BF2S Forums Official Beer Thread

Dilbert_X wrote:

I can't read the full article, the public part solely references Nutt's data.

So MDMA and mushrooms are 'automatically' in the 'most dangerous' category ?

Looks to me like they've been carefully assessed, checked and rechecked by parliament over the years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugs_con … _Drugs_Act

And looks like this Nutt guy has a history of malfeasance.
"He served on the Committee on Safety of Medicines where he participated in an enquiry into the use of SSRI anti-depressants in 2003. His participation was criticised as, owing to his financial interest in GlaxoSmithKline, he had to withdraw from discussions of the drug paroxetine."

Seems like he's not really an academic, he has an agenda and is seeking to make a profit out of recreational drugs, not really the go to person for impartial information.

Anyway, good luck with your hobby, maybe it will be legal some day and poor peasants won't need to risk death and imprisonment so you can get your fix.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-02 05:31:17)

Around 30% of road traffic deaths in Australia involve alcohol, which is one of the worst records amongst high-income countries for drink-driving fatalities.

The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE) reported there were 1,295 road traffic deaths in 2016 – an increase of 7.5% compared to 2015 – which suggests that as many as 388 Australians tragically died last year due to drink-driving.

uziq wrote:

Around 30% of road traffic deaths in Australia involve alcohol, which is one of the worst records amongst high-income countries for drink-driving fatalities.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

Around 30% of road traffic deaths in Australia involve alcohol, which is one of the worst records amongst high-income countries for drink-driving fatalities.

Drug driving is a contributing factor in up to 41% of road fatalities in Australia
https://research.qut.edu.au/carrsq/wp-c … e-2017.pdf

Hey lets get the kids onto drugs though!

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-02 14:16:02)

Dilbert_X wrote:

'multiple research groups agitating for changes to drug legislation' Why would they be doing this, do they think kids taking drugs is a good thing?

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-02 14:30:52)

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-01-02 15:06:33)

Dilbert_X wrote:

But yeah, people blithely assume legalising drugs will solve all problems, because keeping people out of prison is more of a priority than keeping drug-addled nutcases out of the community.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

....considering alcohol is more harmful – to the individual and to society – than many of them.

According to Mr Nutt and no-one else.

Still, drugs aren't zero-harm and many of the issues are as yet unknown, there's still no case for legalising something harmful.

A comparative risk assessment of drugs including alcohol and tobacco using the margin of exposure (MOE) approach was conducted. The MOE is defined as ratio between toxicological threshold (benchmark dose) and estimated human intake. Median lethal dose values from animal experiments were used to derive the benchmark dose. The human intake was calculated for individual scenarios and population-based scenarios. The MOE was calculated using probabilistic Monte Carlo simulations. The benchmark dose values ranged from 2 mg/kg bodyweight for heroin to 531 mg/kg bodyweight for alcohol (ethanol). For individual exposure the four substances alcohol, nicotine, cocaine and heroin fall into the “high risk” category with MOE < 10, the rest of the compounds except THC fall into the “risk” category with MOE < 100. On a population scale, only alcohol would fall into the “high risk” category, and cigarette smoking would fall into the “risk” category, while all other agents (opiates, cocaine, amphetamine-type stimulants, ecstasy, and benzodiazepines) had MOEs > 100, and cannabis had a MOE > 10,000. The toxicological MOE approach validates epidemiological and social science-based drug ranking approaches especially in regard to the positions of alcohol and tobacco (high risk) and cannabis (low risk).

Many governments in Europe have favoured more restrictive policies with respect to illicit drugs than for alcohol or tobacco, on the grounds that they regard both illicit drug abuse and related problems as a significantly larger problem for society. Drug rankings can therefore be useful to inform policy makers and the public about the relative importance of licit drugs (including prescription drugs) and illicit drugs for various types of harm.

Our MOE results confirm previous drug rankings based on other approaches. Specifically, the results confirm that the risk of cannabis may have been overestimated in the past. At least for the endpoint of mortality, the MOE for THC/cannabis in both individual and population-based assessments would be above safety thresholds (e.g. 100 for data based on animal experiments). In contrast, the risk of alcohol may have been commonly underestimated.

Our results confirm the early study of Gable who found that the margin of safety (defined as therapeutic index) varied dramatically between substances. In contrast, our approach is not based on a therapeutic index, which is not necessarily associated with risk, but uses the most recent guidelines for risk assessment of chemical substances, which also takes the population-based exposure into account.

A major finding of our study is the result that the risk of drugs varies extremely, so that a logarithmic scale is needed in data presentation of MOE (e.g. Figures 1–3). Therefore, we think that previous expert-based approaches which often applied a linear scale of 0–3 or 0–1003,9, might have led to a form of “egalitarianism”, in which the public health impact of drugs appears more similar than it is in reality (i.e. more than 10.000-fold different as shown in our results on a population basis, e.g. Fig. 2 and ​and3). As expected, for an individual the difference between the impact of different drugs is not as large as for the whole society (i.e. only up to 100 fold, Fig. 1)

Currently, the MOE results point to risk management prioritization towards alcohol and tobacco rather than illicit drugs. The high MOE values of cannabis, which are in a low-risk range, suggest a strict legal regulatory approach rather than the current prohibition approach.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-02 17:01:43)

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-01-02 17:56:14)

Derpzique wrote:

you're acting like they've dishonestly taken out all 'normal' alcohol drinkers, which just isn't the case

"HOW many standard drinks do you clock up in a week?

Think about your total — that glass of red wine with dinner, the after-work trip to the pub on Friday, the occasional Saturday night bender.

If your number exceeds nine standard drinks in a week, you’re probably consuming more booze than the average Australian.

A major study by the Foundation of Alcohol Research and Education (FARE), which surveyed 1820 Australians, found that most of us are “moderate drinkers” — that is, we have nine or fewer standard drinks per week.

While the percentage of drinkers has increased from 77 to 82 per cent since last year, more than three-quarters do so no more than two days a week."

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-01-02 20:34:35)