IMAGINE you are seated at a table with two bowls in front of you. One contains peanuts, the other tablets of the illegal recreational drug MDMA (ecstasy). A stranger joins you, and you have to decide whether to give them a peanut or a pill. Which is safest?
You should give them ecstasy, of course. A much larger percentage of people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA.
This, of course, is only a thought experiment; nobody would consider doing it for real. But it puts the risks associated with ecstasy in context with others we take for granted. Yes, ecstasy is dangerous and people who take it are putting their lives on the line. But the danger needs to be put in perspective.
Sadly, perspective is something that is generally lacking in the long and tortuous debate over illegal drugs. In this magazine, we have argued that drug policy should be made on the basis of evidence of harmfulness - to individuals and to society. The British government's stated line is similar, yet time and again it ignores its own rules and the recommendations of its experts. Most other western governments act in a similar way.
The latest example of doublethink concerns MDMA. As New Scientist went to press, the UK government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was widely expected to recommend downgrading it, based on evidence of its limited harmfulness (see "Ecstasy's legacy: so far, so good"). Yet the government has already rejected the advice.
No doubt this is partly a reaction to the furore over the government's de facto decriminalisation of cannabis in 2004, based on another advisory council recommendation. Despite the fact that the move actually reduced the quantity of cannabis being smoked - surely a welcome outcome of any rational drug policy - the government recently reversed it in the face of implacably bad press.
For evidence of how irrational and lacking in perspective the public debate has become, consider how the advisory council's chairman, David Nutt, found himself in hot water last weekend for comparing the harm caused by ecstasy to the harm caused by horse riding, or "equasy" as he dubbed it. Nutt's intention was simply to put ecstasy in context with other sources of harm. But his comments - which he actually made last month in an editorial in the Journal of Psychopharmacology - caused predictable squeals of outrage and calls for his head.
This is a worldwide problem. We need a rational debate about the true damage caused by illegal drugs - which pales into insignificance compared with the havoc wreaked by legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco. Until then, we have no chance of developing a rational drug policy.
Fra
New Scientist.
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