drugs for model as illegal a Tobacco

April 06th, 2007 | Category: Smoking

And the teams were never chosen rationally.

The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a fascinating study last month.

Researchers from Oxford and Bristol universities set a straightforward challenge for themselves: manufacture a science-based assessment of the harm caused by various drugs, legal and illegal.

The researchers relied on three scales: the physical harm to the user, the drug’s addictiveness, and its impact on the user’s family and community.

Their documents are hard to argue with: Alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than marijuana or ecstasy. Heroin and cocaine topped the list as most harmful. There would still be demand, but not abundant to construct the business appealing. The only kind of person who would point to that as an argument in favor of that policy is a person who believes that heroin addicts can’t get well.

Another column from Newsday, “In the war on drugs, a tax plan that makes sense”, raises inconsistencies in drug harms and their legality while arguing for higher tobacco taxes. We’d target kids, but plus vulnerable adults.

We’d produce a big effort to help humans quit, something we don’t do today. Who knows where it will be 5, 10 or 25 years from now? We fight to reduce supply, unsuccessfully, and create crime and chaos and costs.

For whatever reason, we tried something different with tobacco. Why is alcohol taxed, while cocaine and heroin are just available? Is it considering some of these substances are more dangerous than others?

Of course not. And for society who wanted to keep using, we would prescribe heroin or cocaine or working substitutes. It simply seems wrong to supply a drug like cocaine to public, for one thing. (The current half-hearted, restrictive methadone program really doesn’t count.)

What are the downsides? But we chose a different approach — managed use, with education and financial penalties to decrease smoking. Is it inconceivable that some states or countries could be moving toward making tobacco sales illegal?

Finally, “During a prescribed heroin trial in Switzerland…about seven per cent quit during their day in the program.” Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations. Fewer overdoses, abscesses and infections. First, I don’t think his arguments are without any merit. Only about two per cent of Canadians are heroin and cocaine users; whether we can manufacture the same relative gains, using the lessons from smoking, the number of addicts would be tiny.

That seems like a faraway list of benefits, with few costs. Instead of spending their days and nights scrambling for money and drugs, users would have duration to think about work and developing more stable lives.

Based on similar efforts in other countries, a significant number would seek treatment.

During a prescribed heroin trial in Switzerland, not only did crime by users plummet but about seven per cent quit during their date in the program.

Since society wouldn’t be using drugs in alleys and dodgy settings, we’d save a fortune in health costs. I’ve said several times in that blog that there is no such thing as a problem free drug policy. We’ve always had a War on Some Drugs. perhaps the big companies had too much clout, or there were just too many smokers. He stops short of calling for any other drug policy change but he begs the question:

Will higher prices really push smokers to stop? The public being prescribed the drugs wouldn’t be stealing to get the money to buy them. And it worked.

Why not for other drugs?

I have a few reactions. But there was hardly any connection at all, the scientists pointed out, amidst the harm a drug does and how the law has chosen to treat it.

Otherwise, pot would be legal. Marketing is a concern and lobbying potential. Two opinions that we should look to tobacco policy as a model for drug policy.

The

first is from the Victoria Times Colonist:

We could have made tobacco illegal 20 years ago. What whether we say heroin and cocaine are like tobacco — things we really wish public wouldn’t use, but that we still accept some probably will.

Under that approach we would commit a lot of resources to making certain public didn’t start, as we did with smoking. All of them will have problems associated with them, the question is that — which problems are we willing to live with?

Second, I have concerns about the legalization and the combination of legal capitalism and addictive drugs. Figure a 75-per-cent drop in property crime, conservatively, since Victoria police estimate up to 90 per cent of break-ins and thefts are drug-related. We worked on reducing demand. While tobacco policy has been successful in many ways, these numbers are still to high to offer comfort in moving towards tobacco as a model.

Fourth tobacco policy is in a state of rapid change. Yet instead, we push on with tactics and strategies that have losed out to deal with prohibited substances for nearly a century. We didn’t ban cigarettes or arrest public. And it’s worked quite well.

So why not try the same approach with illicit drugs, or at least some of them? Consider that tobacco is still not regulated by the FDA.

Third, in Michigan 23% of adults are regular smokers, and 52% of youth report having tried smoking with 16% of them before the age of 13. About 55 per cent of adults smoked in 1965, compared with 15 per cent in B.C. Or is the lure of smoking and grip of addiction so all-powerful, the customers will pay whatever it costs?

Most of the research says that higher prices have the most impact on teenagers. Addiction issues nearly never are, and that certainly applies to the new suburban cigarette-tax debate.

Why is tobacco legal and marijuana not? Tobacco and alcohol would not.

No one in the New York area yesterday was calling to build cigarettes illegal, even whether they have now been banned from offices, restaurants, sports arenas and bars. public with both mental health problems and addictions would get a chance to reduce the chaos in their lives and deal with their mental illness.

And all the while we’d be pushing for the same shift in attitudes toward drugs as we have achieved on smoking. We’ve never had a War on Drugs in America. Police would be free to work on other problems and jails would be less crowded.

Organized criminals would lose a huge market. At the same instance, tax opponents warn about a rise in tax cheating, counterfeiting and illicit sales from Indian reservations, should higher taxes come in.

Only one thing is undoubtful: that debate will never be settled on the facts. You could argue that others — young folks — might see the practice as condoning drug use. today. As some states and other countries experiment with decriminalization, it will be worth watching which harms are reduced, which harms increase and what strategies are most effective in mitigating the undesirable effects of decriminalization. (Though we’ve managed to allow controlled sale of tobacco products while condemning their use.)

Against those negatives, look at what we would gain. Will $7 packs persuade kids not to start? They have less money in their pockets, even in the affluent ‘burbs. It should be much easier. (Suozzi did mention adding public parks to the no-smoking list.)

No one likes to pay more, even in a sin tax.

But whether an additional $2 a pack will prepare some adults smoke less and persuade a few kids not to start, at least the change is connected to some kind of reality.

In that war, at that instance, with these drugs, that’s actually saying something.