Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: March 23, 2007 10:40:15 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Addiction INC: Only the Most Harmful Substances Get Mass-
Media Marketing, Most Widely Used
ROYAL MEDICAL COMMISSION REPORT ON DRUGS CONCLUDES:
TOBACCO AND ALCOHOL ARE "MORE DANGEROUS THAN LSD"
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
The Independent (UK), 23 March 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article2383902.ece
Alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than many illegal drugs
including the hallucinogen LSD and the dance drug ecstasy,
according to a new scale for assessing the dangers posed by
recreational substances.
Drug specialists say the current system for ranking drugs - class A
for the most dangerous to class C for the least dangerous, as set
out in the Misuse of Drugs Act - is irrational, arbitrary and
"lacking in transparency".
Scientific evidence shows that heroin and cocaine are correctly
ranked as class A drugs as they do cause the most harm. But LSD and
ecstasy come close to bottom of the league in terms of harm caused,
yet they are also labelled as class A.
Alcohol is legal and widely used but comes fifth in the "harm"
table, ahead of amphetamines and cannabis, which are ranked as
class B and class C respectively. Tobacco is also ranked as more
harmful than cannabis.
The league table of 20 drugs drawn up by drugs specialists is
intended to provide a scientifically based model for policy makers
of the harm they cause. It shows that the dangers they pose bear
little relationship to the official classification, on which the
penalties for drug use are based. The eight drugs ranked as most
dangerous include two that are unclassified while the eight judged
least dangerous include two class A drugs.
The report comes a fortnight after an independent commission called
for a radical overhaul of Britain's drug laws which it said were
driven by a "moral panic". The commission, set up by the Royal
Society of Arts, said the aim of public policy should be to reduce
the harm drugs cause, not send people to jail. It proposed
reclassifying drugs - legal and illegal - according to the harm
they do.
Professor David Nutt, who works in addiction psychiatry at the
University of Bristol and who led the latest research, said: "The
current drug classification system is arbitrary in the way it
assesses harms. It is not fit for purpose. We have tried to come up
with a better system by looking at the factors that contribute to
drug use and the harms they cause. We should review the penalties
for drug use in the light of the harms they cause and have a more
proportionate response."
Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research
Council and co-author of the study, said: "The object was to bring
a dispassionate approach to a very passionate issue. Some
conclusions might appear to be liberal in stance, but that was not
our starting position. We intended to reach conclusions that were
evidence-based."
"Alcohol and tobacco are way up there in the league table, not far
behind heroin and cocaine and street methadone. Society has not
only come to terms with alcohol and tobacco but is well aware of
the harms associated with them so we felt it was useful to include
them as calibration points for other drugs."
All drugs were marked on the physical harm they caused to the
individual user, their tendency to cause dependence and their
social harm, including their effect on families, communities and
society [such as crime and NHS costs]. Each was given an overall
harm score by two separate groups of experts which yielded roughly
similar results.
There was little evidence that ecstasy caused extensive harm,
despite its widespread use by young people in clubs and pubs at
weekends. Cannabis has been cited as a cause of schizophrenia but
the authors said a causal relationship had not been established. If
it were, evidence showed no more than 7 per cent of cases could be
attributed to use of the drug.
Professor Leslie Iversen, of the University of Oxford, said there
was a widespread myth that skunk, from the tips of the cannabis
plant, was 20 to 30 times more powerful than that available 30
years ago. "It is simply not true," he said. "The Advisory Council
on the Misuse of Drugs looked at this carefully. Cannabis resin
[hash] has changed little and is about 5 per cent
tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Skunk has 10-15 per cent THC. That
makes it two to three times more powerful, not 20 to 30 times."
The study, which took five years to complete, is published today in
The Lancet. Professor Blakemore said: "We hope that policy makers
will take note of the fact that the resulting ranking of drugs
differs substantially from their classification in the Misuse of
Drugs Act and that alcohol and tobacco are judged more harmful than
many illegal substances."
---
ALCOHOL 'IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN ECSTACY'
The Telegraph (UK), 23/03/2007
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/
2007/03/23/nalcohol123.xml
Alcohol is ranked much more harmful than the Class A drug ecstasy
in a controversial new classification system proposed by a team of
leading scientists.
The table, published today in The Lancet medical journal, was drawn
up by a team of highly respected experts led by Professor David
Nutt, from the University of Bristol, and Professor Colin
Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council.
The authors proposes that drugs should be classified by the amount
of harm that they do, rather than the sharp A, B, and C divisions
in the UK Misuse of Drugs Act.
They say the basis of the Act is ill-defined, opaque, and seemingly
arbitrary and overestimates the risks of ecstasy, which kills
around ten people annually of the half a million people who use it
every weekend, while neglecting those of alcohol, a legal substance
which kills more than 300 annually by acute poisoning, and many
tens of thousands by road traffic accidents, cirrhosis, gut and
heart disease.
In the paper, the team argues that it would make much more sense
for drugs to be reclassified on a rational basis that can be
updated as new evidence emerges, and more easily than the current
rigid category system now in use.
Prof Blakemore added that policies of the past four decades
“clearly have not worked”, given the ubiquity and low price of
illegal drugs, and that fresh thinking is now required.
Today’s call to overhaul the UK drug classification system, which
will be examined by the forthcoming UK Drug Policy Commission, is
likely to receive popular public support, according to research
into attitudes to drugs by the Academy of Medical Sciences’
DrugsFutures project.
Harmful drugs are currently regulated according to classification
systems that purport to relate to the harms and risks of each drug.
However, “these are generally neither specified nor transparent,
which reduces confidence in their accuracy and undermines health
education messages,” said Prof Blakemore.
“The most striking observation is that there is no statistical
correlation between this ranking of harm of drugs and the ABC
classification.”
In the new system legal drugs, such as alcohol and nicotine, are
ranked alongside illegal drugs.
The new ranking places alcohol and tobacco in the upper half of the
league table. These socially accepted drugs were judged more
harmful than cannabis, and substantially more dangerous than the
Class A drugs LSD, 4-methylthioamphetamine and ecstasy.
“Alcohol is not far behind demonised terrors of the street such as
heroin and cocaine,” said Prof Blakemore.
But the conclusions are likely to be ignored, according to coauthor
Prof David Nutt from the University of Bristol, who has worked with
the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs.
Because some individuals with a particularly genetic make-up are at
greater risk, as has been seen with rare deaths connected with
ecstasy, ministers have been reluctant to change classifications
despite the relative safety for the rest of the population.
Several millennia of human experience with alcohol, its
pervasiveness in industrialised cultures, and the US experience
with alcohol prohibition (1920–32) make it unlikely that any
industrialised society will criminalise alcohol use, he said.
But that still leaves taxation and regulation as methods of
control. “Alcohol is a drug we should take very seriously.”
The team identified three main factors that together determine the
harm associated with any drug of potential abuse: the physical harm
to the individual user caused by the drug; the tendency of the drug
to induce dependence and addiction; the effect of drug use on
families, communities, and society
Within each of these categories, they recognized three components,
leading to a comprehensive “matrix of harm”.
Expert panels gave scores, from zero to three, for each category of
harm for 20 different drugs.
All the scores for each drug were combined to produce an overall
estimate of its harm. In order to provide familiar benchmarks, for
comparison with illicit drugs, five legal drugs of potential misuse
(alcohol, khat, solvents, alkyl nitrites, and tobacco) and one that
has since been classified (ketamine) were included in the
assessment. The process proved simple, and yielded roughly similar
scores for drug harm when used by two separate groups of experts,
one of consultant psychiatrists who were on the Royal College of
Psychiatrists’ register as specialists in addiction and the second
including a range of expertise, from police chief constables to
scientists. “The two show very good agreement,” said Prof Nutt.
Cannabis, the subject of much recent debate, was ranked below
tobacco, despite the evidence for a link with psychotic episodes in
about 7% of schizophrenics. Since the expert panels were asked to
assess the harm of drugs in the form that they are currently used,
this ranking took account of the widespread use of skunk, which is
about twice as potent than traditional cannabis resin.
Other experts still doubt there is a cause and effect relationship
between cannabis and psychosis, while a study that claimed genes
place some people at particular risk requires confirmation.
Prof Nutt said that young people believe that the establishment
lies and distorts the dangers posed by drugs and the only way to
restore their confidence is to rely on hard evidence, not arbitrary
classifications.
“It is a landmark paper, a real step towards evidence based
classification,” commented Prof Leslie Iversen of the University of
Oxford, a member of a working group of the Academy of Medical
Sciences, though he added that there is still more to be done to
take on board new understanding of addiction arising from
neuroscience.
The Academy has been asked by the Government to undertake an
independent review of the issues raised in the Foresight report
‘DrugsFutures 2025?’ The review will take on board the opinions of
many hundreds of people from across the UK who have taken part in
face to face discussions and an online debate at
www.drugsfutures.org.uk, which is open until end of this month.
Participants are clear that the current classification of drugs is
“confusing and inconsistent”. A majority of participants support a
health-based approach to drug use and treatment, rather than a law
enforcement approach. Many also point out that alcohol is one of
the most harmful drugs in common use, to both individuals and wider
society.
There appears to be little support for decriminalising drugs
however. Professor Sir Gabriel Horn, Chair of the Academy of
Medical Sciences group considering the findings of the DrugsFutures
project said “The UK Government have asked us to explore the likely
future impact of recent developments in science on addiction, drug
use and treatments for mental health. We have heard views from both
members of the scientific community and of the public which
indicate that the current classification system is in need of review.
“Such a review must be underpinned by evidence on the harms of drug
use to the individual user, to families and to society, and be
considered in the light of the latest evidence from the brain
sciences.”
Drug misuse is one of the major social, legal, and public-health
challenges in the modern world.
In the UK, the total burden of drug misuse, in terms of health,
social, and crime-related costs, has been estimated to be between
£10 billion and £16 billion per year.
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