re: "Man hacked to death by drunk friend" (BP, February 7, 2022)
Dear editor,
Alcohol is such a nice drug, unlike those wicked narcotic drugs that drop users into blissed out stupor. It is fitting that the dealers of this particularly nasty drug of addiction are so richly rewarded by society with wealth and acclaim.
Bearing in mind the blunt assessments reported in such research as: "The Australian drug harms ranking study" (2019, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 33(7)); and in the earlier "Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis" published in The Lancet (2010, 376(9752)), it is nothing new to learn that alcohol is again causally implicated in a gory killing among friends or relatives.
Fights, domestic abuse of spouse and children, rape, murderously reckless driving (think Thai national holiday), and so on have long been known as common symptoms of alcohol use, whether moonshine or champagne. Alcohol is not the most harmful drug to users, with heroin, crack cocaine, and methamphetamine beating it by a little, but when it comes to drug-harms to others in society, alcohol is far and away the winner. As the authors of the 2019 paper conclude: "Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug when harm to users and harm to others was combined." And it is surely only harm to others that justifies the state interfering in personal behaviour, isn't it?
It makes you wonder what just laws that regulated drugs according to the evidence would be like.
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on February 16, 2022, under the title "Demon drink" at URL
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