.) Later that year Nutt made a statement that alcohol was more dangerous than many illegal drugs, leading to his subsequent dismissal from the position on the government's Advisory Council. But although his statement – and the 'Equasy' article – was undoubtedly provocative, it was also doing exactly what it should do: using scientific evidence to advise policy about the relative risk of recreational drugs."
Camilla Nord, in The Balanced Brain [pg 134-136]
