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

[haw-thorn.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that the prevailing attitude among legislators and their advisors (including many church bodies) is that some substances (ie the illegal ones) are inherently EVIL, regardless of their actual effects. Because these substances are EVIL there is NO point practicing any type of harm minimisation, this risk of exposure to EVIL is apparently so much worse than the effects of the substance that it is better for the individual and society to suffer all the effects of prohibition rather than to condone the use of these inherently EVIL substances. It all makes perfect sense once you enter the appropriate head space!

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* i suspect you're right. Personally, i tend to see more EVIL in someone else thinking they have the right to tell me what i can and can't put inside of me . . . .

And Happy Birthday! :-D