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

[Samantha Atkins]

On 02/27/2012 04:34 AM, Tom Nowell wrote:
> 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.

End the War on [some] Drugs.  Sue producers of defective tabs for 
fraud.  Simple.

>
> 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)
>

Compare that to the numbers that died from alcohol.  Or from tobacco.

- samantha

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