Tag Archives: drugs

Number Needed To Treat

Posted by apt46 on April 16, 2012 1 comments

In March, news came out that LSD was an effective way to treat alcoholism. (The thinking is that the profound hallucinogenic experience changes one’s view of the world, kind of like a spiritual awakening. Hallucinogenics have been shown to also reduce the rate at which criminals return to crime.) But how effective is LSD as an alcoholism treatment? The answer is 6.

That’s a measure called Number Needed To Treat (NNT), and it’s the number of people that will statistically be treated in order for one person to benefit from the treatment. So if 6 drunks are treated with LSD, 1 will give up the bottle. That works out to about 16% effectiveness, which means 84% of alcoholics would take LSD and the only thing they would get out of it is a psychedelic trip.

LSD is a highly-concentrated liquid, commonly distributed on the backs of stamps which are then placed on the tongue for absorption

 

Sounds like pretty meager results, but it turns out that medicine is a pretty poor science, and 16% effectiveness is actually pretty high. Things are so bad, that if the NNT is below 10 — that’s benefits for just 1 in 10 patients, or 10% effectiveness — that’s considered a very successful drug or treatment. Keeping in mind that an NNT of 1 means everyone treated will benefit and that the higher the number, the less effective the treatment, here are the NNT numbers for some well-known treatments:

A related measure is the Number Needed To Harm (NNH), which is complementary to the NNT. For example, the drug Vioxx had a great NNT of 2.2, but it’s NNH of 42 was a little too low for comfort, so it was pulled from the market. The moral of the story: find out the NNT and NNH of the drugs and treatments you’re prescribed.

In the meantime, LSD is still classified in the “most dangerous drugs” category by the UN and US, along with drugs like heroin and cocaine. This, in spite of the fact that LSD has yet to cause a single death, which is more than can be said about many legal drugs, like Vioxx. In fact, LSD is a fairly safe drug and was only banned as a backlash to its use by the counterculture of the 1960s, and in particular, by its leading proponent, Harvard psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary. The graphic above shows a rating of common legal and illegal drugs done in 2007 by a team of scientists; the drugs are ranked by how much harm they have the potential to do to society: LSD was on par with Ritalin, and both were well below alcohol and tobacco.

And below, a very interesting video of a 1950s housewife tripping on acid in a clinical setting at the Veteran’s Administration, back when it was legal.

See also:

 

From NPR

Pat Robertson Wants Marijuana Legalized

Posted by apt46 on March 9, 2012 1 comments

It looks like the tide has officially turned in favor of legalizing pot: the very conservative evangelical leader Pat Robertson is saying that marijuana prohibition is doing more harm than good. Apparently he’s been saying this for over two years, and his reasoning is that the war on drugs is obviously a giant failure and that making recreational drug use a crime has been turning otherwise okay youngsters into hardened criminals. This is surprisingly sound logic from the man that said Katrina and the 2010 Haiti earthquake were divine punishments. Given that Robertson’s demographic of religious right-wing baby boomers is probably the only significant opposition to the decriminalization of marijuana, it now seems a foregone conclusion that within a decade or so, pot will be as legal as cigarettes.

 

See also:

 

From The New York Times, via NPR

PSA Posters Warn About Doing Art

Posted by apt46 on November 30, 2011 1 comments

The College for Creative Studies in Detroit has a new advertising campaign done by Team Detroit.

 

 

 

The danger of dabbling in art, of course, is the same as the danger of dabbling in drugs: an unstable life of poverty; always trying to do more art, always wondering when your next paycheck is going to come, living in a shack with no heat because art took any chance of having a real career away — all the while being involved in a string of intense but brief flash-in-the-pan relationships with other art lovers, who, aside from the onlookers gawking at the train wreck that is an artist’s life, are the only people that will spend time with them. And it should be needless to mention that there’s also heavy drug use throughout.

From Tek1Now, via Neatorama

Marijuana Isn’t Getting Legalized Anytime Soon

Posted by apt46 on October 31, 2011 2 comments

A couple of months ago, the White House added a “petitions” section to its website, the idea being that regular people could petition the administration for whatever blew through their minds. If the petitions got enough signatures (originally 5,000, now 25,000), Obama or one of his underlings would take a gander at it. One of the most popular petitions was to abolish the highly ineffective TSA, which we talked about before. And not surprisingly, legalizing marijuana was a blockbuster, gathering more than 75,000 signatures.

Today, the administration responded to a few of the petitions, including the one on legalization. The short answer is “no.” A slightly longer version of the answer is that marijuana is bad for you and has no proven medicinal value; but education, not law enforcement, is the key to curbing use, and so they spend a little more money on education than arrests.

No word on why the same arguments don’t apply to alcohol and tobacco, or why the state is in the nanny business to begin with — maybe it’s trying to earn money for college and nanny taxes are more attractive than stripping. It also completely ignores that the government’s message on marijuana being evil is diametrically opposed to the mainstream media’s message on it being the bee’s knees; somehow, between the billions spent on both sides, and Hollywood being way cooler than D.C., it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which way teenagers are going to skew.

So despite legalization being supported by a virtual majority of the population, drug prohibition lives to see another day and will likely do so until there is such massive support for legalization that it can no longer be ignored. Probably also on Obama’s mind is that, as the first black president, he should try not to do things like legalize chronic and declare fried chicken to be the national bird.

The entire response, written by the current Drug Czar (who reminds us that he is a former police chief), is available on the White House website.

From The White House, via Slashdot

Half Of Americans Want Marijuana Legalized

Posted by apt46 on October 19, 2011 None comments

Since 1969, Gallup has been polling Americans every few years on whether they want marijuana legalized. That year, 12% did; it quickly rose to 28% by the late 1970s, though. Support languished in the ’80s, but since then it has been steadily rising, and now for the first time, 50% support legalization. Possibly due to the libertarian factor, support among the elderly and conservatives is pretty high too — around 30%.

The stars may be aligning, because earlier this year Congressmen Ron Paul and Barney Frank introduced a sure-to-be-doomed bill to legalize marijuana. They were likely motivated by a report released in June by the Global Commission on Drug Policy which highlighted exactly how ineffective, expensive and tragically misguided drug laws are, and recommended that countries move to end drug prohibition. In 2002, the Coalition For Rescheduling Cannabis petitioned the government to change marijuana’s classification as a Schedule 1 drug, which puts it in the most dangerous class, along with cocaine and heroin. In 2009, the American Medical Association asked the same thing.

But in spite of all that, two weeks ago, the US Attorney announced a major crackdown on California’s quasi-legal pot dispensaries. And in July, the head of the DEA finally responded to the petition to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule 1 drug with a firm no, saying that it has a high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use. Or maybe she was talking about alcohol or tobacco — it’s hard to tell.

From NPR

Drug Cartels Are No Longer Just About Drugs

Posted by apt46 on June 27, 2011 None comments

Foreign Policy has an article pointing out that the Mexican drug cartels have grown very large and powerful (as evidenced by the brazen standoffs with the government in recent years) and as a result, they are now less like drug cartels and more like mafia groups. Mostly starting with efforts to launder money and continuing as a means to reap increasing profits with the increased power they command, the cartels have expanded into all kinds of money-making schemes, including: protection rackets, kidnapping, theft and corruption. The cartel members are now almost at half a million members, which is more than the Mexican state oil company of 360,000 and even more than the police force of 400,000.

Colombian police posing with Pablo Escobar's dead body

 

The article tries to make a misguided point by saying that despite the failure of the war on drugs, legalizing them won’t affect the cartels too much since they have diversified their sources of revenue; what it fails to mention is that the cartels may not even be around if they hadn’t gotten started selling illegal drugs. Not to mention that it’s a logical fallacy to begin with: assuming the drug cartels are here to stay with or without the end of drug prohibition, then legalization is irrelevant when talking about the cartels. If the devil exists with or without charitable donations, then charity is irrelevant when talking about killing the devil. However, charity is good for a whole host of other reasons. In the same way, there are a lot of reasons to end prohibition (e.g., to stop wasting taxpayer money on the drug war, to restore personal freedom, to treat addiction as a healthcare issue instead of a criminal one) and only one of those is to reduce illegal trafficking and the associated violence.

From Foreign Policy, via NPR

Drug Commercials Explained

Posted by apt46 on June 27, 2011 None comments

A smart parody of the formulaic (and deceitful) TV commercials for prescription drugs, that most people have no business knowing about anyway.

Via Laughing Squid

Bill Introduced To Legalize Marijuana

Posted by apt46 on June 24, 2011 6 comments

Two Congressmen who have first names for last names, Massachusetts liberal Barney Frank and Texas libertarian Ron Paul, introduced a bill today that would end the prohibition on pot. The bill is modeled after the 21st amendment, which ended the prohibition of alcohol, and is not expected to pass the House — much less survive a veto from Obama. Still, it’s a good first step both for personal freedom and for the end of the pointless and expensive drug war that has gotten us nowhere after fifty years.

From NPR

The War On Drugs Is Officially A Failure, Again

Posted by apt46 on June 10, 2011 None comments

Last week, an international group of dignitaries and business people known as the Global Commission on Drug Policy released a report saying the War on Drugs is a failure by any measure, and that it’s time to take another look at how we deal with drugs. Today a related new report (PDF) was released, the result of a year-long investigation by the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight. It’s not at all the same kind of report as the Global Commission’s, in that it’s mostly a look at how counter-narcotics contracts are being handled, so it’s simply a financial analysis of where the tax dollars go.

But the gist of it is that we’re spending a lot of money on the counter-narcotics contracts, that they’ve gone up a lot in the past decade, and that we have no idea if we’re getting any results from all that money, but most likely not. The Global Commission’s report would agree on that last point, as they have a graph showing drug use has gone up.

The report (PDF), via The LA Times and NPR

The War On Drugs Is Officially A Failure

Posted by apt46 on June 2, 2011 8 comments

It looks like a bunch of important people from around the world finally saw the excellent movie Traffic, and decided to do something about the travesty that is the War on Drugs. So they formed a Global Commission on Drug Policy and today released a report spelling out just how ineffective the “War” is: after 50 years, drug use keeps going up.

The commission includes people like Robert Branson (who runs Virgin Airlines/Mobile/Galactic/etc), Kofi Annan (the former UN Secretary General), a former US Secretary of State, a former Prime Minister of Greece, and former Mexican, Colômbian, Swiss and Brazilian presidents; so the thing has some clout. Their recommendations:

  • end criminalization
  • start regulation
  • focus on prevention and treatment
  • replace policies that are based mostly on misguided ideology (e.g., “drugs are bad so if they’re illegal no one will take them”) with ones based on facts.

These findings prompted some logical reactions. The White House drug czar thought about it, caught a glimpse of a world in which he’d be out of a job and rejected the commission’s findings. The Mexican government thought about it, caught a glimpse of a world in which they wouldn’t be getting mountains of money from the US to “fight” the drug war and — wait for it — rejected the commission’s findings. Facts are so 1952. In the meantime, here’s a handy graph cited in the report showing just how much nonsense there goes into criminalizing drugs:

The darker the color of the drug, the more dangerous the UN thinks it is; the higher up on the chart, the more dangerous it actually is. It looks like heroin and cocaine are the only drugs the UN classified correctly. Alcohol is perfectly legal, but a lot more dangerous than marijuana, LSD and ecstasy. Even ritalin is more dangerous than ecstasy, and about the same as LSD. And tobacco is just slightly less dangerous than speed.

In fact, the only things more dangerous than alcohol are barbiturates, cocaine, and heroin. So logically, if alcohol is legal, everything below it should be legal also. Or conversely, alcohol should be illegal too; which would be a lot more consistent, except for the fact that we already tried making it illegal for 13 years with disastrous results and rampant increase in organized crime. Sound familiar?

But let’s not let facts get in the way of drug policy.

From The Global Commission On Drug Policy, via NPR and BBC