The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Booze worse than Crack?

    By Donal on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 1:00pm | Humor & Satire



    Last month, these talking heads was tellin' me that guys what drank a few beers or a few glasses of wine every night lived lots longer than teetotallers, who look and act mostly dead already anyway. So I took that to heart, stocking up on Sangria and Yuenglings, and telling the wife that we'll definitely be growing old together, though I might not remember all of it too clearly. She was OK with it once I got a few drinks into her, but my daughter started singing, "Father, dear Father, come home with me now ..." but what's the harm of a wee nip after dinner?

    So's I turn on the Tube today and some Nutt is telling me that Booze is worse than Heroin or Crack. What gives? Can't these damn labcoats make up their damn minds?

    Alcohol 'more harmful than heroin' says Prof David Nutt

    Alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack, according to Professor David Nutt, the former UK chief drugs adviser.

    Prof Nutt co-authored a report published in medical journal the Lancet which ranks 20 drugs on 16 measures of harm to users and to wider society.

    Tobacco and cocaine are judged to be equally harmful, while ecstasy and LSD are among the least damaging.

    ... the study involved 16 criteria, including a drug's affects on users' physical and mental health, social harms including crime, "family adversities" and environmental damage, economic costs and "international damage".

    The modelling exercise concluded that heroin, crack and methylamphetamine, also known as crystal meth, were the most harmful drugs to individuals, but alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine were the most harmful to society.

    When the scores for both types of harm were added together, alcohol emerged as the most harmful drug, followed by heroin and crack.



    Well crikey, they used statistics, so they must be right. But I guess I gotta tell the wife we'll be switching to 'Shrooms - just for the health benefits, mind you. And what am I gonna do with all this hooch now?

    Oh yeah, tomorrow's election night.

     

    Topics: 
    Humor & Satire

    Comments

    Great post, Donal!  I saw this report last night and almost fell out of my chair, thanks to the misleading headline.  Granted, alcohol causes an awful lot of accidents, therefore making it more harmful to others as well as oneself, but it's rather misleading to imply that crack and/or heroin is less harmful.  One has to read the fine print, and the two categories of numbers, in order to understand the overall conclusions in this study. 

    Nice to see pot hardly does any damage at all, though!  (Not that that's any surprise...)

     


    by LisB on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 1:16pm

    There'd be a lot less harm to others if people would just let go of my bourbon and get out of the way.


    by Michael Maiello on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 1:16pm

    The article doesn't go into a lot of detail of how they compared data but I am intruiged by the category "international damage". I imagine a chart where Columbian cocaine cartels are going head to head against English Football fans visiting other countries.

    I am surprised LSD gets such a low "harm to oneself" score. I think I could change the researchers minds on the matter if we visited several people I knew in College.


    by moat on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 1:39pm

    Yeah, I was thinking about that girl I saw on the Light Rail myself. She seemed to be on something hallucenogenic.


    by Donal on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 1:45pm

    Pardon me, Moat, but I resemble that remark.  And take supreme offense at it.  ;o)


    by we are stardust on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 2:43pm

    You can still take offense? Clearly, you need just a little more....Cool

    By the way, is that your iguana on the monitor? He is kind of freaking me out.

     


    by moat on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 4:13pm

    Duz there be an acronym stronger than ROTFLMAO???  If there is one, then I would gladly use it!  My iguana and I...salute you.    InnocentLaughing


    by we are stardust on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 5:28pm

    I love this issue. The booze debate is when I get to walk amongst my fellow lefties and laugh my ass off. At what? Well... at their near-complete inability to face problems... when held in their own (happy) hand.

    Alcohol is a carcinogen. Now how often do you hear that? As a former smoker, do you know how many self-righteous arses informed me, earnestly, that "surely I was smart enough to know that tobacco was a carcinogen?" To which I enjoyed replying, "Yes, I know that. But are YOU smart enough to know alcohol is as well?"

    And damage to society? To others? "Hey, second-hand smoke, it's a killer doncha know! And my God, the damage done to families and neighbourhoods by crack, eh?"

    My response is a simple one, "Go to England, on any Saturday night, stand outside the pubs - if you dare - at closing time, and watch."

    Or let's go through the readership here, and see how many incidents of violence we can personally tote up, as inflicting, receiving or observing, fuelled by alcohol. For me, it's easy, as >150 years of alcoholism on one side of the family has spelled it out fairly plain.

    Ah well. As long as we open the doors to drugs of all kinds, and educate people accordingly, and treat the inevitable damage, I'm ok with booze I guess. It's mostly that I came to really really despise the self-righteousness of many Lefties when it came to smoking... combined with their incredible willingness to lie, bare-faced, about their drinking and its impacts.

    Que sera sera, I guess. 


    by quinn esq on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 2:01pm

    You might want to choose your Lefty friends more carefully then; ask for some proof of Leftiness ID.  My friends have always claimed that pot is not dangerous to oneself or others, but alcohol IS, regardless of the carcinogenic factors, which I had known about.  It is toxic to livers, so even the health/vascular/free radical neutralizing/digestive aid properties need to seen in terms of only moderate consumption.  It's anodyne properties are a whole nother kettle of fish for people who can't get pain meds from docs, though.  Sadly.


    by we are stardust on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 2:48pm

    See? You're skipping over those anti-TOBACCO-smoking freaks! Man, they're thick on the ground in Massachusetts and California. 

    Had a good laugh a few years back when myself and an Old Lefty buddy got tossed for smoking in a restaurant. (A restaurant full of rip-roaring drunks.) Thrown outside, the immediately adjacent parking lot was open to smokers, but obviously,not drinkers. which meant the restaurant was allowed to pour booze down your throat, and provide parking to you, then set you on the public road home. But NO SMOKING!

    In between, we found a strip about 3 feet wide, which ran between restaurant and parking lot, where it was unclear who exactly held jurisdiction. THIS, we decided, was the sweet spot of freedom, where you could both smoke AND drink. Which we did. Even falling down was apparently legal.

    Ohhhhh Sweet Spot of Freedom!!!!


    by quinn esq on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 3:14pm

    I stand rightly accused, Quinnus Profundus and Correctus; but only for this sole reason: I AM STILL A SMOKER.  SO SUE ME.  Tongue out  Plus, I have partaken liberally (so to speak) of the sacrament, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.  Which, by the way, back when dinosaurs, yada yada...was not so much a recreational drug, but an experiment in seeing with other parts of one's brain and other dentritic pings, and the whole of one's planetary existence.  Now: please; have your fun with me.

     p.s. the local shrinks and medicaid folks give me prescriptions for cigarettes; they have twigged to the fact finally that tobacco keeps me from murdering people.  Many people...though they are all assholes, my imagined targets.


    by we are stardust on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 3:41pm

    I heard radio Doc Dean Edell opine about which recreational drugs were the safest. Heroin, he said, was least harmful to your body, assuming A - you get it uncut, and B - you can always get as much as your body demands. So Edell and Nutt agree on that, although I'm sure both would agree that taking heroin is a very bad move.

    To get a real comparative number, you'd have to make all the drugs as legal as alcohol, and see how the use and abuse shakes out after a few years. We have a lot of pitiful drunks right now, but we also have a lot of pitiful gambling addicts. How many addicts to some or all of the others would we have if they were more available? Alcohol takes a long time to kill you, unless you drive drunk, but cocaine can kill you at any time, as Len Bias found out. Meth seems to grind you down in a year or so.


    by Donal on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 3:25pm

    Where is SUGAR on this list ???? Major oversight, I think.

    What happens when one gives up alcohol? Sweets craving.

    What happens when one gives up smoking? Sweets craving.

    I can't speak about recovery from heroin, crack et al but I'm betting whatever anyone gives up results in SWEETS CRAVING.

    There's humor here, I think. I'm picturing the average neighborhood cafe/bistro with discreet signs that say: "Thank you for not sugaring" and/or "Be considerate: Secondary Sugaring is harmful to the health of others."

     

     


    by wws on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 3:29pm

    I really crave your comments, wws.


    by Donal on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 6:42pm

    Why thank you, Donal. Very sweet of you to say that, when most of my recent comments (to whomever) have tended to be tart.


    by wws on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 10:02am