Saturday, 6 April 2013

Drugs that cause most harm

A gem from The Economist:






I'm surprised that cannabis is as high on the list as it actually is, but other than that this doesn't surprise me.  Nice to see that LSD and magic mushrooms do no harm to anyone else (statistically).

I wonder if this is also based on availability, in which case the availability of cannabis should be much higher than the availability of everything else but alcohol and tobacco.

It's more difficult to see, but if you can work out the proportions, that's also interesting. As I commented, the ratio of harm to others compared to the harm done to users of LSD and magic mushrooms is statistically insignificant.  The harm to others from alcohol is greater than the harm to done to drinkers of alcohol.  I'm not sure why the harm to others to others from methamphetamines is so low compared to the harm done to users... loads of meth users lose their kids and trailer parks, don't they?  But they're very, very interesting statistics, no matter how you take them.  (And yeah, I think a different study would yield different results.)

No comments:

Post a Comment