Tag Archives: drugs

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Time to end prohibition?

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marijuana traffic lightsDid you know that alcohol prohibition ended in the United States seventy-five years ago this month? Me neither; following on neatly from the Swiss legal heroin program story comes news of a US organisation called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, whose name should tell you exactly what they’re advocating: legalised regulation of all drugs. Here’s their pitch:

After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled making building prisons the fastest growing industry in the United States. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more guaranteeing those prisons will be bursting at their seams. Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs.

They’ve got a lot of facts and figures there, that’s for sure… and they’ve also just released a report that claims ending the war on drugs will boost the US economy by at least $76 billion a year, in addition to putting criminal cartels out of business.

LEAP are far from the first to make similar claims, of course, but their point about the economic effects is well timed and calculated to appeal to the status quo. Whether it will have any effect of the entrenched ideas of policy makers remains to be seen… over here in the UK, our government is trying to reclassify cannabis on the same level as methamphetamine, so I’m not exactly hopeful for a spontaneous outbreak of common sense in the halls of power. [image by aforero]

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Switzerland approves legal heroin program but keeps marijuana under control

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drug injection paraphenaliaSounds a bit topsy-turvy, doesn’t it? But it’s quite true – in a national vote last weekend the Swiss decided to make a controversial legal heroin program a permanent part of the country’s healthcare infrastructure, but rejected decriminalising cannabis. [image by Todd Huffman]

It’s a mixed blessing, I suppose. Hell knows the ‘war on drugs’ in the UK and the US has done absolutely nothing to eradicate the problem, and I guess if people are going to take smack then I’d rather they weren’t burgling my stuff to pay for it (as has happened). But it seems odd that people who can see the pragmatism in that idea seemingly can’t see the logic behind abandoning attempts to control the cultivation and consumption of a slightly psychoactive plant.

What say you, readers – should it be “no victim, no crime”, or should the law do its best to protect people from their own potentially self-harming choices?

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Marijuana is teh good, episode 3

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Research suggests drugs similar to THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, may help reduce memory impairment due to Alzheimer’s, from Physorg:

The research suggests that the development of a legal drug that contains certain properties similar to those in marijuana and hemp might help prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Though the exact cause of Alzheimer’s remains unknown, chronic inflammation in the brain is believed to contribute to memory impairment.

Any new drug’s properties would resemble those of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive substance in the cannabis plant, but would not share its high-producing effects. THC joins nicotine, alcohol and caffeine as agents that, in moderation, have shown some protection against inflammation in the brain that might translate to better memory late in life.

This following news THC could also be used as an antibiotic, and that cannabis is believed to be less dangerous than alcohol or tobacco.

[from Physorg][image from Wikipedia]

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Unlicensed tanning pills circumventing regulation

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tanning bed tubesHere’s a story for the modern age: despite warnings from the UK government, internet sales of an unlicensed tanning drug are booming. [image by savv]

Melanotan is a synthetic hormone developed by skin cancer researchers that has not been tested for safety, quality or effectiveness. The drug is being sold over the internet and in some tanning salons and bodybuilding gyms. It works by increasing levels of melanin, which is the body’s natural protection from the sun.

Now, it’s no news that people want to take short-cuts to the body (allegedly) beautiful. What is news is the fact that laws and clinical tests can’t keep up with the pace of supply and demand any more; once an idea is out there, someone’s going to see the market potential to make money selling it, and people are going to buy it.

Even when laws or bans are passed, the web effectively negates nation-state boundaries – what’s illegal here in the UK may not be in the Nigeria, for instance. Will controlling the distribution of drugs become as unwinnable a battle as preventing music piracy?

Oh, by the way – the UK government is at least trying to warn of the potential side-effects of the tanning drug:

Melanotan II has also been linked to an increase in libido.

Yeah, that‘ll discourage ’em.

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This post will make you 75% more likely to make the right decision on medicines!

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drug capsulesNo report on a new wonder-drug would be complete without the statistical results of the clinical trials – you know, the bit where it says that people taking Wotdafuxocin were 60% less likely to find captioned cat pictures funny, or something similar. [image by rbrwr]

It will probably come as no surprise to our more cynical readers that these risk reduction numbers – while technically correct – are expressed in a way to maximise the medicine’s results as perceived by the casual reader:

Those are the figures on risk, expressed as something called the relative risk reduction. It is the biggest possible number for expressing the change in risk. But 54% lower than what? The trial was looking at whether it is worth taking a statin if you are at low risk of a heart attack or a stroke, as a preventive measure: it is a huge market – normal people – but these are people whose baseline risk is already very low.

If you express the same risks from the same trial as an absolute risk reduction, they look less exciting. On placebo, your risk of a heart attack in the trial was 0.37 events per 100 person years; if you were taking rosuvastatin it fell to 0.17. Woohoo.

Other research shows that even when faced with the same risk reduction expressed in two different ways, the majority of people will still pick the one where the number looks bigger. Don’t beat yourself up about it too much, though – it’s not just us patients who fall for the marketing tricks:

The same result has also been found in experiments looking at doctors’ prescribing decisions.

But try to think positive – it’s not often we get placed on an equal footing with our doctors, after all.