Just finished a great article on the British drug adviser who lost his job for touting the results of a long independent study that roughly indexed the "harm coefficient" [my term] of the most widely abused drugs. Well, that's not why he lost his job, he lost his job because alcohol was number five on the list.
I happen to be thoroughly unsurprised.
Before I expound, a disclaimer: there is ample room, despite the (what I consider to be) considerable efforts of the researchers involved to achieve results as free as possible from bias, for disputing these results. (I don't even agree entirely - based alone on what I know about it I'd consider ecstasy quite a bit more harmful than marijuana.) After all, one of the categories they asked participants to rate was "harm to society". I can tell you from experience, that a cop in Singapore is going to think the harm to society marijuana causes outstrips that of alcohol by a great and terrible margin. I can also tell you that a cop in Singapore has a very, very different image in mind when you ask him to consider "society" than does a cop in Chicago. But even accounting for that, and the odd fallacy in reasoning (or perhaps it's a fallacy of blind faith in governmental wisdom) the article highlights - that many are given to consider an illegal substance more dangerous because it's illegal - alcohol, the most widely legal psychoactive substance, trumps many other drugs with nearly as long a history of abuse.
I'm up on the history of drugs and drug policy in America; the two have never fully reconciled in my mind, and that was before Big Pharm became a major political power and promptly set about confusing any part of the issue accidentally left clear by the tobacco and alcohol lobbies. When I'm working with kids, I make sure I always share certain tidbits: heroin was invented to "cure" morphine addiction. Cocaine use was a fad in the 1880's too, it was just legal then. The Sears-Roebuck catalog offered free vials of cocaine and heroin with your purchase of a brand-new hypodermic needle. All the while, the Temperance Movement was gaining momentum, power and influence.
See, health has never been a government's top priority when considering the problems of drug abuse and its prevention. Morality, crime prevention, harm reduction, profit, power: these are the rubrics by which Old White Men have defined and ruled the issue for centuries. There's light on the horizon: the Obama administration has been encouraging the same shift in perspective I try to bring to my kids. Well, not the same: while governments need to shift from ignorance and intolerance, kids need to shift from ignorance and overindulgence. But the means by which the shift must occur are the same: health education. Yes, the facts are available, and yes, it is as always primarily incumbent upon the seeker to find the knowledge; but this is also the twenty-first century, and when we want something widely known, we take measures to promote the knowledge. In America, the fact that operating a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol content over .08% is illegal has been widely publicized as a public service. In the same vein, why not publish - and support - these findings?
It's going to be decades, maybe even centuries, before governmental policy on psychoactive substances results solely from the synthesis of available health information and the will of a well-informed populace; modern politics, especially in America, do not allow for it. All policies in America are shaped, in part or in full, by reelection; it's a concern whose weight in decision-making increases in direct proportion to the financial wherewithal of any concerned lobbies. In this case, as I said above, the interests of Anheuser-Busch, Phillip Morris, and Pfizer all coincide. They none of them want to see any of us making rational choices based upon concern for our health; they damn sure don't want any Senators or Congressmen doing the same. I shudder to think (no, I don't) of the world such reason would produce: people might realize the wisdom of waiting until twenty-one to drink. Smoking, already not particularly cool to today's teens (and many adults), might become the essence of social leprosy. Prescriptions might only, ever, be taken as prescribed, in spite of any extant pleasurable side-effects. Heaven forfend people seek their pleasure, their alterations of mind and mood, in healthier fashions - think of all the lost profit!
But we live in a world where a man can lose his job for pointing out the simple reality that objectively-obtained health statistics and governmental policy fail to reconcile in his country. It's like getting fired for realizing that the Emperor is naked as a jaybird, and saying aloud only that he might consider a jacket, it's rather nippy out.
