Journal Journal: Welcome back, SlashPot (thank you failure machine samzenpus) 39
Now, before the Pro Pot Propaganda Pushers here start calling me a fascist, let me point out where my criticism is. This is about how samzenpus failed to even approach a useful summary of the article that the summary linked to - which I will point out is freely available to everyone. In particular, because failure machine couldn't be bothered to read the article, he missed:
Nevertheless, as previously stressed, our findings should not be interpreted that moderate alcohol consumption poses a higher risk to an individual and their close contacts than regular heroin use14. Much of the harm from drug use is not inherently related to consumption, but is heavily influenced by the environmental conditions of the drug use2, and this additional hazard is not included in a drug ranking based on (animal) toxicology.
The first major problem of the approach is the lack of toxicological dose-response data for all compounds except alcohol and tobacco. No human dose-response data are available; also no dose-response data in animals, only LD50 values are published. Furthermore, no chronic-toxicity data (long-term experiments) are available, which are usually used for such kinds of risk assessment. Therefore, we can assess only in regards to mortality but not carcinogenicity or other long-term effects. The absence of such data is specifically relevant for compounds with low acute toxicity (such as cannabis), the risk of which may therefore be underestimated.
In other words, the study was looking to see how much of a substance was required to kill you immediately. They mentioned very few substances have known limits for that. They also went on to mention that cannabis in particular is not studied much from a toxicology standpoint when compared to other drugs:
The second major problem is the uncertainty in data about individual and population-wide exposure due to the illegal markets. There is a scarcity of epidemiological studies of cannabis use by comparison with epidemiological studies of alcohol and tobacco use
Indeed, I agree with their closing remark:
Currently, the MOE results point to risk management prioritization towards alcohol and tobacco rather than illicit drugs. The high MOE values of cannabis, which are in a low-risk range, suggest a strict legal regulatory approach rather than the current prohibition approach.
Not that the propagandists here on slashdot would bother to read that far.
