There is some seriously fallacious thinking going on here:
"It is estimated that tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is involved in more than 50 percent of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. In light of these statistics, the authors of this study question why alcohol and tobacco are legal to use within current drug policies for Britain and the United States, while less harmful drugs like ecstasy and LSD are deemed illegal to use."
Ok, so if you start with a statistic representing the frequency of an event in the general population caused by a drug that is legal and in widespread use, you cannot simply compare that directly to a lack of the same event attributed to another drug whose usage population is far lower. Far fewer people use ecstasy (just an example) than use alcohol or tobacco. That, in itself, doesn't make it less dangerous. You'd have to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the population that uses the drug, then apply a per capita calculation.
I'm not necessarily arguing that any of the drugs on the list shouldn't be there, but as soon as I saw bullet #3 (The drug's overall impact on society) I knew things were going to get fuzzy.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 20.8 ms ] thread"It is estimated that tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is involved in more than 50 percent of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. In light of these statistics, the authors of this study question why alcohol and tobacco are legal to use within current drug policies for Britain and the United States, while less harmful drugs like ecstasy and LSD are deemed illegal to use."
Ok, so if you start with a statistic representing the frequency of an event in the general population caused by a drug that is legal and in widespread use, you cannot simply compare that directly to a lack of the same event attributed to another drug whose usage population is far lower. Far fewer people use ecstasy (just an example) than use alcohol or tobacco. That, in itself, doesn't make it less dangerous. You'd have to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the population that uses the drug, then apply a per capita calculation.
I'm not necessarily arguing that any of the drugs on the list shouldn't be there, but as soon as I saw bullet #3 (The drug's overall impact on society) I knew things were going to get fuzzy.