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

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

As if you needed another confounding factor: Given the fact that pot's illegal, that creates a strong self-selection for who is willing to try it vs more legal drugs. More harm is probably caused by the fact that pot is illegal than by the pot itself.

[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

*nod* Indeed. Especially when one considers the massive amount of criminalisation and incarceration of people for having and/or using small amounts of grass . . . .

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

Certainly (with all the abuses that entails). Though I was referring more to things like cartels, organized crime, gang violence, etc. So long as drugs are contraband, they'll be valuable and illicit, and hence they'll give rise to all manner of criminal nature —not because of anything the drugs do, they're just a commodity, but because of what people are willing to do to make a buck off the folks who want them. For some drugs (meth, heroin,...), the drug itself will cause crimes like property theft and damage or assault; but pot, not so much.