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I can live with that.
Alcohol, tobacco make top 10 list of risky drugs
British study rated the substances more dangerous than marijuana, Ecstasy
Smoking and drinking pose a bigger risk to society than some illegal substances, a new British study says.
LONDON - New "landmark" research finds that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal systems, according to a new British study.
In research published Friday in The Lancet magazine, Professor David Nutt of Britain's Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances.
Nutt and colleagues used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user, the drug's potential for addiction and the impact on society of drug use. The researchers asked two groups of experts — psychiatrists specializing in addiction and legal or police officials with scientific or medical expertise — to assign scores to 20 different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, amphetamines and LSD.
Nutt and his colleagues then calculated the drugs' overall rankings. In the end, the experts agreed with each other — but not with the existing British classification of dangerous substances.
Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy.
‘Current drug system is ill thought-out’
According to existing British and U.S. drug policy, alcohol and tobacco are legal, while cannabis and Ecstasy are both illegal. Previous reports, including a study from a parliamentary committee last year, have questioned the scientific rationale for Britain's drug classification system.
"The current drug system is ill thought-out and arbitrary," said Nutt, referring to the United Kingdom's practice of assigning drugs to three distinct divisions, ostensibly based on the drugs' potential for harm. "The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary," write Nutt and his colleagues in The Lancet.
Most dangerous drugs
Research recently published in the medical journal The Lancet rates the most dangerous drugs (starting with the worst) as follows:
1. Heroin
2. Cocaine
3. Barbiturates
4. Street methadone
5. Alcohol
6. Ketamine
7. Benzodiazepines
8. Amphetamine
9. Tobacco
10. Buprenorphine
11. Cannabis
12. Solvents
13. 4-MTA
14. LSD
15. Methylphenidate
16. Anabolic steroids
17. GHB
18. Ecstasy
19. Alkyl nitrates
20. Khat
Source: The Lancet
Tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services.
Nutt hopes that the research will provoke debate within the UK and beyond about how drugs — including socially acceptable drugs such as alcohol — should be regulated. While different countries use different markers to classify dangerous drugs, none use a system like the one proposed by Nutt's study, which he hopes could serve as a framework for international authorities.
"This is a landmark paper," said Dr. Leslie Iversen, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. Iversen was not connected to the research. "It is the first real step towards an evidence-based classification of drugs." He added that based on the paper's results, alcohol and tobacco could not reasonably be excluded.
"The rankings also suggest the need for better regulation of the more harmful drugs that are currently legal, i.e. tobacco and alcohol," wrote Wayne Hall, of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in an accompanying Lancet commentary. Hall was not involved with Nutt's paper.
While experts agreed that criminalizing alcohol and tobacco would be challenging, they said that governments should review the penalties imposed for drug abuse and try to make them more reflective of the actual risks and damages involved.
Nutt called for more education so that people were aware of the risks of various drugs. "All drugs are dangerous," he said. "Even the ones people know and love and use every day."
I can live with that.
Their entire methodology is flawed.
cannibis is more risky than solvents?
madness
i smoke a hit before work and i have the best day at work i've had in months
harmless?
I don;t see how MJ is more dangerous than solvants or steriods... that makes no sense.
damn ecstasy must be no better than a sugar overdose.... I say we fill a kiddie pool of it and jump on in!!
gesh. I have yet to hear of someone dying form an overdose of MJ.
Alcohol is 5 because it's so widely used, and of the most easiest to obtain.
Bull list.
I smoked before work yesterday.....and as i was slowly leaving a convenient store the car in front of me got rear ended and totally CHODE BLOADEDeven though they were going slow....I just kept thinking, "Man that coulda been me. If I were driving normally I would have been the one getting bloaded."
Harmless?
Weed is worse than ex, acid and anabolic steroids? These people have never smoked weed and are ing morons. Acid makes you crazy, ex puts holes in your brain and can kill you, but weed is worse
I agree with you about roids andalcohol but LSD is an overly maligned drug. It does not make you crazy(unless the person was inclined that way to begin with), it does not stay in your system, it's impossible to OD on it....it also doesn't screw up your chromosomes as of often stated.
All the major hallucinogens like Pscilocybin, Mescaline and LSD are relatively harmless(as long as you aren't on the road or something), non addictive and don't cause permanent side effects(PCP excluded).
I'd say the most dangerous are alcohol, heroin(and the other opiates) and methamphetamine(which ironically isn't even included on the list).
Alcohol definitely gets a free pass...it's heavily addictive(you could say mentally and physically), highly imparing(mentally and physically) to the degree that you are dangerous to others, and destroys health(physical and mental) with the best of them.
MJ isn't physically addictive, isn't highly imparing, and while it does have some health detriments(depending on method of induction), it also actually has proven medicinal value as an every day use medicine.
i don't find alcohol addictive... i think it's more of a willpower thing then it is something that's chemically addictive.
I agree with everything you said except the LSD, I have many people that used to be friends in my life, but I had to cut them off because their overly addictive personalities pretty much turned them into physcos that werent even the same person. I did much lsd in my younger years, it may not be addictive, but can be horribly damaging. It also destroys your spinal cord
False...it does not destroy your spinal cord, it does not collect in your spinal fluid.
It does not stay in your system for more than a day or so.
It does not cause actual hallucinations beyond a slight color change or other mild effects.
It also isn't cut with strychnine(this would cost money).
You aren't legally insane if you take it 5 times or whatever.
It's water soluable and gets pissed out easier and with work less by your kidneys and liver than just about any other drug known to man.
Etc.
It pretty imparing when you are on it...but the LSD itself doesn't stay in your system and doesn't cause any known permanent physical damage. And it's been argued that it only has the potential for schitzophrenic breaks in people already predisposed to schitzophrenia.
This is what is known now.
It's an unfairly maligned drug that has recieved a lot of false negative publicity and is the victim of a ton of urban myths.
people are risky, drugs not so much but with a few notable exceptions. people with addictive personalities are far more likely to fall victim to substances. they don't know when to stop. i would imagine lots of people who have been given/taken LSD had no idea what they were actually taking. good liquid acid was always very hard to find in my experience. i never bothered with the paper , everyone always said to stay away from it. i mostly stuck to mushrooms but got burnt out on those - one day i looked at myself in the mirror on them and realized i just looked sick. dilated pupils, fever, sweating. damn good time before it got old though! the only bad thing that ever happened to me on acid or shrooms was the pack of cigarettes i smoked when affected - lungs never hurt until the next day.
So true, and for some reason every time I tripped I loved smoking menthols, which would destroy me the next day
Acid is one of the most amazingly revolutionary inventions of mankind, with practically no side effects if used in moderation, and the government realized this....now its essentially nonexistent, and people are led to believe it did anything other than open minds and expand creativity and expose people to different levels of reality.
Right on.
Werd...if the World took LSD, Shrooms, or Peyote, and smoked a j, War would be a thing of the past. Because everybody'd be trippin and too stoned to fight.
Alas, until that day comes...
Since the earliest traces of advanced sentience in humans, hallucinogenics(and most of this other stuff) were common place.
These were the magic potions and spiritual occurrences our ancestors spoke of(and so was weed)...
And suddely 60-80 years ago we decided they were bad for us?
If it grows on it's own it definitely shouldn't be illegal...these are the gifts of mother earth to us. I can understand making some of the more advanced man made ones illegal...but most of the natural stuff shouldn't be.
so she was hideous before and hideous after
i don't get the moral
its natural to assume ugly chicks are ugly after using meth
Did she have some sort of annual meth binge in early April?
That list is inane.
Putting methylphenidate ahead of Anabolic steroids, GHB, Ecstasy, Alkyl nitrates, and Khat shows the gross level of misinformation the people who compiled this list are capable of.
I can't believe Methamphetamine isn't on this list. Bogus.
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