ONTARIO'S ALCOHOL PROMOTION AT ODDS WITH ANTI-DRUG TALK

Booze Has Killed More People Than Illicit Drugs, but Society Has a Blindspot

OTTAWA - 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 convince 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.

According to a 2006 study prepared by the Centre for Addiction and
Mental Health, alcohol consumption was responsible for 8,103 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.

"Canadians have an exaggerated view of the harms associated with
illegal drug use but consistently underestimate the serious negative
impact of alcohol on society," concluded a report released earlier
this year by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.

We 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 to "positive, convivial, funny images" of drinking.

Illicit Drug Use Highly Stigmatized

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. It's
also stigmatized, so the lawyer who occasionally snorts a line of
cocaine before heading out to nightclubs will tell his colleagues the
next day about the alcohol he drank but not the cocaine.

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 of the unconscious mind.
"Affect" simply means emotion and this heuristic 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 Ontario. And no one sees anything
amiss.