Quote:
Originally Posted by dannieyankee
What I meant was that I was trying to find whether a drug is illegalised based on how dangerous it is or by other effects.
By comparing legal and illegal drugs, I was hoping to discover if the (il)legalization of a drug had any real basis.
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Short answer: yes, how dangerous a drug is taken into account by most governments when deciding its legal status – legal, illegal, or the various statuses in between.
This is a complicated subject, involving centuries of history in several nations, but I think it can be overviewed by looking at a couple of brief summaries:
The US’s Controlled Substance Act (CSA for short), enacted in 1970, is a pretty good representative of how most “
first world” nations’ drug laws currently work. Drugs are placed, by name, on one of five classifications, called “schedules”, by their “accepted medical use” and “potential for abuse”, with Schedule V containing drugs with accepted medical use and little potential for abuse, schedule I containing drugs with no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Drugs not placed on any schedule are no subject to the Act, and may be obtained over-the-counter (or out-of-the garden, etc.). Schedule I drugs cannot legally be prescribed by an MD or dispensed by a pharmacy. Common black market drugs such as Cannabis, LSD, and MDMA (Ecstasy) are on schedule I, because they are legally considered to have no accepted medical use, while ones Cocaine, Oxycodone, and amphetamines are on Schedule II, because while having as great or greater potential for abuse as Schedule I drugs, they have accepted medical uses.
As a general rule, psychotropic or physiologically significant substance that were sold, and typically taxed, for recreational use when the laws of a nation were codified, are “grandfathered in” as non-drugs, subject to different laws than the CSA. Tobacco, alcohol, and caffeine fall in this category. However, this status is not necessarily permanent. Cannabis, for example, was once legal if a special tax for it was paid, then later, if prescribed by an MD with a special federal license, before being made entirely illegal by the CSA. Alcoholic drink was illegal in the US from 1919 to 1933 per the 18th Amendment and 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th. At present, Cannabis has an especially complicated legal status, as it’s illegal according the CSA, a federal law, yet explicitly legal under certain conditions according to the laws of several US states.
Taking a higher historic overview of the regulation of drugs by governments, one can look back a couple of centuries to when the only legal regulation of drugs consisted of punishing illegal acts involving drugs, such as the fraudulent sale of an ineffective or dangerous drug, the production, transport, and sale of a drug without paying its legislated tax, or criminal behavior under the influence of a drug, typically termed “drunken conduct” or something similar.
The widespread illegalization of the strong alcoholic drink
absinthe, ca. 1905, is considered by some, including me, a significant event in government proactively illegalizing a substance believed dangerous and unbeneficial to the public, and also an example of controversial and questionable science informing various governments, while the real motives for its illegalization may have been cultural, rather than scientific: in short, an effort to suppress offensive “bohemian” culture associated with absinthe, much as in the 1960s, cannabis and LSD were associated with offensive “hippie” culture.
This same period – the early 20th century - saw the creation of laws leading to agencies such as the US
FDA, which were charged with proactively determining what drugs could and could not be used, and how. At the same time, various countries including the US began to devise more legalistic approaches to determining who could and could not practice medicine, including a system of accrediting schools the ability to graduate MDs. By the 1940s, these efforts lead, in the US and Canada, to organization such as the AAMC, and
LCME, which to this day determine who can and can not prescribe controlled substances in the US and Canada.
Prior to the early 20th centuries, more in rural areas than urban ones, anyone who seemed sufficiently “doctorly” could practice medicine, formulate and dispense drugs, etc. The system present in most of the first world is, more or less and depending on location, about a century old, and as it pertains to drug laws, about half that. This system is not present everywhere - today, in many countries, such as Mexico, you can legally purchases most US Schedule II substances in a legitimate pharmacy, and use them in those countries as you wish, without a MD’s prescription.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moontanman
Legal/Illegal has no bearing on danger or harm done by drugs, several years ago a study, ( that i do not have a link to) showed that for every death caused by illegal drugs 1000 people died from legal drugs.
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While it’s true that far more people die in the US while taking drugs prescribed by an MD than while taking drugs purchased via a black market, I don’t think the legal status of a drug is unrelated to its safety. This is especially true with regards to drugs where the delivery system itself is potentially dangerous, such as injected drugs, which increase the risk of contracting blood-born diseases such as
Hepatitis C and
HIV/AIDS.
On the other hand, the determination of the potential and severity of consequences of abuse of many drugs on the CSA’s Schedule I is of questionable scientific validity. I’m hopeful that the US government and the governments of its many states will soon decriminalize the use of many of these, based on sound scientific data and reasoning.
A brief summary of the history of medical law
