drug policy
lborkowski | November 2, 2010The Associated Press article title "Study: Alcohol more lethal than heroin, cocaine" succeeded in getting me to click through to the article. When I did, I wasn't surprised to learn that the study in question didn't actually find alcohol to be more lethal than heroin. What it concluded was that alcohol is the most harmful drug (out of 20 studied) when harms both to users and to those around them are tallied.
The study -- authored by David J. Nutt, Leslie A. King, and Lawrence D. Phillips and published in The Lancet -- used multicriteria decision analysis modelling to assess the harms caused…