[ExI] Jaw-dropping CWRU Alzheimer's breakthrough?

[Tom Nowell]

Spike asked how come stoners take colossal risks putting god knows what junk into themselves and get a free pass. Well, the simple answer is they're not actually taking that big a risk. They have the mighty power of mammalian evolution on their side, and the human body is amazing at detoxifying all sorts of crap. You can fill yourself with rubbish, wash down your pharmaceuticals with a dose of ethanol that would butcher some other mammals, get the munchies and eat some junk food which is more additives than farm produce and still only have a modest hangover in the morning.

I remember hearing a statistic about how many millions of pills of what customers believe is MDMA are taken each week in the UK, but I thought the figure I remembered was too high. http://mdma.net/club-drugs/uk.html reproduced an Observer article from 2003 stating the UN reckoned 730k people took MDMA in the UK, and the National Criminal Intelligence Service said from 500k to 2m pills of "MDMA" (well, something that produces a similar high mixed with random cutting agents, but lets pretend it's actually the drug people thought they were paying for) were consumed each week.

If that's true, then in 2003 from 25m to 100m badly produced, minimally quality controlled tablets were taken in the UK for the purposes of getting high, and only 72 people died in "ecstasy related deaths", some of which were down to accidents they could have had on other intoxicating substances, some due to allergy, some due to people overdrinking water because they thought they needed that much while taking the drug. http://thedea.org/statistics.html says that in a UK study of 81 deaths where MDMA was present, only 6 died of MDMA toxicity. So, maybe 100 million tablets for single figures of actual deaths from poisoning. It says a lot about the resilience of the human body that large-scale consumption of illegal synthetic drugs still kills less people than old-fashioned heroin or cocaine. (It also says a lot about the UK that so many people escape the tedium of their lives through getting completely off their faces, nothing has changed since the
 gin-swilling drunks depicted by Hogarth in the 18th century)

The acceptable risk levels allowed for pharmaceuticals are very small, and many medicines are rejected each year for small levels of risk. Cancer drugs are allowed to have a bigger level of risk than many others because the patients suffering the disease are staring at a very shortened lifespan as it is. Everyday medications, like contraceptives, have to have a very low level of risk simply because so many people will be taking them for years at a time.


As Anders likes to point out in his talks on risk, what sort of price are we willing to put on these small risks? Mike Darwin gave a talk to the UKTA a few years back when he pointed out the work of the HIV underground in pressuring the government and research organisations into speeding up testing of antiretroviral therapies. It made a big difference to HIV sufferers, and could work for other conditions too.

Tom
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20120227/dc1c2fae/attachment.html>