Alcohol is a drug. We have guidelines on its use aimed at reducing the long-term risk of health harms. So why not have guidelines for drugs?
Last year almost 80,000 people took part in the Global Drug Survey and helped us produce the world’s first harm reduction guide to be voted for by the experts: people who like taking drugs and want to keep themselves as safe as possible. It’s been downloaded 30,000 times so far. The guide included common sense strategies – don’t mix stimulant drugs with each other or with loads of alcohol, don’t take GHB with alcohol, don’t use drugs when you’re anxious or depressed – to reduce the risk of harm.
Uniquely, it also spoke about the impact of these strategies on the pleasure people got from drugs. But as we stated very clearly, the only way to avoid drug related harm is not to use.
This zero tolerance approach is applied oddly to a legal regulated drug: tobacco. The message governments put out about tobacco is that any level of use is associated with harm and it’s highly addictive so don’t smoke. This is good advice because the risk of addiction with tobacco is higher than for almost any other drug and even low levels of use are associated with an increased risk of lung illnesses and cancer.
The problem as I see it is that this same (but unevidenced) zero limit advice is applied to illegal drugs by governments. I guess they have no choice – they could hardly say a drug is illegal because it’s very dangerous and then say “look, actually if you don’t use too much X too often and make sure you don’t play with knives, go scuba diving or drive, then actually the risks of you running into serious harm is pretty low (not zero)”.
Source: Dr Adam Winstock, thejournal.ie, 20/11/14
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