Dope on dope
You’re absolutely right. Even if every myth about cannabis causing “reefer
madness” were true, the harm caused by the drug would not justify sending users
to prison
(3 November, p 3 and
p 12).
The zero tolerance approach both victimises users and harms society at large.
Prisons transmit violent habits and values rather than reduce them. Most
non-violent drug offenders are eventually released with dismal job prospects due
to their criminal records. Turning cannabis smokers into hardened criminals is a
senseless waste of tax dollars.
Hopefully the common sense coming out of Britain will rub off on the US. More
Americans were arrested for cannabis in 2000 than all violent crimes combined.
For a drug that has never been shown to cause an overdose death, the amount of
resources used to enforce cannabis prohibition is outrageous. The effectiveness
of zero tolerance is dubious at best鈥攄espite harsh penalties, the US has
higher rates of cannabis use than any European country.
Sooner or later Britain is going to have to take the next logical step.
Decriminalisation acknowledges the social reality of cannabis use and frees
users from the stigma of criminal records. What’s really needed is a regulated
market with enforceable age controls. Separating the hard and soft drugs markets
is critical. As long as cannabis distribution remains in the hands of organised
crime, consumers will continue to come into contact with hard drugs.
Letter
David Fergusson was quoted as saying that he “can’t explain away” the
correlation between marijuana use and subsequent hard drugs use found in his
study in New Zealand. But the hardly radical Institute of Medicine, part of the
US National Academy of Sciences, discredited the “gateway theory” that marijuana
leads to hard drugs use in its recent report to Congress on the potential
dangers of medical marijuana. The report said, “There is no conclusive evidence
that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse
of other illicit drugs.”
Even Fergusson’s paper qualifies his comments more than your reporter
suggests. His abstract ends with the statement: “Findings support the view that
cannabis may act as a gateway drug that encourages other forms of illicit drug
use. None the less, the possibility remains that the association is non-causal
and reflects factors that were not adequately controlled in the analysis.”
Let me suggest just one major confounding factor. Perhaps some people simply
like taking drugs, and some of those people like to take them more often than
others and like to try many different ones. This could explain why two-thirds of
cannabis smokers don’t use other drugs鈥攁nd why heavier smokers are more
prone to use other drugs鈥攂etter than any pharmacological idea about pot
changing the brain. Occam’s razor needs to be applied with particular sharpness
to research on illicit drugs, which tends to serve political agendas far more
than scientific ones.
Letter
You report that: “Although two-thirds of cannabis users [in the New Zealand
study] did not progress to other illicit drugs, nearly all hard-drug users
started off on cannabis.” Could it not be that most teenagers鈥攁nd also
most adults鈥攗se some sort of mild drug, such as cannabis, nicotine and
alcohol, and that a smaller subset of people progress to harder drugs?
The causal relationship for cannabis may appear a little stronger because its
illegality (and reputation) probably keeps some potential users away, but I
suspect most hard drug users also began smoking cigarettes and drinking
alcohol.
Letter
I was sorry to see you fall for an old statistical (or philosophical)
chestnut. “The link is undeniable,” you say of the New Zealand study that showed
99 per cent of hard drug users started with cannabis.
An unpublished study of my own reveals that 100 per cent of all drug users
and alcoholics started on milk, and by the same logic it is clearly high time
some action was taken to restrict access to this dangerous white liquid.
Prion priorities
The causes of the BSE blunder are clear
(27 October, p 14).
First, spending only 拢217,000 on such a critical experiment was clearly
stupid. I have received far larger grants for carrying out far less important
research.
Secondly, that Whitehall was in any way involved in the science of the
experiment was just plain misguided. The only role of government should have
been to write a request for proposals stating the goal of the project, setting
up the peer review process, and funding the research.
Also, it is clear that if the government had chosen the top three proposals
and funded them, this mistake would never have happened. Any maker of science
policy who bases his decision on one study is asking for trouble.
Finally, by defining BSE only as a problem, Britain is missing an
opportunity. The whole area of prion-related diseases is a wide-open frontier of
science with huge potential for spin-offs. Since Britain is saddled with dealing
with BSE anyway, the right approach would be to spend whatever it takes to make
the country the world leader in prion-related research of all kinds.
Reflections on paper
Karlin Lillington fails to note the main advantage of e-paper鈥攔eflection
(27 October, p 36).
Through millions of years, evolution has provided us with a couple of eyes
that are exquisitely tuned to perceive light reflected from objects, but clearly
unsuited for looking straight at light-emitting objects. Cathode ray tubes and
all other would-be paper replacements generate light that is emitted towards us,
and the results are the typical symptoms of ocular fatigue: headache, stress,
tiredness, and so on.
I think that the main drive of e-paper systems won’t be their flexibility,
the lack of which people can easily tolerate, but their use of reflection
instead of emission. It will be this that may finally overcome people’s
reticence over e-reading.
Bellotto's cities
Your correspondent Peter Listkiewicz is confusing Antonio Canaletto with his
nephew Bernardo Bellotto
(10 November, p 55).
It was Bellotto who painted Warsaw, Dresden and Vienna, and who started the
confusion by trading on his uncle’s name.
Skyscraper safety
The skyscraper rescue platform is an excellent idea
(3 November, p 24).
But it is sad that it took the tragedy of the attack on the World Trade Center to
get people to take it seriously.
Two other ideas occurred to me that could be used to complement the platform,
and they’d be cheaper. The first is simply parachutes. Stored in lockers on
floors above a certain height, they would always be ready for use in an
emergency.
The second, for floors too high for ladders but too low for parachutes, is
based on airbags. It would consist of a harness fitted with four airbags. The
escapee would strap on the harness and leap out, pressing an inflate button. The
airbags, in a tetrahedral pattern, would cushion the fall in the same way as
they did for Pathfinder on Mars. Legs might get broken but lives would be
saved.
Asbestos risks
Your article states: “From next June, all owners of business premises in
Britain will have to make safe any asbestos in their buildings”
(10 November, p 25).
Under the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, they already have an obligation
to make safe any asbestos in their premises. What the writer refers to is the
planned (and long overdue) implementation of the new Control of Asbestos at Work
Regulations, which will require a risk assessment register of all known and
presumed asbestos materials to be compiled and managed on a continuous
basis.
This will not only apply to business premises as such but to all workplaces.
So if you are a firm that sends personnel to work in council housing, for
example, you will first need a risk assessment of all known and presumed
asbestos materials in those properties.
Monumental flaws
Mike Pitts is wrong to say that opponents of the Highways Agency’s Stonehenge
road scheme risk “losing the entire scheme”
(27 October, p 51).
What arouses opposition to the scheme in its present form is the idea that
the road tunnel should be short, so that its cuttings and permanently lit
portals, and some kilometres of new dual carriageway on the A303, will all fall
inside the World Heritage Site. This will not do, simply because it is the whole
monumental landscape, not just the area immediately around the Stones, for which
Britain is internationally responsible under the World Heritage Convention.
Moreover, until we have a better idea of how many visitors there will be in
the long term, there can be no go-ahead for a visitor centre. So much time and
money have already been wasted by English Heritage and the Highways Agency on
bad ideas for Stonehenge from “consultants” that a little more thought is
absolutely necessary.
Semiopathy rules
Feedback introduced the term “semiopathy” 鈥� the tendency to read inappropriate emotions into signs 鈥� to the world (10 November). But am I the only one to note the tendency of semiopathic manifestations to achieve the total opposite of their apparent aim? Take the heroic campaign of the lollipop ladies of Britain over the years. They bravely carried banners proclaiming “Stop children crossing”, but were swamped daily by increasing numbers of children demanding to cross.
Then there were the many signs extolling people to emulate fruit farmers and become a nation of allotment keepers. “Pick your own strawberries” signs appeared everywhere. The outcome? Fields full of people picking somebody else’s strawberries.
Letter
It must be a sign of science fiction addiction that every time I see the
roadworks sign “Caution heavy plant crossing”, I think: “Beware triffids!”
Letter
A sign on the garden gate of a house near me bears the words “loose
Alsations”. I don’t know whether to look out for dogs roaming freely, to free
captive dogs, take a bag and buy a couple of kilos of them, watch where I put my
feet, or criticise their morals.
Letter
I thought I would tell you of a sign I saw while driving in Oxford. Here, as
part of a traffic-calming scheme, a sign proclaims “Humped Zebra
Crossing鈥�400 yards”. Although I slowed to look, I saw nothing of note.
Correction
The box story in Feedback on
10 November
described a Yorkshire
Building Society mortgage application form with product information listing a
maximum mortgage of 95 per cent. It has since come to our attention that the
Yorkhire Building Society does in fact offer 100 per cent mortgages. We
apologise if any other impression was given by the story.