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?

My friend forwarded me this fascinating Vice article yesterday about drugs that do the opposite effects of some well-known drugs. The writer went through and experienced drugs that do the opposite effect of marijuana, psychodelics and heroin.

 I didn't realize some of these things existed, nor did I realize someone would actually desire to experience them in large doses and in a recreational way like the writer did. But he makes a good point about it all at the end of the article. After a week of doing things that made him feel terrible, he feels awesome.

Most recreational drugs make you feel pretty good and they're hard to turn away from. But when you lose track your initial state of reference, i.e. sobriety, that's when problems start. You need to know what feeling shitty is like in order to feel good. Or you need to know what feeling normal is like to know what it's like to be high.