Life_goes_on wrote on Apr 28^th, 2011 at 5:59pm:


I very much doubt that.  A doctor wouldn't turn you away for nicotine addiction either. If you have a significant cannabis addiction, the doctor will probably prescribe anti-depressants or benzodiazepine or both.

I agree that some people are more affected than others.

... wrote on Apr 29^th, 2011 at 10:17am:


Hang on there just a minute. I've never heard a doctor say anything like this yet:

Quote:


If you know a doctor that said something like that, then I'd agree that there is much more potential harm in that approach than in buying marijuana off the street. Absolutely no doubt about it.

However if the doctor gives you a controlled prescription and says - take one per day after meals, well the risk is much lower.

What's worse – heroin or amphetamine? And are they worse than alcohol and tobacco, which affects the health of far greater numbers of people.

In fact, how do you measure the harm of a drug? That's a question UK researchers found themselves asking when they set out to rate a range of commonly used recreational drugs – some legal, others not – to rate them in order of the harm they cause to users and to those around them.

They looked at 14 compounds: heroin, cocaine, alcohol, barbiturates, amphetamine, methadone, benzodiazepines, solvents, buprenorphine, tobacco, ecstasy, cannabis, LSD, and steroids.

They asked a range of experts – doctors, psychiatrists, chemists, police, lawyers and others – to rate these drugs individually in various categories of harm. The first was physical harm to the user – whether they caused illness and disease. The second was whether the drug would lead to addiction and dependence; and the third was the capacity for harm to others; family, community, and society.

Varieties of harm
Those drugs that are injected like heroin, amphetamines cause a lot of physical harm because of the risk of overdose and spread of blood borne viruses like HIV, hepatitis B and C. Other dugs like tobacco don't have an overdose or HIV risk, but caused physical harm over the long term. Some of the newer party drugs such as ecstasy or MDMA are so new their long term health effects aren't known.

With some drugs, the physical harm is compounded by the fact that the drug is addictive and the person keeps using it. Some require higher and higher doses to achieve the same effect, and/or cause withdrawal symptoms when the drug is stopped; heroin, benzodiazepines and nicotine were in this category, while LSD was much less addictive.

Drugs also vary in their capacity to cause harm to others. Alcohol often leads to violent behaviour, injuries and accidents and is a major cause of damage to family and social life. Alcohol and nicotine, being so widely used and so destructive to health over long periods of heavy use, are immensely costly to society. (Tobacco and alcohol together account for about 90 per cent of all drug-related deaths.) Illegal drugs like ecstasy, amphetamine and heroin may involve the user in criminal activity and its consequences.

And the winner was..
Rating these drugs wasn't easy because of the wide variations of degrees of harm in different categories – some drugs caused a lot of harm in one category but not another.

But when it came to all the harm factors considered together, heroin and cocaine were right at the top of the list; alcohol, tobacco, amphetamines and benzodiazepines fairly high; cannabis further down; and LSD and ecstasy towards the bottom.
So what's the point of all this?

The researchers weren't trying to justify the use of one drug over another. What they were trying to do was encourage police and law-makers to be a bit more rational about classifying drugs on the basis of harm (they found there wasn't much rationale in existing 'dangerous drugs' classifications in the UK at least).

But the findings are also a useful guide for doctors, counsellors, family and others working in drug treatment to help them devise harm minimisation strategies, especially when there's a scarcity of one type of drug and users switch to another with a different set of risks.

http://www.abc.net.au/health/thepulse/stories/2007/04/05/1884640.htm

A drug is likely to be more harmful to persons around the user, and society in general if its use is more prevalent. That's why alcohol is so harmful. More people use it.

I often say that the Music Industry has a 'drug' problem,
much like the Religious Industry has a 'gun' problem.

What u say ? Muso. You're the expert yeah?