Cannabis as a Class A drug?

[PaulB]

MDMA doesn't make you thirsty.

I don't need to read about it, I know what it does.

It's not a particularly dangerous drug.

Neither is cannabis. Which nobody 'takes' BTW. Get a clue.

Don't. He just HAS to get the last word in. It will be wrong, self-opinionated and wrong, but it will be his.

 

[icowden]

An A and E doctor once told me that most cardiac admissions of people under 30 were cocaine related. It's asking a lot of the NHS and the police etc to pick up the pieces when these things are more widely available.

As a side note, my wife had a heart attack at the age of 25 (due to poor quality fertility treatment). She must have been asked at least 10 times whether she had taken cocaine (she hadn't) because of her unusually young age.

 

[stowie]

Then when it does go bad, the situation is blamed on everything except the cannabis. We have even had MDMA added to the roll-call of harmless drugs, and @AndyRM is frankly embarrassing himself with his total lack of acknowledgement about the harmful effects of MDMA and it's role in the death of Leah Betts.

I cannot speak for everyone, but I certainly was not saying that MDMA was harmless. Neither is Cannabis.

 

[icowden]

I cannot speak for everyone, but I certainly was not saying that MDMA was harmless. Neither is Cannabis.

Indeed. Alcohol and nicotine also not harmless. Water and baked beans are also not harmless. Neither are jelly babies.

Everything we ingest can do us harm if too much is taken.

 

[winjim]

Don't. He just HAS to get the last word in. It will be wrong, self-opinionated and wrong, but it will be his.

He is correct that MDMA can cause SIADH, water retention basically, and that this may have been a factor in the death of Leah Betts but he could simply come out and say it and provide links.

But we know because it's been well publicised that Prof Nutt, an actual expert in these matters has concluded, after taking many factors into consideration, that MDMA is pretty safe compared to many other drugs. Safer than alcohol, heroin, tobacco and cannabis according to this graph. And the subject of the thread, cannabis, appears to be much safer than heroin and cocaine. I don't think anybody is saying that any drug is 100% safe and has no undesirable effects, but we can get an idea of the relative safety of them.

Interesting article if you want to have a proper think about drug safety and drug policy. Prof Nutt looks back on drug policy a decade after his sacking.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050324519898963

 

[AuroraSaab]

As a side note, my wife had a heart attack at the age of 25 (due to poor quality fertility treatment). She must have been asked at least 10 times whether she had taken cocaine (she hadn't) because of her unusually young age.

How awful. I hope she recovered fully with no lasting damage.

On a different occasion our practise nurse said they were seeing an increase in young men coming to the surgery with concerns about palpitations and rapid heart rates, which she put down to drinking caffeine drinks like Monster. Lots of caffeine in weight training supplements too. Which makes me think that if young people can't use caffeine drinks responsibly, why would they be responsible and moderate in their use of cannabis and cocaine?

 

[AuroraSaab]

Prof Nutt, an actual expert in these matters has concluded, after taking many factors into consideration, that MDMA is pretty safe compared to many other drugs. Safer than alcohol, heroin, tobacco and cannabis according to this graph. And the subject of the thread, cannabis, appears to be much safer than heroin and cocaine. I don't think anybody is saying that any drug is 100% safe and has no undesirable effects, but we can get an idea of the relative safety of them.

Interesting article if you want to have a proper think about drug safety and drug policy. Prof Nutt looks back on drug policy a decade after his sacking.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050324519898963

The thing with alcohol and tobacco is they are already here and widely available. You can't ban them, it's too late. But if we could have known beforehand what dangers smoking brings, would we let cigarettes be marketed today? By which I mean saying 'X isn't as bad as Y' is not in itself a reason to make X freely available, not when we know there are risks attached to using X.

 

[winjim]

The thing with alcohol and tobacco is they are already here and widely available. You can't ban them, it's too late. But if we could have known beforehand what dangers smoking brings, would we let cigarettes be marketed today? By which I mean saying 'X isn't as bad as Y' is not in itself a reason to make X freely available, not when we know there are risks attached to using X.

No, but there have been some (rather disingenuous imo) posts made on this thread suggesting that people do indeed think that. I think that people calling for decriminalisation of drug possession tend to take a more nuanced view than that. Indeed the premise of this thread was not that cannabis should be made freely available but rather that it should not be reclassified to the same level as heroin, which seems reasonable to me.

 

[dutchguylivingintheuk]

The thing with alcohol and tobacco is they are already here and widely available. You can't ban them, it's too late. But if we could have known beforehand what dangers smoking brings, would we let cigarettes be marketed today? By which I mean saying 'X isn't as bad as Y' is not in itself a reason to make X freely available, not when we know there are risks attached to using X.

The thing is, we live in a free country, people can decide to drink or not to drink, to smoke or not to smoke, and i think with canabis it should be the same. Because if taken normally in an non-addict way they are not more dangerous thanalcohol or smoking. It should be a life choice people should be able to make.

I'm against a nanny government that bans everything that isn't good for you.

 

[AndyRM]

Seriously, you need to ease off it @AndyRM You are all over the place mate!

Sorry, what is it I'm supposed to be easing off?

I've lost track of whatever point it is you're trying to make.

Must be all the weed I occasionally smoke.

 

[AuroraSaab]

No, but there have been some (rather disingenuous imo) posts made on this thread suggesting that people do indeed think that. I think that people calling for decriminalisation of drug possession tend to take a more nuanced view than that. Indeed the premise of this thread was not that cannabis should be made freely available but rather that it should not be reclassified to the same level as heroin, which seems reasonable to me.

Yes, fair point. I think one poster was in favour of declassification altogether, but yes most people haven't called for it to be legalised.

 

[PaulB]

I just looked in more detail at that chart and one obvious thing struck me straight away; anabolic steroids. According to that chart, it is one of the lowest in terms of harm to user and extremely low on harm to others. That's surely ridiculous? The harm the user is doing is long-term and lasting but the harm to others has got to be of more concern. We're all aware of the term 'roid-rage' are we not? The harm and damage bouncers do to people keeps the courts busy and anyone seen being aggressive tend to be exhibiting roid rage or high on booze or coke in lots of cases. I see it all the time round here, that's for sure.

 

[AuroraSaab]

I suppose millions of steroids are given out every year by doctors and when used as a prescription drug they help and don't harm. I would guess the graph covers both prescription and illegal use, so overall the harm might be low. As you say though, if you just looked at the harm of unsupervised use of steroids by young men it would be very different. A lot of the harm probably goes unrecorded as well, eg domestic violence.

 

[winjim]

I think you'd have to properly read the study itself to know how they worked it all out. I don't even know if 'roid rage' is a real thing or just a made up term. Skimming the recent article whence came the graph I did notice some naivity in Prof Nutt's analysis. For example he says that 'hippy crack' is a term invented by the tabloids and bears no relation to the reality of nitrous oxide use or users. He is wrong on that count, I've heard it referred to in that way, for good reason, by hippies themselves and before it came to recent prominence in the papers.

 

[BoldonLad]

I think you'd have to properly read the study itself to know how they worked it all out. I don't even know if 'roid rage' is a real thing or just a made up term. Skimming the recent article whence came the graph I did notice some naivity in Prof Nutt's analysis. For example he says that 'hippy crack' is a term invented by the tabloids and bears no relation to the reality of nitrous oxide use or users. He is wrong on that count, I've heard it referred to in that way, for good reason, by hippies themselves and before it came to recent prominence in the papers.

An expert, wrong? How can that be?