Drugs without the hot air: Making Sense of Legal and Illegal Drugs

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For example, he points out that tobacco and alcohol are drugs that are much more dangerous than many illegal drugs. Polecam każdemu, ponieważ większość społeczeństwa używa lub zna osoby, które używają legalnych substancji psychoaktywnych takich jak alkohol czy nikotyna.

However, it is often the case that policy is concerned with reducing the prevalence of use, rather than harm. And this was especially interesting given David Nutt’s past relationship with the British government, and how a lot of the examples and policies mentioned are from the UK, most of which I didn't know much about before, so it was great to be able to put things into context, being British. The science of what drugs are and how they work lets us quantify and compare the harms caused by different drugs. But there are still major issues (see Chapter 12) and insufficient summaries (see Chapter 13) to contend with, leading me to think I probably wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.When we appraise an intervention for the treatment of a disease we look to see its overall benefit in terms of increasing quality adjusted life years, not how many people can benefit from it (although the two may be related). In these interviews I also observed that the government had asked the ACMD to determine which Class cannabis belonged in, but then hadn’t followed our advice. That would be a direct incentive for drinkers to switch to weaker drinks and for manufacturers to reverse the trend of beers and wines getting stronger.

I have been following Professor David Nutt, that is his work and contributions in the media, for a few years now. Certain groups lobby on behalf of different diseases to overturn decisions about drug reimbursement. The second edition of Drugs without the hot air looks at the science to allow anyone to make rational decisions based on objective evidence, asking: *What is addiction?

Nutt is both committed to rigorous, evidence-based policy and to clear, no-nonsense prose that makes complex subjects comprehensible. Plus, while David Nutt clearly has his own opinions present in this book, I think he wrote a fairly good representation of the facts as well (this based on my own general knowledge and what I have learned at uni). An actual expert scientific investigation of alcohol/drugs and drug policy without a bunch of misleading morality-based bullshit. I responded in The Times that I didn’t understand what he meant when he said I had crossed the line from scie. Summary: The worst part about this book is that I came out feeling only marginally more informed about what we can do to minimize the harms going forward, about what policies I should support and what practices I should adopt.