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Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
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7:36 pm
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| Wednesday, June 27th, 2007
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2:44 pm
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| Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
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7:57 pm
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my seven week old kitten josephina maria is perfect i love her.
pictures soon!
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, May 14th, 2007
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8:10 pm - maybe if you had any sense at all you would know this....
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Mar 24, 2007 2:50 am US/Pacific
Alcohol, Tobacco More Dangerous Than Marijuana
(AP) LONDON, England New "landmark" research finds that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal systems, according to a new British study.
In research published Friday in The Lancet magazine, Professor David Nutt of Britain's Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances.
Nutt and colleagues used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user, the drug's potential for addiction and the impact on society of drug use. The researchers asked two groups of experts — psychiatrists specializing in addiction and legal or police officials with scientific or medical expertise — to assign scores to 20 different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, amphetamines and LSD.
Nutt and his colleagues then calculated the drugs' overall rankings. In the end, the experts agreed with each other — but not with the existing British classification of dangerous substances.
Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy.
‘Current drug system is ill thought-out’
According to existing British and U.S. drug policy, alcohol and tobacco are legal, while cannabis and Ecstasy are both illegal. Previous reports, including a study from a parliamentary committee last year, have questioned the scientific rationale for Britain's drug classification system.
"The current drug system is ill thought-out and arbitrary," said Nutt, referring to the United Kingdom's practice of assigning drugs to three distinct divisions, ostensibly based on the drugs' potential for harm. "The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary," write Nutt and his colleagues in The Lancet.
Tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services.
Nutt hopes that the research will provoke debate within the UK and beyond about how drugs — including socially acceptable drugs such as alcohol — should be regulated. While different countries use different markers to classify dangerous drugs, none use a system like the one proposed by Nutt's study, which he hopes could serve as a framework for international authorities.
"This is a landmark paper," said Dr. Leslie Iversen, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. Iversen was not connected to the research. "It is the first real step towards an evidence-based classification of drugs." He added that based on the paper's results, alcohol and tobacco could not reasonably be excluded.
"The rankings also suggest the need for better regulation of the more harmful drugs that are currently legal, i.e. tobacco and alcohol," wrote Wayne Hall, of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in an accompanying Lancet commentary. Hall was not involved with Nutt's paper.
While experts agreed that criminalizing alcohol and tobacco would be challenging, they said that governments should review the penalties imposed for drug abuse and try to make them more reflective of the actual risks and damages involved.
Nutt called for more education so that people were aware of the risks of various drugs. "All drugs are dangerous," he said. "Even the ones people know and love and use every day."
(© 2007 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. )
http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_083055741.html
loves it.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, May 6th, 2007
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4:00 pm
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fuck everyone.
not even kidding.
if half of the people i knew disappeared i wouldn't be upset a bit.
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, July 10th, 2006
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2:11 pm
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| Saturday, June 24th, 2006
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2:12 am - Brilliance
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"People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance. But they should think logically and if they thought logically t hey would see that they can only ask this question because it has already happened and they exist. And tehre are billions of planets where there is no life, but there is no one on those planets with brains to notice. And it is like if everyone in the world was tossing coins eventually someone would get 5,698 heads in a row and they would think they were very special. But they wouldn't be because there would be millions of people who didn't get 5,698 heads.
And there is life on earch becuase of an accident. But it is a very special kind of accidnet. And for this accident to happen in this special way, there have to be 3 conditions. And these are:
1. Things have to make copies of themselves (this
is called replication)
2. They have to make small mistakes when they do this (this is called mutation)
3. These mistakes have to be the same in their copies (this is called heritability)
And these conditions are very rare, but they are possible, and they cause life. And it just happens. But it doesn't have to end up with rhinoceroses and human beings and whales. It could end up with anything.
And for example, some people say how can an eye happen by accident? Because an eye has to evolve from something else very like an eye and it doesn't just happen becuase of a genetic mistake, and is the use of half an eye? But half an eye is very useful becuase half an eye means that an animal can see half of an animal that wants to eat it and get out of the way, and it will eat and get out of the way, and it will eat the animal that only has a third of an eye or 49% of an eye instead becuase it hasn't got out of the way quick enough, and the animal that is eaten won't have babies because it is dead. And 1% of an eye is better than no eye.
ANd people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an anmial and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal."
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, May 17th, 2006
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1:02 am
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