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Asked by JOSIE to Ellen, Elliot, Hazel, Rupesh, Thomas on 17 Jun 2016.
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Elliot Jokl answered on 17 Jun 2016:
Thanks for the question!
Some drugs are a lot more dangerous than alcohol. Other drugs are less harmful than alcohol.
It is interesting to think that if we discovered alcohol today, it probably would probably be banned for being too dangerous! We have rules in place to try and figure out if things are too harmful for people to consume, and alcohol would break many of those rules. We are only allowed it because it has been around for such a long time, before these rules were invented.
Some people use this as an argument for making certain drugs legal, because it doesn’t make sense to ban drugs that are less harmful than alcohol and keep alcohol legal. But I do think we have to think carefully about each drug and the effects that it can have, and not just make decisions based on one thing maybe being less bad for you than another.
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Thomas Biggans answered on 18 Jun 2016:
I learnt at university that everything is bad for us if you have too much of it. In toxicology they say “The dose makes the poison”.
How much we can have without anything bad happening depends on what the drug is. We can think of alcohol as a drug just like all the other drugs. There are alot of studies to tell us how much alcohol we can drink without suffering any harmful effects. There are less studies on illegal drugs because they are illegal so we don’t know as much about their effects but there are some studies.
I’ve personally seen some brain scans of a patient who used cocaine and seen for myself the really bad damage the drug has caused on their brain. Damage which we can’t fix. For other drugs the effect is less clear we’re not sure how the body is affected, we don’t know if the effect will wear off and everything will go back to normal or will it be forever.
So some drugs are worse than alcohol and other drugs we don’t know so its the safer option to avoid it if you don’t know what will happen.
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