Is Alcohol or Cannabis more Harmful?
Deciphering the hype from reality with regard to drug use can be a challenge for most of us. Professor David Nutt in the UK has given me permission to post a link to the paper he has co-authored with Ruth Weissenborn that looks at the reality of a comparison of harm caused by two common intoxicants – Alcohol and Cannabis. That paper has been published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology under the title ‘Popular Intoxicants: what lessons can be learned from the last 40 years of alcohol and cannabis regulation?’ Professor Nutt is a strong proponent of evidence based responses, rather than those often based on what might be kindly called hype.
Some interesting comparisons are drawn through assessing the two drugs on a scale that looks at ‘harm to user’ and ‘harm to others’. The short takeaway for me was that in terms of ‘harm to user’, alcohol was about two times more harmful than cannabis. When including ‘harm to others’, alcohol was about FOUR times more harmful. As some of you know, my early career was a member of the police force in Victoria. I can say categorically that when needing to arrest a cannabis intoxicated user, I have no recollection of having any trouble at all. The same cannot be said for arresting those using alcohol where aggression by the alcohol user was a common experience. You can download the paper here – many thanks to Prof. David Nutt for providing it to me. If you’d like to visit his blog go to his wordpress site here
You’d think that given a focus on the future, you’d ask specialists in the future to have some input, and whilst that didn’t occur for the PM’s Summit in Canberra over the weekend, some of Australia’s Futurists had already done the leg work to contribute their thoughts on the future of Australia. That report is…
Read More >Some of Australia’s leading futurists gathered in Melbourne in March to provide a specialist Futures approach to addressing the Australia 2020 Summit in Canberra. The outcome of that Summit and the development that subsequently followed has led to the creation of the report ‘Australia 2020 Futurists Summit’ that has worked through each of the ten…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will meet with eminent ABC radio presenter Jon Faine on Wednesday the 16th of April to discuss the outcomes of the Australia 2020 Futurists Summit and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit in Canberra on the weekend With a focus on the future of Australia it would be only natural…
Read More >A group of leading Australian Futurists gathered over the weekend to consider the 10 core themes set to be tackled at Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit in Canberra in April. Convened by Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber, the 2020 Australia Futurists Summit utilised some of the advanced facilitation and strategy development techniques as a…
Read More >As preparations continue for the Prime Minister Rudd’s ‘1000 heads’ ideas summit in Canberra in April, a group of Australia’s leading futurists are gathering in Melbourne this weekend for the ‘Australia 2020 Futurists Summit’. The futurists attending the summit work across Australia, in corporate, not for profit and Government agencies in a variety of fields…
Read More >A few thoughts on what steps could be taken to overcome the ‘treat everyone like a nail’ approach that Interest Rate rises seems to do. Check out the idea under the ‘Latest Focus’ section Interest Rate Rises are going to penalise too many people who don’t deserve to lose their homes
Read More >Marcus Barber offers his thoughts on How to Stop Japanese Whaling in its Tracks and suggests that raiding boats won’t do the job. Instead he suggests that the key to negotiating with the Japanese is to have the Japanese people do the work. And to encourage them to do so we must begin to talk…
Read More >If an ‘Inconvenient Truth’ raised the profile of global warming to the general population, it appears that a willingness by political leaders to take appropriate action to mitigate the possible ramifications is still very much lacking. It is such a pity. No one who holds the Global Warming scenario close to heart wants to be…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will join Tim Cox on 774 ABC as part of the conversation hour next week Tim is filling in for Jon Faine whilst he takes a well deserved break and Marcus will join him for the conversation hour kicking off at 11am on Thursday the 13th of December, where they’ll discuss…
Read More >At the AustForesight 2007 Conference, Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber and fellow Futurist Steve Tighe presented their take on what is required to enable futurists to be seen as more relevant to the Corporate world. Drawing on their shared experience as facilitator and client, they detailed the journey of foresight and futures across the past 50…
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