World News @lemmy.world Lee Duna @lemmy.nz 1y ago

Swiss cocaine so cheap and widely used they’re considering legalising it

www.telegraph.co.uk Swiss cocaine so cheap and widely used they’re considering legalising it

As prices halve on ‘highest quality we’ve ever seen’, Bern says ‘war on drugs has failed’ and looks at it being sold for recreational use

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What is the source of that image? I'm questioning its validity. They have cannabis as more dependency forming and physically harmful than GHB. Unless it means something it doesn't say, like they've weighted the results by how many users there are of each drug or something.
- LSD shouldn't even be pictured... I question the validity, as well.
  
  It’s completely bullshit.
  
  I love GHB but it needs to be way higher on dependence. It’s extremely easy to be addicted to. Benzos as well. Benzos are just under heroin in levels of dependency.
  
  Edit: full agree with you, LSD isn’t even on this chart if the chart was real.
  
  I'd argue benzos should be higher than heroin for dependence. You can't cold turkey a bad benzo addiction, but you can with heroin.
  
  Yeah I'm guessing the source data for this chart is "random boomer's feelings".
  
  You should totally question the validity, but I'd pause before dismissing it entirely. It's supposedly based on an opinion survey of psychiatrists and a group of 'independent experts' (footnote incoming) published in the Lancet in 2007. Edit: I said things that weren't true about the Wikimedia image that I have removed - it's based on the table near the bottom of the article.
  
  DOI is 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)60464-4
  
  You should ask our friend ANNA if she'S heard people talk about this during her time in the ARCHIVEs.
  
  It's not a completely objective harm/dependence measure, for sure, but the opinions of experts aren't meaningless - it's worth reading the article and judging the authors' claims rather than this image. Though I will say the number of participants seems really low.
  
  On LSD,
  
  the opinion thing should be underlined and considered heavily (particularly in the UK, where rave culture is/was more top of mind than other places and LSD is/was in the mix, albeit I don't think to the same degree as MDMA and other compounds), but also
  
  as crazy as it may sound, dependency can develop in some users. I'd argue it looks VERY different than dependence to other substances (frequency is obviously much lower, given rapid tolerance, and some people may not call once a week or every two weeks dependency*), but it still exists. Given that this is basically an expert opinion poll it's actually placed more or less where I'd expect to see it.
  
  *Though in online discussion groups for folks interested in such compounds, those folks often do call that level of frequency a sign of dependency. Should note I'm talking specifically about macrodoses, not microdosing.
  
  (Footnote) from page 1049: "These experts had experience in one of the many areas of addiction, ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services."
- Interesting - linking again, which pulled it from an expert survey in the UK.
  
  I think they were asking for the source because the link you shared is just Wikipedia to a file. I was wondering about the original source of data too.
  
  Edit: full link came out weird like yours. No wonder we were confused.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg
  
  They end in .svg but load as a page - both yours and mine.
  
  That wasn’t the case for you? Which browser/app?
  
  Sync 👍
- The data in the paper is obtained solely from questionnaire results obtained from two groups of people: the first comprised people from the UK national group of consultant psychiatrists who were on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ register as specialists in addiction, while the second comprised of people with experience in one of the many areas of addiction, ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services; the experts are not named and were chosen by the authors.

194 comments