Classification of Drugs

This week the media have been huffing about a new study reported in the Lancet.

Apparently it is some kind of news that alcohol and nicotine are in fact drugs and that they kill more people than all the other drugs put together. 90% of the total in fact.

The topic of how drugs should be legally classified and which are the most harmful seems to hold a wonderful fascination for us Brits and I am totally unsure as to why this is. You only have to see the ongoing debates about the classification of cannabis to see this in action. Everybody adopts a posture based on whichever bits of evidence, pseudoscience and folklore happen to support their own views and we call this "debate".

While I happen to agree with the article's conclusions I feel it raises larger questions:

Does anybody really believe that:

1. The government will take any notice at all of the report.
2. Anyone will actually change their behavior because of it.

I know that as a spotty faced 14 year old when I first came across "drugs" in all their myriad forms I did not stop to think what "class" they were. I had no intention of getting caught anyway. So far as I was concerned I saw other people doing them, they didn't seem to have turned into raving looneys the next day - that was all the evidence I needed. All the politicians, police and media who went on about drugs were all part of some huge amorphous "them" who were out to spoil my fun.

I suspect that these articles and the endless debate serves several purposes:

1. It enables people like me to endlessly discuss the issues.
2. It enables the government to claim that there is a debate going on.
3. It keeps drugs educators, the publishers of drugs educational materials and the police on their toes as they struggle to keep up with it all.

That's about it really - drugs treatment and prevention are nowadays an industry and I doubt if the ripples from all this really spread much further.

In the real world drugs policies are really driven by political and financial considerations - they are driven by "what wins votes" and earns money for the treasury.

We all do the world a great diservice if we pretend otherwise.