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?

This list obviously has an answer.

Doing a bit more research on the topic, this list isn't the first to suggest that binge drinking is worse for you than popping a few pills. That exact thing was suggested, with much controversy, by an Australian researcher (see a pair of articles here and here) after it was shown that when drink prices increased, many partiers were switching to E.

The first question that is raised is why do people need to use anything to have a good time. But questioning that is much like asking why the sky is blue. It's just what people do and it's what people will continue to do whether it's legal or not, whether it's alcohol or ecstasy or cocaine or whatever. Some people use it to escape and forget, some people do it to work their courage up. Personally, I like being drunk because it feels good and I like being high because it feels good. I don't need to be drunk or high to have a good time, but I generally choose to.

So if you accept that, whether or not some people disagree with it, people will always get slightly screwed up to party, then the potential harm of two party substitutes, apparently, should be evaluated against each other. And the probability of you dying or something incredibly bad happening to you when you drink is much higher than if you use ecstasy. Further, the harm in using ecstasy partially arrises from its illegal nature. Often pills are bought in a club environment, which, given the fact you're buying a chunk of compressed powder or a gel cap filled with unknown substances, is ridiculously dangerous. Most people don't bother testing it, mostly because they don't have the capacity to. Many times the full dangers of the drug are not known by the people consuming them, either because the information isn't out there, or because the important information is diluted by unscientific misinformation propagated by the anti-drug lobby.

With all that being said, I think I know my body and I've had some bad hangover experiences, but I've also gone through periods of repeated E use and have felt it in ways afterwards that make me second guess me using it at all. So I'm not going to respond to these kinds of articles by completely switching to popping pills all the time to replace drinking. But it's good to see that some scientific minds are rationally evaluating the substances we use, and questioning why some are celebrated and others shunned.