PROMOTING ONE OF THE DEADLIEST DRUGS OF ALL

A glossy brochure recently dropped out of my newspaper: "Discover
your taste for whisky," it advised. As it happens, I discovered my
taste for whisky long ago and so was not in need of this advice. But
it struck me as surpassingly odd that the Liquor Control Board of
Ontario is spending a considerable amount of money to persuade the
uninitiated to try potent forms of a psychoactive drug whose known
risks include addiction, cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal
disorders, liver cirrhosis, several types of cancer, fetal alcohol
syndrome and fatal overdose.

A Centre for Addiction and Mental Health study blamed alcohol
consumption for 8,103 Canadian deaths in 2002. Of all deaths among
those under age 70, alcohol was the cause of one in 16.

Western cultures have a bizarre relationship with psychoactive drugs.
Some are believed to be so dangerous and destructive that they are
banned and those who make, sell or use them are deemed criminals and
outcasts. But when a government-owned corporation seeks to boost
alcohol consumption by marketing the drug as a sociable and
sophisticated indulgence, no one sees anything amiss.

Why would we? Alcohol isn't dangerous and destructive, we assume. And
that assumption lies at the heart of the contradiction.

According to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, Canadians
overestimate the risks of consuming illicit drugs while greatly
underestimating the risks of the legal variety. For psychologists who
study the perception of risk, this is predictable.

One of the mechanisms the unconscious mind uses to make intuitive
judgments about risk is the "availability heuristic": The easier it
is to think of an example of something happening, the greater the
probability of that thing happening will seem.

News and entertainment media are filled with stories about people who
suffer as a result of taking an illicit drug, but they almost never
have stories of people who take an illicit drug without bad
consequences following -- even though the latter event is vastly more
common than the former.

The opposite is true of alcohol: As a 2003 study of British
television found, stories of people suffering as a result of drinking
do appear occasionally -- almost always in the news -- but those
stories are "infrequent" compared with "positive, convivial, funny
images" of drinking.

Personal experience multiplies this effect. Alcohol use is so common
and open we all know lots of people who drink without coming to
grief. But illicit drug use -- marijuana excepted -- is relatively
rare. As a result, few of us have personal experience with most illicit drugs.

When this biased information is run through the availability
heuristic, we form the intuitive conclusion that harm is very likely
to come from taking an illicit drug, but very unlikely to result from
drinking alcohol.

The "affect heuristic" is another mechanism, a phenomenon that uses
emotions as a measure of risk: Positive feelings drive the perception
of risk down, while negative feelings push it up. Someone who grew up
with a beloved dog will have a much lower intuitive sense of the risk
of dog attack than someone whose only contact with dogs was being
chased by one on the way home from school.

In our culture, alcohol is not only accepted, it is embraced and
celebrated. Drugs like heroin, cocaine and to a lesser extent
marijuana are reviled. Those dramatically different cultural
positions produce dramatically different feelings, which, once again,
drive perceived risks in opposite directions.

The cumulative effect of these influences is to produce radically
different perceptions about the risks posed by alcohol and other
drugs. They are so different, in fact, that we often don't even
consider alcohol to be a drug -- which is why we often hear the
nonsensical phrase "alcohol and drugs."

This is wholly irrational. And most of us are blind to it.

I once attended a dinner in Ottawa that brought together RCMP
officers, DEA agents, politicians and civil servants in honour of a
visit by the United Nations' top anti-drug official. There was an
open bar. And so, as speakers denounced the evils of drugs and vowed
to continue the fight for

"a drug-free world" -- an official goal of the UN -- most of the
people nodding their heads and applauding vigorously were buzzed on a
drug that has killed far more people than all the illicit drugs combined.

Bizarre juxtapositions like this abound, but they don't come any
stranger than a government spending large sums of money suppressing
drug use while a corporation owned by that same government spends
large sums of money encouraging drug use.

That happens every day in every province across Canada. And no one
sees anything amiss.

- - Gardner writes for the Ottawa Citizen.