Drugs

[flexibeast]

Apparently "landmark" studies don't need to be of particularly high quality nowadays - at least when it comes to confirming 'official' societal 'standards':

Researcher George Patton, who conducted the study for Melbourne University's Centre for Adolescent Heath, said that while both alcohol and cannabis carried health risks, the overwhelming evidence was that cannabis was "the drug for life's future losers".

"It's the young people who were using cannabis in their teens who were doing really badly in terms of their mental health," Professor Patton said.

"They were also less likely to be working or be qualified or in a relationship and more likely to be using other substances such as ecstasy, amphetamines, cocaine and even tobacco.

"Effectively, for a substantial number of high-risk users in our sample, cannabis was the drug that was preferred as teenagers."

[ "Teen dope users 'life's future losers'" ]

So how did they define "high risk users?

using cannabis every day or in the case of alcohol, exceeding 43 standard drinks per week for boys or 28 for girls — more than the guidelines for very risky drinking by adults.

Er, what? So having one toke of a joint each day is enough to qualify you as a 'high-risk' user of marijuana, but to qualify you as a 'high-risk' male user of alcohol, you need to have 6 standard drinks per day?? And what possible justification could there be for that figure to be higher than the figure for "very risky drinking by adults"? Colour me naïve, but i was under the impression that teenage brains are more vulnerable to drug-related damage than adult brains, due to the fact that the former are still developing?

Am i missing something, or is this 'study' severely flawed?

Edited to add: i can't help but mention the following data point: in Victoria in 2000/01, there were ~17,000 alcohol-related hospital admissions, but only ~250 marijuana-related hospital admissions (sources: The Victorian Alcohol Statistics Handbook, Volume 4, p. 16; and NDARC Technical Report no. 256, p. 48). Now it's true that these figures must be adjusted for comparative rates of usage; the 2004 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, p.3, suggests to me that, Australia-wide, alcohol is used by ~8 times more people than pot. Multiplying the pot-related admissions by 8 gives us an estimated ~2000 marijuana-related admissions if as many people were using pot as are currently using alcohol - a figure an order of magnitude less than the figure for alcohol-related admissions. Yet that 2004 survey found that many more people first mentioned "marijuana" as being a problem drug than first mentioned "alcohol" as being a problem drug. i suppose it doesn't help that people only rarely think of alcohol as a drug . . . .
 

Comments

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

Excellent points!

People can, it seems, be addicted to almost anything. Some people are addicted to conspicuous consumption, which distorts societal values and damages the environment; but since it's regarded as necessary to sustain our economic system, it's not criticised. :-/

Then, too, demonising certain substances, and user of those substance, creates a 'deviant' class which can be utilised to create and/or sustain moral panics. :-/

Which is, i guess, part of the reason why governments are loathe to legalise and tax marijuana - it would involve admitting their policies were wrong, and that they had in fact been spreading misinformation. Which i suspect that many people - including teenagers! - realise when they witness campaigns suggesting that smoking pot will inevitably wreck one's life, but then have a few smokes themselves and find that their life has not suddenly gone down the gurgler. :-P