Quote of the week
When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am your God – Leviticus 19:33-34.
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit – Ephesians 2:19-22.
Christian Bible
Pharmaceutical Calvinism or rational drugs policy?
There has been some lively discussion below following my post suggesting that alcohol is far more harmful than dagga or ecstasy and that the
The study I quoted from was published in the respected British medical Journal, Lancet (not that that should be conclusive), and used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user, the drug’s potential for addiction, and the impact on society of the drug’s use before calculating the drugs’ overall rankings. It is therefore clear that the researchers did not only rely on whether the drug would kill you or not.
I don’t want to sound like President Mbeki with his Aids denialism… but the report on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news website continued:
Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was ecstasy.
Tobacco causes 40 per cent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services.
While experts agreed that criminalizing alcohol and tobacco would be challenging, they said that governments should review the penalties imposed for drug abuse and try to make them more reflective of the actual risks and damages involved.
I suppose those who warn that dagga causes Schizophrenia will argue that if it was freely available it would become just as dangerous and harm just as many people as alcohol or cigarettes. Which begs the question of why alcohol and cigarettes are legal and part of a multi-billion dollar industry, while dagga is produced by poor black people in Transkei…. Well, make up your own mind.
