DEFINING DRUGS

We Overestimate the Risks of Consuming Illicit Drugs While Greatly
Underestimating the Risks of the Legal Variety

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.

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.