Note that this "harm index" combines both harm to self and harm to others. The results are skewed by usage numbers; if the number of people using heroin, meth and crack were equal to the number of drinkers, the results would no doubt show that alcohol was not as harmful.
BadTux has mentioned before that the laws on which drugs are legal and which are not are more based on the classes and racial makeup of the users than on the damage done by the drugs. I suspect that there is considerable merit to that argument. But changing the drug laws in this country (as well as others) will require a partial dismantlement of the police state that has been built up to run the War on Drugs, and judging by the way the law enforcement statists are pushing back on California's Prop 19, I don't see the drug laws changing anytime soon.
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Not going to argue that alcohol is not a dangerous drug, but as you pointed out there is a question of scale.
The British Office of National Statistics reported in 2008 that around 22 percent of British people were addicted to tobacco, and that heavy habitual drinkers constituted 23 percent of men, and 12 percent of women. Call that an overall prevalence of 36 or 37 percent of all Britons, since there are slightly more women than men in the UK.
There are about 62 million people in the UK, 82% of whom are over 16, so that’s about 18.5 million habitual heavy drinkers. Meanwhile, the estimated number of addicts of what they call Class A drugs (heroin, crack and meth) is less than 300,000, or about 1/60th of that number.
What would Britain and British society look like if over a third of the adult population didn’t drink, but took heroin, meth or cocaine regularly instead? Or what if they took Ecstasy or psilocybin mushrooms, two of the lowest-scoring drugs in the study?
On the whole I'd be happier if large numbers of people didn't feel the need to stupefy themselves on a daily basis, but for that to be so, our society would have to be a happier one in the first place.
If they smoked marijuana or took E, not much would happen. Marijuana makes people mellow, E makes people happy, but the only real health issue is that E also puts a fair amount of stress on the heart. But most folks who use these drugs use them only occasionally for recreational purposes because they are less addicting than alcohol. Not to mention that dealing with people who are strung out on pot or E is so much easier than dealing with a belligerent drunk, who is about as mean and nasty as they come. Mellow or happy people don't take swings at you just on general principle.
Cocaine, heroin, and meth are another issue altogether, but bringing them into this argument is a crock, because nobody has proposed legalizing them.
Badtux, the original posting wasn't talking about legalization, only pointing out that alcohol is a drug more socially than individually harmful, and in the aggregate more harmful than many other, currently illegal drugs.
But I know your and EBM's position on legalization - we'll see how Prop 19 fares today, personally I don't think it will pass (but neither will it fail by much).
I reiterate my point from a while ago that a devious government SHOULD get into marijuana legalization. People are already perfectly OK with their government selling them, or profiting from the sale of, harmful and addictive substances, so why not let government profit from the production and sale of this stupefier as well?
When you think about it, this is actually a fabulous method of social control. Yes, pot smokers don't make a fraction of the social trouble drinkers do, but they (or at least the heavy ones) don't get up to much of anything else. Ideal if you want much of your population to be quiescent, socially and politically disengaged, law-abiding (since we've abolished that law) zombies.
Uhm, just how many pot smokers do you know, again? A typical pot smoker would be like the CEO of one of my former employers, who complained when the company got a defense contract that now he'd have to go clean for several months to take the mandatory piss tests that critical personnel of defense contractors are legally required to take as a condition of the contract. He didn't become CEO by being apathetic and useless, only Fortune 500 CEO's get to do that, and most of *those* CEO's come by it naturally without pharmaceutical enhancement, yo.
Studies show that most marijuana smokers are occasional recreational users. They light up while relaxing watching baseball games on weekends, not continuously. The notion of all pot smokers as stoner losers is belied by the fact that the majority of Americans have used pot at one point or another in their life. Of course, you can say that the majority of Americans are losers, but at that point you're going off on another tangent ;).
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
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