Drug Discrimination Time
Line
1952 The cancer
advisory committee of the
You shouldn't frighten people into thinking that
smoking might be dangerous.
1955 The World
Health Organisation’s The Physical and Mental Effects of Cannabis:
[Contact WHO Library or email
us]
Under the influence of cannabis, the danger of
committing unpremeditated murder is very great; it can happen in cold blood,
without any reason or motive, unexpectedly, without any preceding quarrel;
often the murderer does not even know the victim, and simply kills for pleasure.
1968
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/wootton/wootmenu.htm
Para 66: All we would wish
to say is that the gradations of danger between consuming tea and coffee at one
end of the scale and injecting heroin intravenously at the other, may not be
permanently those which we now ascribe to particular drugs.
1970
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/runciman/pf3.htm
Chapter 3, para 1
In 1970 James Callahan, then
Home Secretary, explained to Parliament the aim of drug classification under
the new Misuse of Drugs Act (Hansard, March 25th
1970, Vol 798, col 1453):
The object here is to make,
so far as possible, a more sensible differentiation between drugs. It will
divide them according to their accepted dangers and harmfulness in the light of
current knowledge and it will provide for changes to be made in the
classification in the light of new scientific knowledge.
1993 World Health Organisation’s
28th Expert Committee on Drug Dependence:
http://whqlibdoc.who.int/trs/WHO_TRS_836.pdf
3.2.4 Public health approaches to all psychoactive
drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, are increasingly being viewed in a common
frame.
3.3.1 The strengthened network of transportation has
also facilitated migration. … While in itself migration has not been an
important mechanism for drug transportation, it has contributed to the
increased contact between cultures with very different norms and understandings
of psychoactive drug use.
4.1 [p.15] The social
consequences of drug use are largely determined by social and environmental
factors, such as the legal status of the drug. The possibility of imprisonment
or other penalties only arises where a pattern of purchase or use is defined as
illegal. The legal status of the drug will also affect the pattern and mode of
administration, with illegality tending to push a drug into more concentrated
forms and its use into mote life-threatening modes of administration.
5.1.2 …the Committee discussed the advisability of
prohibiting under the international conventions plant products containing
psychoactive substances that are traditionally used by indigenous populations.
… However, the Committee felt that the social problems resulting from the
prohibition of these products under the international controls might outweigh
the health benefits. Several instances were cited in which prohibition of drugs
with traditional patterns of use had caused unforeseen problems. The Committee
suggested that, if regulatory control of these products was considered
appropriate, a national control system might be used to regulate the market,
such as many countries use for alcohol. …the Committee recommended that WHO
should consider … making recommendations concerning international control
provisions.
5.6 The structure of public opinion about drugs often
undermines the effectiveness of rational drug control policies. For example,
the widespread acceptability of cigarette smoking in almost all societies has
made tobacco smoking a familiar and companionable behaviour,
and one that can be fitted into almost all routine daily activities. In many
societies, drinking has also become established as a socially acceptable behaviour, often associated with other activities, and so
familiar that it may not even be noticed. … Conversely, a lack of knowledge
about illicit drugs can contribute to excessive public concern and lead to
ill-considered policy-making.
8. [p.31]: Government policies may also be
inconsistent – the promotion of alcohol and tobacco may be unrestricted while
the use of drugs that have less serious consequences may be illegal.
A rational drug control policy is an essential tool
for fostering health promotion, irrespective of the legal status of individual
drugs, and the absence of such a policy will result in considerable public
health costs.
9.1.1. …[WHO has an] integrated approach to the
problems presented by the use of tobacco and the harmful use of alcohol and
other psychoactive drugs, and [the Committee] recommended that prevention and
treatment services should, wherever possible, be concerned with the harm
produced by all these drugs.
9.1.3. Attention must be paid not only to illicit
drugs, but also to alcohol and tobacco, medicinal psychoactive drugs and
volatile solvents to ensure a reduction in health problems due to illicit drug
use will not be offset by an increase in problems due to the use of other drugs.
1994
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/~ota/disk1/1994/9435/9435.PDF
P.13: Box 1-3: Drugs and
Discrimination. In
1850,
1880,
in
1909.
1882,
1930s, Colorado, New Mexico:
The Southwest welcomed Mexican migrants during labor shortages but during the
Depression, anxiety over competition for jobs shifted to wildly exaggerated
fears of the effects of marijuana use customary among Mexicans.
To placate fears, Congress
passed the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which prohibited recreational use of the
drug.
1995, The World Health Organisation’s A Comparative Appraisal of the Health and Psychological Consequences
of Alcohol, Cannabis, Nicotine and Opiate Use:
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/general/who-magnitude.htm
Unlike alcohol, cannabis does not produce cirrhosis
for example. Moreover, in developed societies cannabis appears to play little
role in injuries caused by violence, as does alcohol, although recently concern
has been expressed in some developing countries that cannabis may be used to
fortify criminal offenders. Unlike tobacco, all the evidence suggests that the
proportion of cannabis smokers who become daily smokers is substantially less
than the proportion of tobacco smokers who do so.
1997 United Nations World Drug Report, The Regulation - Legalization debate, p.198:
http://www.unodc.org/adhoc/world_drug_report_1997/CH5/5bLEG.pdf
The discussion of regulation has inevitably brought alcohol and tobacco into the heart of the debate and highlighted an apparent inconsistency whereby use of some dependence creating drugs is legal and of others is illegal. The cultural and historical justifications offered for this separation may not be credible to the principal targets of today’s anti-drug messages – the young. If it is accepted that education and prevention are the most effective, long-term strategies against drug abuse, then planning a drug control regime for the next century should tackle this problem and its implications for both the developing and the developed world.
2000, The World Health Organisation’s Child
& Adolescent Health webpage:
http://www.who.int/child-adolescent-health/PREVENTION/Adolescents_substance.htm
Tobacco is the most widely distributed and commonly
used drug in the world today. More deaths are due to tobacco than to any other
drug.
2000
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/runciman/default.htm
21 Such evidence as there is suggests that the health
and other social costs attributable to illicit drugs are small compared with
the health and social costs of alcohol and tobacco. A recent French study has
estimated that 6% of the costs of responding to social problems caused by drugs
are attributable to illicit drugs as compared with 40% to tobacco and 54% to
alcohol.
23 We consulted the
members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Faculty of Substance Misuse
about the relative harmfulness of controlled drugs. …their replies showed a
high degree of consensus over the ranking of drugs by harmfulness. No-one
disputes the position of heroin and cocaine at the top of the list. Methadone,
amphetamines, barbiturates and temazepam when used
intravenously are, in the consensus view of those whom we consulted, in the top
seven (as is alcohol). Ecstasy, LSD, steroids and cannabis come in the last
five (below tobacco). Buprenorphine, codeine and
benzodiazepines other than temazepam are in-between.
34 Given the ranking
that alcohol and tobacco have in the order of dangerous drugs, it is an obvious
question why they and drugs controlled under the MDA should not be treated
similarly: either alcohol and tobacco should be added to the appropriate
Classes under the MDA or drugs that are no more dangerous than they should be
treated as alcohol and tobacco are now treated. We resist this argument. In the
first place, it is simply a fact that the use of alcohol and tobacco is so
widespread and familiar that an attempt to prohibit their supply by law would
lead to widespread resentment and law-breaking (as happened with the
Prohibition experiment in the
35 The cases of alcohol and tobacco are in any case not
the same. Smoking tobacco is widely regarded as a bad and dangerous habit. Many
who smoke wish that they could stop and measures are taken to prevent smoking
in public places, to limit advertising and so on. It is a reasonable social aim
that the use of tobacco should eventually disappear, even though that aim
cannot appropriately be pursued by legal prohibition. Alcohol is a more
complicated case. Although it is a dangerous drug and causes enormous social costs
and harm, it is also used by many people moderately and non-destructively. It
is strictly the misuse of alcohol that needs to be prevented, and while the
ways in which this can best be done may be debated, control under the MDA is
not one of them.
2002
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmselect/cmhaff/318/31802.htm
9. At the outset it is important to keep a sense of proportion. Legal drugs, such as tobacco and alcohol, are responsible for far greater damage both to individual health and to the social fabric in general than illegal ones.
10. Substance misuse is a continuum perhaps artificially divided into legal and illegal activity.
20. While around four million people use illicit drugs each year, most of those people do not appear to experience harm from their drug use, nor do they cause harm to others as a result of their habit.
69. Why are alcohol and
tobacco not integrated into the drugs strategy?
(Rosemary Jenkins) We have to
recognise that the two substances are somewhat different in that they have
legal status rather than illegal status, which means that the way in which you
approach them has to be very different. It is much more complicated than drugs
because of the general view that it is legal and most people manage their
alcohol in a perfectly legitimate and reasonable way. So any strategy has to
take account of that societal attitude.
2004
http://www.sentencing-guidelines.gov.uk/docs/Seriousness_guideline.pdf
1.4 A court is required to pass a sentence that is
commensurate with the seriousness of the offence. The seriousness of an offence is determined by two main parameters; the
culpability of the offender and the
harm caused or risked being caused
by the offence.
1.5 Section 143(1)
Criminal Justice Act 2003 provides:
In considering the seriousness of any offence, the court
must consider the offender’s culpability in committing the offence and any harm
which the offence caused, was intended to cause or might foreseeably
have caused.
1.14 Some conduct is criminalised purely by reference to
public feeling or social mores.
In addition, public
concern about the damage caused by some behaviour, both to individuals and to
society as a whole, can influence public perception of the harm caused, for
example, by the supply of prohibited drugs.
2006
·
Summary, para 5: the current classification system is not fit for
purpose and should be replaced with a more scientifically based scale of harm.
·
Summary, para 3: we have identified significant anomalies in the
classification of individual drugs and a regrettable lack of consistency in the
rationale used to make classification decisions”.
· Para 96: a paper authored by experts including Professor Nutt, Chairman of the ACMD Technical Committee”, found “no statistically significant correlation between the Class of a drug and its harm score” and that “the boundaries between the Classes were entirely arbitrary.
·
·
Para 106: One of the most striking findings
highlighted in the paper drafted by Professor Nutt and his colleagues was the
fact that, on the basis of their assessment of harm, tobacco and alcohol would
be ranked as more harmful than LSD and ecstasy (both Class A drugs).
· Appendix 14, A rational scale for assessing the risks of drugs of potential misuse, submitted by the ACMD, is the “paper authored by experts including Professor Nutt, Chairman of the ACMD Technical Committee”. It states:
·
The current
classification system has evolved in an unsystematic way from somewhat
arbitrary foundations with seemingly little scientific basis.
·
The correlation between
MDAct classification and harm rating was not
statistically significant.
·
Alcohol [and] tobacco … were
ranked as more harmful than LSD.
·
Our findings raise
questions about the validity of the current MDAct
classification, despite the fact that this is nominally based on an assessment
of risk to users and society. This is especially true in relation to
psychedelic type drugs. They also emphasise that the exclusion of alcohol and
tobacco from the MDAct is, from a scientific
perspective, arbitrary.
·
Our findings reveal no
clear distinction between socially accepted and illicit substances.
2006
http://www.drugs.gov.uk/publication-search/acmd/pathways-to-problems/Pathwaystoproblems.pdf
1.13 At present, the legal framework for the regulation and control of drugs clearly distinguishes between drugs such as tobacco and alcohol…, drugs which are covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act (1971) and drugs which are classed as medicines…. these distinctions are based on historical and cultural factors and lack a consistent and objective basis.
p.14, para
2: Although its terms of reference do not prevent it from doing so, the ACMD
has not considered alcohol and tobacco other than tangentially. The scientific
evidence is now clear that nicotine and alcohol have pharmacological actions
similar to other psychoactive drugs. Both cause serious health and social
problems and there is growing evidence of very strong links between the use of tobacco,
alcohol and other drugs. For the ACMD to neglect two of the most harmful
psychoactive drugs simply because they have a different legal status no longer
seems appropriate.
2006 UK Government
reply to Science and Technology Committee: Drug
classification: making a hash of it? http://www.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm69/6941/6941.pdf
Rec 50:
·
the Government acknowledges that alcohol and tobacco account for more
health problems and deaths than illicit drugs
·
The distinction between legal and illegal substances is not unequivocally
based on pharmacology, economic or risk benefit analysis. It is also based in
large part on historical and cultural precedents. A classification system that
applies to legal as well as illegal substances would be unacceptable to the
vast majority of people who use, for example alcohol, responsibly and would
conflict with deeply embedded historical tradition and tolerance of consumption
of a number of substances that alter mental functioning (ranging from caffeine
to alcohol and tobacco). Legal substances are therefore regulated through other
means.