BudGuy
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This is an old study, but it's one of the most important ones in drug science and policy, and it's something I've referred to literally hundreds of times since I first read it.
The lead researcher on the paper is Prof David Nutt. He was, at one point, a scientific advisor to the governing Labour party at the time, but he was abruptly sacked after he released a paper which fairly compared the harms of two very comparable voluntary recreational activities - horse riding and taking ecstasy, and after surmising from the data that horse riding was a far more dangerous activity, posed the question why one was seen fit for government regulation and the other was not. Of course, governments cannot be seen to be associated with scientifically-backed policy conclusions and good sense, so they cut ties with him immediately.
The study itself takes a new "multi-criteria" approach to measuring the harms of any given drug, both legal and illegal, analysing the harm of each drugs across countless categories from harm to the user, harm to the user's relations, harm to society, harm to the economy, etc, with the scores negotiated by teams of experts in each of the different forms of drug harms, and compiles it all into a few handy graphs which tells us what any sensible person can already ascertain without much research: the legal drugs tobacco and alcohol are far dangerous than cannabis, and pretty much every other drug including most psychedelics, in almost every category of possible harm. Alcohol's largest two categories of harm combined (personal injury and family adversity) have a larger impact than EVERY harm of cannabis combined.
Of particular use in the study is Figures 2, 3 and 4 where the disparity in drug harms is laid bare. Comparing the drug classification system in the UK to the actual measured harms of those drugs according to this study shows an almost INVERSE relationship, where the LEAST harmful drugs like LSD and Mushrooms get the most severe penalties for possession as class A, whereas some of the MOST harmful drugs alcohol and tobacco are freely available and, in the case of booze anyway, culturally encouraged.
Cannabis doesn't necessarily come out the study in a purely positive light - it's a sort of middle of the list drug, deemed more harmful than many psychedelics, though to be fair the biggest problem in studying cannabis is decoupling it from tobacco since they are mostly consumed in tandem in illicit contexts, and indeed a lot of the harms of cannabis can be explained by its legal status rather than its biological effect (its biggest two categories of harm are economic harm and crime, both of which dissolve entirely with legalisation). Having said that, it still raises the very obvious question - how can the government morally and scientifically justify its class B controls on cannabis, and similarly its class A controls on virtually harmless psychedelics, and its zero tolerance approach to cannabis users when it regulates the most dangerous drug on Earth and makes it an integral part of its economy?
We all know that answer is that it can not.
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