Quote:
Originally Posted by Kumabjorn
Interesting, how do you quantify something like that? Is it accumulated damage? In what terms?
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The medical body that advises the British government on drug policy released a "ranking" of all the different drugs - including alcohol and tobacco - a year or two ago. Both cannabis and cocaine rated well below tobacco in terms of the damage they do the body. It caused quite a stir here at the time, because it illustrated that there was a wide discrepency between the "class" of a drug (ie the length of prison sentence you can receive for possessing it) and how "dangerous" it actually was, and that tobacco was close to the top of the scale in terms of its medical damage. Largely, if memory serves me correctly, because it's physiologically addictive, whereas drugs like cocaine are not.
EDIT:
Here's a
newpaper article about the study that was carried out. I was wrong about cocaine - it is very harmful - but, for example, LSD was ranked as being less harmful than either alcohol or tobacco.