Silk Road forums
Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: MDUK on February 22, 2013, 03:53 am
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So, many of you will never have heard of professor David Nutt - he's the former adviser to the government in the UK who was sacked for comparing the dangers of Horse Riding and MDMA, and giving interviews in which he said the government's drug policy wasn't working (because everyone knows that shooting the messenger is always a great tactic).
If you want to see why I like this guy, here's an amazing quote of an exchange between Professor Nutt and the British home secretary at the time when he wrote his article comparing the dangers of going out horse riding to the dangers of going out clubbing on MDMA - for reference, he found that ~1 in 350 instances of horse riding results in a serious incident, and ~1 in 10,000 instances of MDMA use result in a serious incident:
Jacqui Smith: "You can't compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal one."
Professor Nutt: "Why not?"
Jacqui Smith: "Because one's illegal"
Professor Nutt: "Why's it illegal?"
Jacqui Smith: "Because it's harmful"
Professor Nutt: "Don't we need to compare harms to determine if it should be illegal?"
Jacqui Smith: "You can't compare harms from legal activity with an illegal one"
Yes, one is a politician with no real-world experience, one is an eminent neuroscientist specialising in psychoactives - who do you think is more qualified to make statements on policy? Of course, the government couldn't risk the fact that they might be forced to have their scale of harm actually function as a scale of harm, so it was important to shoot the messenger as quickly as possible...
So anyway, after Professor Nutt was fired, he set up the "Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs" to provide information on established recreational drugs (including alcohol and tobacco) free of all the political hot air. It's quite an interesting resource:
http://www.drugscience.org.uk/
I know that a lot of people use SR to try new substances, so this represents a good source of unbiased info and advice ;)
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i like the comparison of mdma to horseback riding
but i've seen his dogshit graph about physical harm and addiction potential of diffferent drugs
put huffing solvents as less harmful than benzodiazapines and lsd as more harmful than mdma
also putting heroin as more physically harmful all of which simply is not so
this made me lose faith in his integrity as a scientist
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the world is frustrating. more study must be done on preventing brain damage done by drugs
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This is exactly what I needed, thanks!
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word
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the world is frustrating. more study must be done on preventing brain damage done by drugs
I just wish we could get past the idea of drug control as some kind of moral crusade...
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I like this I wonder how much of what he says actually has merit.