If only Prince told this to CC judges…..

Quote of the week

My colleagues and I often care for patients suffering from hallucinations, prophesying, and claiming to speak with God, among other symptoms—in mental health care, it’s sometimes very difficult to tell apart religious belief from mental illness…. Our conclusions frequently stem from the behaviors we see before us. Take an example of a man who walks into an emergency department, mumbling incoherently. He says he’s hearing voices in his head, but insists there’s nothing wrong with him. He hasn’t used any drugs or alcohol. If he were to be evaluated by mental health professionals, there’s a good chance he might be diagnosed with a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. But what if that same man were deeply religious? What if his incomprehensible language was speaking in tongues?

Nathaniel P.Morris
Scientific American

PREVIOUS QUOTES OF THE WEEK

27 March 2007

On His Blog Andrew Sullivan links to interesting articles on the dangers of various illegal recreational drugs. He points to a new study that argues that one way to measure the dangers of various drugs is to examine how toxic the drug is at various levels. Can too much kill you? And how much is too much?

Money quote:

The most toxic recreational drugs, such as GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate) and heroin, have a lethal dose less than 10 times their typical effective dose. The largest cluster of substances has a lethal dose that is 10 to 20 times the effective dose: These include cocaine, MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, often called “ecstasy”) and alcohol. A less toxic group of substances, requiring 20 to 80 times the effective dose to cause death, include Rohypnol (flunitrazepam or “roofies”) and mescaline (peyote cactus). The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested.

I’ve found no published cases in the English language that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery. My surmise is that smoking marijuana is more risky than eating it but still safer than getting drunk.

Alcohol thus ranks at the dangerous end of the toxicity spectrum. So despite the fact that about 75 percent of all adults in the United States enjoy an occasional drink, it must be remembered that alcohol is quite toxic. Indeed, if alcohol were a newly formulated beverage, its high toxicity and addiction potential would surely prevent it from being marketed as a food or drug. This conclusion runs counter to the common view that one’s own use of alcohol is harmless.

When Gareth Prince went to the Constitutional Court to argue that his freedom of religion had been infringed because as a Rastafarian he was not allowed to smoke cannabis, the majority made much of the dangers of dagga. This evidence seems to suggest the judges were severely misguided. If dagga is not dangerous at all, why not allow Rastafarians to use it?

The other statistic that caught my eye in this extract is that 75% of adult Americans “occassionally” enjoy a drink. Only 75%? In South Africa, where drinking alcohol is a national sport, I would imagine its closer to 90%.

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