Whisky is dangerous

Jock — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 13:53:51 +0000

Whisky, and other spirits, specially distilled to take their alcohol (the chemical that provides the "high" - well, "low" actually in both cases!) content up from the usual 3-5% of beer to 40% or more, are dangerous.

Non sequitur? Indeed - we all know that you don't drink whisky by the pint by and large. But people still use spirits to get blotto as fast as they can on as little liquid as they can and for those people, yes, it is dangerous. Yet such a FUD mantra (fear, uncertainty and denial) is routinely trotted out by the twenty-first century's New Temperance League in their relentless attacks on other drugs, such as here at the First Post:

Cannabis growing hits a new high (was the pun intended I wonder?)

The plant most popular with illicit farmers is actually skunk, a hybrid cannabis plant specially bred to be more potent: whereas standard cannabis contains about one to five per cent of THC (tetrahydro- cannabinol - the chemical that provides the "high"), skunk can contain as much as 30 per cent THC, making it dangerous.

And yes, of course, like whisky when drunk by the pint it could be dangerous. Now of course, with the benefit of regulation, we know exactly what the alcohol content is of every alcoholic drink that is sold (except that scrumpy stuff that is still brewing when it hits your stomach!). But cannabis users do tend to know how to dose themselves - and you don't, indeed physically can't in most cases, sit there and smoke yourself comatose like people do with booze. Unlike with alcohol, there usually comes a point at which your body actually cannot take any more well before you're actually semi-conscious - you're "toked out" in the lingo - and you cannot for love nor money force yourself past that point, often even having to stub out a joint halfway through, so it seems much more self regulating than strong alcohol is where you can down a bottle of the stuff and pass out a few minutes later.

But all this FUD reminds me of the Untouchables and prohibition in the US. Of course in an underground market people produced the strongest most rancid hooch they could, because shipping bulk tankers of lite beer around the country was just not on. Prohibition didn't work then, so why do we think it should work now? And just like back then, there are other very real dangers - in cultivating the stronger stuff, in making it quickly and covertly, they use hydroponics with all sorts of chemicals that stick around after the plants are harvested. So not only are you consuming artificially strong stuff, but chemically tainted stuff as well. Double bad!

And thinking about strength of drugs they are fighting a losing battle on most of them - did you know, for example, that it is possible to concentrate the active ingredients of heroin to such an extent that you could pass around enough supply for an addict to live off for a month if he knew how to dilute it again properly under a postage stamp? How are you supposed to stop that sort of concentration getting past the authorities?

Conrad Russell suggested that when a law has a significant amount of the population either disregarding it or contemptuous of it, it has become de facto a bad law. The numbers of people that now appear to be involved in cannabis cultivation suggests this is now the case here if it wasn't already.

The best, nay the only way, to deal with this is to legalize and regulate it, and bugger the Temperance League ladies. Make sure that, as with tobacco and alcohol, everyone knows precisely how much of the active ingredient they are taking and then leave it up to individuals to decide whether they want a quick snifter of the strong stuff, or an evening's socializing with the old tongue loosener.

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Whisky is dangerous