Forum Topic

Booze worse than drugs ???

Just seen the news and the latest is booze is worse than herion.What's your thoughts?

Andy Wright ● 5637d8 Comments

I think Nutt's study is valid and has its place. I am currently looking at ways non profit organisations can measure their social impact. Being able to turn around to a funder and say, last year every £1 given to our organisation resulted in £3.40 worth of social value.As an example, Fab Pad is a project that supports young homeless people to sustain new tenancies. An SROI evaluation carried out on Fab Pad revealed that for every £1 invested by the government in support, £8.38 of social return was derived in reduced health care costs, reduced welfare benefits expenditure and reduced costs of repeat homelessness.Perhaps Prof Nutt should have converted his findings into costs. What is the cost we as a society pay for binge drinking and alcoholism? How much of our police/ambulance/hospital/street cleaning resources are deployed dealing with binge drinking/alcoholism compared to other drug use? Would the cost of banning alcohol and the subsequent loss of tax revenue, be less than this figure?

Nina Thornhill ● 5631d

Andy,Sorry if I diverted this serious topic...I always thought that replacing an s in a word with a z for no reason was the creeping Americanisation of the English language.I must be wrong.Silly me.Is booze worse than drugs?If you're dependant on either they are both surely hellish.I knew a chap many years ago who had been addicted to heroin and was an alcoholic.He  said he found it easier to come off heroin.That is anecdotal I know....I should imagine there is not much to seperate the two on the misery scale.

Keith Iddon ● 5636d

"...different endings for different meanings is not only grammatically incorrect..." ...... except in the cases of licence and practise one might suppose.Any way when is this Nutt twerp going to suggest that Ford cars are more dangerous than Jaguars? Well there are more Fords on the road than Jaguars. It's this this sort of statement that gives science a bad name. Remember the MMR fiasco? The sampling methodology was criticized but the conclusion was probably false.

Alan Brainsby ● 5636d

This is actually a common misconception, the -ize suffix does not have anything to do with Americanization, in fact the -ize version of verbs is the standard spelling used by the Oxford English Dictionary.  The misconception arises from Americans happening to only use that version.What is important is that, whichever you choose, you are consistent in use, which means using different endings for different meanings is not only grammatically incorrect, it's stylistically questionable too.

Nathan Brown ● 5636d

No. It's my way of differentiating between advertising (noun, gerund, etc) and advertizing (verb).I recognize that some confusion may occur but with the exception of certain words which always take the '-ise' suffix I favour the '-ize'.Unfortunately this does appear to be US English which only demonstrates the fact that their version of the language has not changed much since the time of the Pilgrim Fathers.Well, how often is 'gotten' used as a verb by British English speakers?OK. Possible exceptions could be those from the WRR aka GOC or the SRSY aka PRSY. :)

Alan Brainsby ● 5636d

Come over ll American all of a sudden Alan?Or are you a son of Uncle Sam?

Keith Iddon ● 5636d

Perhaps Professor Nutt should get a job advertizing Dyson vacuum cleaners...

Alan Brainsby ● 5637d

That's not really what the study suggested.In terms of how lethal each drug is (alcohol is a drug too; the phrase "booze worse than drugs?" makes no sense) heroin was rated as more dangerous than alcohol to individuals using it, along with methamphetamine and crack. But because alcohol is both very harmful and very widely used, it causes vastly more harm at the societal level through crime and physical / mental health and family problems.And that's hardly news, is it?

M. Duley ● 5637d