Mo' Indexing

Jul 02, 2008 11:01
by Russell Brown

http://publicaddress.net/hardnews

Reading the news, a person could be forgiven for thinking that New Zealand had the world's second-highest rate of cocaine use. Hardly. Zealand was second for lifetime incidence of cocaine use amongst the 17 countries covered in Toward a Global View of Alcohol, Tobacco, Cannabis, and Cocaine Use: Findings from the WHO World Mental Health Surveys.

But our cumulative lifetime incidence of 4.3% for cocaine is not only far behind the US (16.2%), but well behind the rate for countries not included in the WHO survey, but for which good data exist. Britain, for example, and Italy and Spain.

Cannabis is a different matter: we're genuinely right up there: behind, again, the home of the War on Drugs, which leads the survey in substance abuse. The Netherlands, whose liberal drug policies attract the ire of the prohibitionists, has less than half the lifetime incidence of cannabis use of the US, and one eighth the rate of cocaine use.

As the authors put it: "countries with more stringent policies towards illegal drug use did not have lower levels of such drug use than countries with more liberal policies."

Other points of interest: rates of lifetime use of tobacco and cannabis in New Zealand are converging (51% vs 42%); use of all the drugs covered in the survey was linked to higher personal income everywhere; drug use is increasing everywhere; and, at 12,790 the New Zealand sample for the survey was far and away the largest for any of the 17 countries -- does anyone know why this is?

This is the kind of turf we're covering in Media7 tonight, Freeviewers. I'll link to the online video tomorrow morning.

And one thing that didn't make it into the show but popped out of the research: the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs has advised that another substance be added to Schedule 4 of the Misuse of Drugs Act -- the slot formerly occupied by BZP.

That being salvia divinorum, the special-interest psychedelic herb that has been sold unrestricted in New Zealand for several years now. Assuming Schedule 4 isn't simply being used as a holding pen for prohibition, this is a good thing; especially now that the MoH finally has some proper guidelines ready: the most important of which is presumably an R18 restriction on sales.

All bets are off, of course, under a National government. Whatever people think of Anderton, he does listen to evidence {otagonorml note: YEAH RIGHT?!?}. I don't think the same can be said of National's would-be drug tsar, Jacqui Dean.