Dear editor,
The lesson to be learned from Veera Prateepchaikul's "Lessons to learn from nursery tragedy" is that some go to great lengths of to push comforting, populist assumptions over an evidence-based, critically reasoned response to a tragedy. Veera's opening sentence proclaims the dead horses he's going to flog for a few paragraphs: "Narcotic drugs, methamphetamines in particular, and guns, when they are mixed together, are a dangerous chemistry for violence -- much worse than the combination of alcohol and guns."
Yes, the killer used guns. But Veera overlooks (I am sure he is not ignorant of the fact) that the killer also used knives to kill. And yet there is no discussion of the need to ban or at least strictly control knife ownership. The rampaging killer was not simply a "gunman" as Veera labels him, but also a knife man.
The more serious misunderstandings Veera assumes are his incorrect ideas about drugs and drug harms to society. His claim that "methamphetamines ... are a dangerous chemistry for violence" is true. But when he goes on to repeat the common false belief that they are "much worse than the combination of alcohol and guns" he flatly contradicts expert opinion, which is that of all drugs in popular use, alcohol is far and away the most harmful to society and others. This is the conclusion reached, for example, by Nutt et al. writing in the Lancet in "Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis" (2010, DOI 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61462-6) and Bonomo et al. reporting in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in "The Australian drug harms ranking study" (2019, DOI 10.1177/0269881119841569). Veera's sole support for his outrageous claim is to point out that "from time to time, we hear reports of a man who turns into a monster when high on methamphetamines." He offers no solid statistical support for his claim, which is likely popularly shared, for the very good reason that no such exists. False beliefs, however sincerely and widely believed on pure faith, do tend to lack actual supporting evidence.
Veera is certainly right that drug use, especially methamphetamine use, is a serious problem in Thailand. Alcohol use is, however, an even more serious drug problem in Thailand, relevant to which are these summary sentences from the results section of Bonomo et al.: "Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug when harm to users and harm to others was combined. A supplementary analysis took into consideration the prevalence of each substance in Australia. Alcohol was again ranked the most harmful substance overall." It is not merely that alcohol is the more harmful drug to society because it is more widely used, but that for equal numbers of users, alcohol is the more harmful. But then, if instead of focusing on the rare reports that fit his preconceptions of demented yaa baa users holding their own family at gun point (more likely knife point, as I recall such reports), Veera considered for a moment, he would realize that it is alcohol that is the drug implicated in a high percentage of traffic deaths and in domestic abuse and sexual assault. The Democrat Party's former golden boy Prinn Panichpakdi plied himself and alleged victims not with yaa baa but with alcohol to fuel his lusts.
Yes, Thailand needs to take a hard look at the failing drug policies of many, many decades. A healthy start would be to look honestly at the evidence and form drug policy that reflects reality. Portugal, which decriminalized all personal drug use in 2001, now offers more than 20 years of valuable statistics on what happens when reason not inherited prejudice based on wild assumptions is used to plan a national drug policy whose aim is not appeasing popular prejudice but in fact the reduction of drug harms to society consistent with respect for human rights.
Felix Qui
_______________________________
The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
