This has been making the rounds on my Facebook feed and it definitely deserved to be posted here. In the U.K., the country's top advisor on drugs was recently fired for criticizing the country's drug laws. Basically, he was saying that drug policy should reflect the actual harmfulness of the drugs they police, as measured by the handy table in the article.

The table ranks 20 substances by a rating assigned by researches based on harmfulness to society and physical being and the risk of addictiveness. Heroin is first, alcohol fifth, weed 11th, ecstasy third from the bottom and LSD 14th. Of course, this reflects what a lot of researchers have been saying about some of the drugs on the list for years, and maybe isn't that much of new information.

Perhaps most interesting to me, mostly because I just wrote a blog post about it, and because I'm starting to become more interested in the implications of the drug and dance culture, is the ranking given to ecstasy. I'm thinking that ranking, at first glance, seems a little low. Chemically, ecstasy is definitely not addictive. But behaviourally, it's definitely more addictive, and more potentially damaging than weed. That being said, the list reflects an interesting dynamic that I've been thinking a lot about: if you're going to be using (or abusing) a substance to have a good time in a dance environment, which is worse for? Ecstasy or alcohol?

Frequenting dance clubs and being around E quite a bit makes you start to wonder what it does physically to your body over the long term. Though I really doubt that E or MDMA will ever be legalized, the way it operates now, it's in a state of accepted use in certain places. In Edmonton, the Y Afterhours club is basically an E bar. They don't let you sell it in there, in fact if they catch you, you're gone. They don't sell it to you themselves, but it's there.  They are also open all-night, after every other bar is closed and sell only energy drinks, water, gatorade and candy. So that's kind of a hint.

But the police don't bust in every night to search for drugs, though I'm sure they know what goes on. It just happens, if people want to find it. And everyone is happy either in willful ignorance or in doing as much as they feel like to discourage it's use without really making it a criminal issue.

For developed electronic music scenes, this seems to be the way things are going as far as the legal tolerance for E.