

Economics of Drinking - dangoldin
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1532171

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JayNeely
Some of the things I found really interesting within this paper...

1) They hypothesize that alcohol's legality vs. the illegality of other
equally or less harmful drugs is a result of efficiency: we only need one
drug, agreed upon by social norms, with roughly the same rate of effect (or
predictability of effect, accounting for weight) on everyone, for the purpose
of 'social lubrication' / 'signaling our true selves via willing loss of
control'.

2) They talk about how knowledge of the effects of a drug is key to choosing
how much to consume for desired signalling, and pretty much provide a perfect
mathematical model for the horror that is college freshman drinking with older
students.

3) Their references are pretty cool. e.g.:

Nutt, D., L. A. King,W. Saulsbury, and C. Blakemore (2007): "Development of a
Rational Scale to Assess the Harm of Drugs of Potential Misuse," The Lancet
369(9566):1047 - 1053. -- This paper apparently provides a scientific basis
for ranking the harm of different drugs.

~~~
youngian
That paper is great! Why can't more public policy be based on sensible metrics
like this?

([http://web.mit.edu/mariya/Public/Exploring%20Pharmacology%20...](http://web.mit.edu/mariya/Public/Exploring%20Pharmacology%2008/addiction/Development%20of%20a%20rational%20scale%20to%20asses%20the%20harm%20of%20drugs.pdf))

~~~
coyul
Talking publicly about that paper is why David Nutt was fired last year from
his post as technical chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in
the UK. I suspect that's the answer to your question, sadly...

Here's a recent interview with him:
[http://news.google.ca/news/url?sa=t&ct2=ca%2F0_0_s_0_0_t...](http://news.google.ca/news/url?sa=t&ct2=ca%2F0_0_s_0_0_t&usg=AFQjCNFLAGET7TM0W6lz77lexfJjIMzBXQ&cid=17593692963640&ei=SpRPS-
iDK4uwMtD-
yckC&rt=SEARCH&vm=STANDARD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.metro.co.uk%2Fnews%2F808938-david-
nutt-alcohol-is-worse-than-drugs)

