Why Alcohol Is the Deadliest Drug
addictioncenter.com
addictioncenter.com
EDIT: looks like it is mostly an advertising company:
"Addiction Center receives advertising payments from the treatment centers that answer calls to the toll free numbers listed on the websites and is not associated with any specific treatment provider. Addiction Center receives advertising payments from the treatment providers that respond to chat requests on the websites and is not associated with any specific treatment provider. Addiction Center is not a medical provider or treatment facility and does not provide medical advice. Addiction Center does not endorse any treatment facility or guarantee the quality of care provided, or the results to be achieved, by any treatment facility. The information provided by Addiction Center is not a substitute for professional treatment advice."
>In an effort to offer a guide to policy makers in health, policing, and social care, Nutt's team rated drugs using a technique called multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) which assessed damage according to nine criteria on harm to the user and seven criteria on harm to others.
>Harms to the user included things such as drug-specific or drug-related death, damage to health, drug dependence and loss of relationships, while harms to others included crime, environmental damage, family conflict, international damage, economic cost, and damage to community cohesion.
>The scientists found alcohol was most harmful, with a score of 72, followed by heroin with 55 and crack with 54.
Indeed, because if I drink one beer it'll be 17% worse off than doing one dose of heroin.
My only gripe is that they seem to intentionally mislead readers by treating heavy users of alcohol the same way as light users of other harder drugs. Clearly, the issue is real, but actions like this will only worsen the public perception on the subject instead of re-affirming it.
Not necessarily than street heroin, ie the heroin that people use, because that can contain any number of other drugs or substances, and even if it doesn't contain anything more dangerous there's still added danger from not knowing the dose.
If you could buy well-manufactured heroin from a supermarket or a pharmacy, or get it prescribed by your doctor, you'd be extremely unlikely to overdose unless wanting to kill yourself, and it would be a much healthier addiction to get than alcohol.
According to Wikipedia, "Trepanning: In ancient times, holes were drilled into a person who was behaving in what was considered an abnormal way to let out what people believed were evil spirits.[3] Evidence of trepanation has been found in prehistoric human remains from Neolithic times onward."
Did you attend an AA meeting where they drilled holes in someone's head? I have never heard of that before but there is the whole group-autonomy thing.
How do you live being like this?
Let's try'n'swap alcohol with cocaine at every party, wedding, bar mitzvah, christmas, new year's eve, thanksgiving etc and let's see what happens.
But yes they are more dangerous to the individual and would be more dangerous to society if everyone decided to start overdosing heroin all the time! But they'd all die and then alcohol would be back at number one.
agree.
Being a "slow killer" makes alcohol much more appealing to the general population.
And, of course, less dangerous in general.
Let's put it this way: if alcohol killed at the same rate of heavy drugs, we would not encounter many old people abusing it.
Lots of people get hooked on illegal opiates like heroin because they start out prescribed legal painkillers, but the prescription runs out and they are forced to look elsewhere for relief. Pills are pricey, but horse is cheap. Happened to a friend of mine, so cheap legal opiates might actually deter much H usage.
Additionally because it's an illegal trade, lots of heroin deaths are actually fentanyl deaths (rip Prince). This definitely wouldn't happen if real heroin was cheap and available and sold in proportioned packages like alcohol.
As to cost, you can easily spend $100 for a night of drinking or more. Cost is not a deterrent for many when it comes to alcohol.
let's put this in numbers
- Each year in Europe, every person aged 15 and over consumes, on average, 9.5 litres of pure alcohol, which is equivalent to around 190 litres of beer, 80 litres of wine or 24 litres of spirits.
- In 2019, 8.4 per cent of the EU adult population (15 years or older) consumed alcohol every day, 28.8 per cent drank weekly, and 22.8 per cent monthly, while 26.2 per said they never consumed alcoholic drinks or hadn’t consumed any in the last 12 months
- Between EU countries, there are large differences in estimated alcohol consumption, but one trend remains prevalent: men drink more than women: 13.0 per cent of men vs. 4.1 per cent of women drink alcohol every day; 36.4 per cent of men vs. 21.7 per cent of women drink every week.
Translate that into heroine or cocaine consumption and only after that we can compare the results.
Even though in some countries drugs have been decriminalized or legalized, the social stigma attached to various substances is still enormously different.
But is alcohol more dangerous than marijuana? Yes.
> they start out prescribed legal painkillers
Yes, correct.
That's why those substances are vastly more dangerous than alcohol and you need a medical prescription to buy them from an authorized dealer who needs to be a Doctor of Pharmacy who also had to pass an exam before applying for the license.
There's a reason why selling alcohol is much easier.
You can't get hooked on alcohol by drinking it milligrams at time, like opioids.
> As to cost, you can easily spend $100 for a night of drinking or more
In a bar or a restaurant, with friends or your partner. You're not paying for the alcohol, you're paying for the service.
Beer is ~1.5 euros for a 66cl a bottle in Italy at the local supermarket. You can find Vodka for 5-7 euros. People will think you're having a party, now try asking for cocaine or heroine...
If you were buying the substance on the streets at the black market, it would cost you pennies.
It would be so cheap that the dealer would actually make no money.
It's about easy of access and social acceptance.
Is that even possible under prohibition? So much of how substances are used is cultural. If cocaine was truly legal, maybe they would sell it in doses that were equivalent to a cup of coffee.
> There's a reason why selling alcohol is much easier.
Because it's so culturally ingrained? Because it's too easy to make to really illegalize it? Because it's a huge money maker, which is more important than societal good?
> You can't get hooked on alcohol by drinking it milligrams at time, like opioids.
Not miligrams of liquid, but you're counting the filler.
> If you were buying the substance on the streets at the black market, it would cost you pennies.
There was alcohol prohibition in america. This did not turn out to be the case.
You're arguing based on gut, not science or history. The fact is, there's no evidence that legalizing drugs leads to reefer madness or cocaine madness or whatever. Would more people try coke if it was legal? Maybe. Maybe some people try it now because it's illegal and that adds to the sex appeal.
You forget about research.
We already tried that, in a lab, under strict supervision and we concluded that: heroine is much worse for your health than alcohol.
> If cocaine was truly legal
you forget that cocaine was legal.
there's a reason why it isn't anymore. we know its effects.
> Because it's so culturally ingrained?
it's not. we have rediscovered alcohol many times throughout history, animals get drunk too. it's more than culture.
You're making it sound like we've just invented alcohol and we don't know what makes it different from cocaine or opioids...
> to really illegalize it?
Yeah, ask China what happened when the the west flooded their country with opium..
Why do you think they are called "Opium Wars"?
Also remember: not all drugs are equal.
As I've said: marijuana? of course we should legalize it, it's not worse than alcohol in any way, I would actually say it's much safer.
I'm also in favour of decriminalization and damage control, but heroine is absolutely much more dangerous than alcohol.
end of story.
> Not miligrams of liquid, but you're counting the filler.
I don't know if you're being serious or not, but there are actually around 14 GRAMS of alcohol in a glass of wine.
It takes 1,400 vicodin pills to make 14 grams of hydrocodone, assuming you're taking the highest dosage pills (10mg).
It's a lethal dose.
OTOH if you drink 5 glasses of wine you will most probably survive to tell your incredible story about what millions of people in many countries do every saturday night.
And the next saturday you're not hooked and need to increase the dosage to keep experiencing the same effects for the same amount of time. It won't wear off exponentially faster with exponentially worse side effects.
> This did not turn out to be the case.
because alcohol was the only drug in town back then.
if you were a drug dealer now, would you prefer to make a few bucks by selling liters of illegal alcohol or thousands by selling opioids?
which one is easier to transport and hide, and also provides the best ROI by weight and volume?
Basically, the claim is that alcohol is more dangerous than heroin or cocaine. The proof offered boils down to the fact that at the level of society more harm is caused by alcohol than by the other two. Well, obviously, far more people drink alcohol than use those two.
Reality check: for you as an individual all three are harmful. Drinking alcohol moderately and not too often is far far faaaar safer than doing heroin or cocaine at any level.
But saying alcohol is the most dangerous drug with this definition is still fair enough to say right? Carfentanil is more potent than fentanyl, but fentanyl is on the streets so it's what we should crack down on.
Per capita, alcohol kills more people than any other drug in most countries. It's also one of two drugs where you can die from withdrawals, being more dangerous than crack or heroin to detox from. It's also the only drug you get advertised 24/7, and that is socially forced down your throat (literally).
Not to say alcohol isn't fun, but it is the most dangerous drug to society, statistically.
>Next time someone tries to justify drinking alcohol, remember it causes cancer and other diseases, it’s three times as harmful as cocaine or tobacco
I know people don't understand cumulative effect, and you know they don't understand per capita. It's just a dishonest way to present something. You could say it's fair that driving is more harmful than drunk driving, but that'd be misleading at best.
You're more likely to know someone who dies from alcohol than any other drug, if you don't already. And I say that as someone who lost a friend to heroin! So I get how bad it can be, and I get how fun alcohol can be, and how culturally accepted one is over the other, but damn alcohol is a deadly drug. Like I said in another comment, alcohol is one of two drugs you can die from withdrawals from too (the other being benzos, ironically what you get to help deal with alcohol withdrawal).
And I say this knowing I still fancy a beer after work! Because that's how ingrained this stuff is in our lives.
The reality is that there is many ways to compare the characteristics of different substances. There are long-term impacts, short-term impacts, ld50, moral impacts, dose control, chemical addiction potential, chemical addiction rate, Etc.
You have to understand all of these to make sense of why different chemicals might be considered differently.
Like it or not, When compared to a lot of drugs alcohol has a high ld50, High dose control, and low chemical addiction rate.
You are unlikely to OD on a drink because the dose was high and there is too much alcohol in it. You are unlikely to get chemical withdrawal and cravings from infrequent use.
This puts a lot more control in the hands of users which is an important moral and Regulatory consideration.
Utilitarian analysis of total death or cost to a very bad job of taking into account any of the moral considerations
Is this a good metric? For a potential drug consumer it is more relevant which health/social risk is involved if taking a certain drug once/sometimes/regularly.
This is conflating the difference between "danger" and "harm". Danger is a measure of risk, not damage.
You wouldnt say that drinking alcohol is more dangerous than drinking bleach or sulfuric acid, but it can be more harmful, if you are talking about rates.
Most drugs are relatively harmless if taken rarely and in relatively low doses, the problem is that a lot of users don't and that because of our shared cultural history Alcohol typically gets a pass where as things not alcohol is vilified even if the data(as is the case for Cannabis) suggest that they might be more equal in actual harm done.
It’s the upper-class drug of choice, and there’s a reason for that. It’s also probably the most expensive drug by dollar-per-high-minutes, which is the real reason it should be avoided
Any stimulant is potentially harmful, especially one as powerful as this. Even ephedrine, which is considered relatively mild, is actually dangerous.
And that's if you don't consider risks that are inherent to the drug's price- cocaine is expensive and thus frequently isn't too pure, to say the least. Pretty obvious how it affects its side-effect profile
Obviously millions of people still do it and get away with it (otherwise England would be much less populated) but strictly speaking Amphetamine is probably safer for uppers.
Cocaine is highly addictive though.