Image Credit: Stefanie L.

When scientists rank recreational drugs by how dangerous they are, they don’t even remotely resemble the degree to which the drugs are regulated and controlled.  Take, for example, this list.  The underlying list was compiled by psychopharmacologist Professor David Nutt and neuroscientist Professor Colin Blakemore, and the items on the list were rearranged by how they are handled by law in the United States. The number in parenthesis is the comparative ranking of how dangerous the drug actually is.

Schedule 1
1. Heroin (1)
2. Cannabis (11)
3. LSD (14)
4. GHB (17)
5. Ecstasy (18)

Schedule 2

6. Cocaine (2)
7. Barbituates (3)
8. Street methadone (4)
9. Amphetamines (8)
10. 4-MTA* (13)
11. Methylphenidate (Ritalin) (15)

Schedule 3

12. Ketamine (6)
13. Buprenorphine (10)
14. Anabolic steroids (16)

Schedule 4

15. Benzodiazepines (7)
16. Khat (20)

Regulated outside of schedule system

17. Alcohol (5)
18. Tobacco (9)
19. Alkyl Nitrites (poppers) (19)

No regulation

20. Solvents (12)

This particular report was commissioned by the British Government.  After Nutt & Blakemore provided their results, the government seems to have considered not publishing the study because it did not conform to the way that Britain, a country with a much more liberal attitude towards drug use than America, classifies drugs.

American drug policy, which makes England’s drug policy look like legalization, is equally arbitrary.  All but one of the schedule I drugs are less dangerous than drugs regulated outside the schedule system and freely available to adults.

The problem is one of pure politics.  Drug classifications in this country aren’t based on any genuine threat to public safety.  The drug scares in the US have historically been based on witch hunts.  The original push to ban opium was an attempt to oppress Asian immigrants on the West Coast.  Ecstasy was outlawed despite an outcry from the scientific community stating they were in the process of investigating controlled, therapeutic uses for it. Why? Because people were afraid of what would become Rave culture.  The attacks on LSD in the 1960s were a direct attempt to control the counterculture. 

Meanwhile, tobacco and alcohol continue to kill over 500,000 people a year.  There really is no credible argument that the classification of drugs in our legal system was made to eliminate dangerous drugs rather than politically unpopular ones.

Even if you buy the notion that the government has an obligation to protect people from the dangers of drug use, you should at least be open to the idea that the way in which its being done is ineffective.  The sheer randomness of drug classification we use, combined with the questionable efforts our government takes to eradicate both demand and supply, make the system practically untenable.  Even when we abandoned the idea of having Congress set the drug laws directly and set up the Drug Enforcement Agency, politics still pushed science out of the process, as seen by how the DEA reacted to scientific concern about therapeutic uses of Ecstasy.  If Congress can’t do it, and administrative agencies can’t do it, what’s left?

At some point, even the most zealous of drug warriors will have to admit that there’s something else behind which drugs are the ones whose abuse we fight most vigorously.  When that happens, we’ll either finally see people admit to themselves that prohibition is a futile endeavor, or we’ll just see another cockamamy regulatory scheme that will get captured by zealots with an axe to grind just like all the rest of the regulatory schemes.  Since the latter is so much more likely, I hope it ends up a slight improvement over what we’ve got at the moment.