BBC - Mark Easton's UK: Drugs debate hots up...the ISCD [Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs] has returned to the fray with what is called multicriteria decision analysis.
This approach includes 16 criteria including a drug's affects on users' physical and mental health, social harms including crime, "family adversities" and environmental damage, economic costs and "international damage".
The scientists, based on their expert knowledge, score a substance on each category from zero to 100...
The problem remains, however, of how much weight to give each of these categories.
"The weighting process is necessarily based on judgement, so it is best done by a group of experts working to consensus," the report authors say.
"Extensive sensitivity analyses on the weights showed that this model is very stable; large changes, or combinations of modest changes, are needed to drive substantial shifts in the overall rankings of the drugs."What emerges is a ranking of drugs at complete odds with the official Home Office classification system.
The fact that alcohol emerges as the most harmful drug leads the authors to conclude that "aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy" but its place at the head of the table also suggests a legal status in stark contrast to the much less harmful effect of Class A drugs including ecstasy and LSD.
It is also notable that cocaine and tobacco emerge with very similar rankings in terms of harm...
What are the merits of taxation? Are we about to learn of its merits when we hear about the huge cuts in public spending affecting many vital public services? There are choices but to listen to the Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition Government one would think not. There's the balance between raising more in taxation vs cutting spending. There's the speed and scale of spending cuts (and tax rises). There are the areas or people to tax more and areas to cut spending on. Already I believe a serious error has been made by not cutting defence spending more, when they are so bad at controlling their costs and getting value for money. And why those child benefit changes that dont take account of the whole of a household's income? Universality for child benefit has very clear advantages. I heard on the local news about Bristol City Council's plans to cut the amount spent on dealing with homelessness by hundreds of thousands - wrong because a roof over your head is a basic need and also counterproductive in my view because this spending helps people to become settled, working, productive, tax paying people who might otherwise be a big cost society in many ways.
Wallace
