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Drugs Without The Hot Air: Minimizing The Harms Of Legal And Illegal Drugs (2012)

by David J. Nutt(Favorite Author)

4.25 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1906860165 (ISBN13: 9781906860165)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

UIT Cambridge Ltd.

review 1: yo. yo. Read this book. force your children to read this shit. if you see a politician at a restaurant, powder this book and invite them to snort this shit.I thought I would not learn anything from this, but as well as some lay descriptions of drugs and their risks, there is some tight shit about how messed up drug laws are. i mean, yo. this book made me ANGRY, you get me? basically this is a must read for anyone who ever wants to talk about drugs, or take them, ever. I got pissed off though because the paper ranking drug risks by Nutt et al is not accessible from my Med School.
review 2: There are always newspaper stories about drugs in the UK and many of them carry a judgemental tone. David Nutt has written a factual book about recreational drugs based on ev... moreidence rather than sentimentality. The book discusses what drugs are, how they work, different types of drugs, the nature of addiction and the most controversial part is the evidence on the relative harm that they do. It is interesting look at how far science should dictate public policy.Nutt was sacked from the government advisory council on the misuse of drugs in 2009 because of his pubic view on certain drugs like cannabis. He is well known for presenting evidence that horse-riding is more dangerous than taking ecstasy. To start with he describes how drugs work and what they are. They have an effect similar to our natural neurotransmitters and Nutt describes a typical day without drugs for example what happens when we wake up,get stressed, are hungry and feel tired. Then how drugs have evolved. Plants, where the drugs come from, have developed chemicals in their leaves that deterred insects that fed on them. The purpose of those chemicals was to act on the insects neurological systems and confuse them. We know this because MRI imaging has greatly improved our understanding of neurotransmitters. There are four main types of drugs that are taken for pleasure opioids, stimulants, depressants and psychedelics and Nutt describes them in more detail.Drugs are social and what is socially acceptable changes over time. Before the 19th century the majority of medicines that people took were fairly inert but by the 1800s almost everything on sale contained extracts of cannabis, heroin or cocaine and there was no regulation.Now drugs like alcohol are socially acceptable despite huge numbers of road deaths, domestic abuse and is estimated to cost the country around £30 billion per year. The drinks industry is however hugely powerful just like the tobacco industry. Nutt also looks at some of the tactics that industry has used to fight evidence. The tobacco industry fought back against the evidence in various ways and in modern times the evidence is so overwhelming that they can't argue against it, they just try to make the link between tobacco and cancer less certain.This is an important book that raises wider issues about government policy in the face of scientific evidence that is wider than the issue of drugs. less

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