Editor
Trembling I sit by day and night,
my friends are astonished at me,
Yet they forgive my wanderings.
I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds,
to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought,
into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God,
then Human Imagination.
O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness and love!
Annihilate the Selfhood in me: be thou my life!
William Blake
Alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal drugs like marijuana or ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal systems, according to a new British study.
In research published in The Lancet, Professor David Nutt of Britain’s Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances.
The study’s authors used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user; the drug’s potential for addiction; and the impact on society of the drug’s use.
The researchers asked two groups of experts — psychiatrists specialising in addiction and legal or police officials with scientific or medical expertise — to assign scores to 20 different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines and LSD. Nutt and his colleagues then calculated the drugs’ overall rankings.
Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was ecstasy.
Tobacco causes 40 per cent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services.
Nutt hopes that the research will provoke debate within the UK and beyond about how drugs — including socially acceptable drugs such as alcohol — should be regulated. While different countries use different markers to classify dangerous drugs, none uses a system like the one proposed by Nutt’s study, which he hopes could serve as a framework for international authorities.
“This is a landmark paper,” said Dr Leslie Iversen, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford University. “It is the first real step towards an evidence-based classification of drugs.”
“The rankings also suggest the need for better regulation of the more harmful drugs that are currently legal, i.e. tobacco and alcohol,” wrote Wayne Hall, of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in an accompanying Lancet commentary.
While experts agreed that criminalizing alcohol and tobacco would be challenging, they said that governments should review the penalties imposed for drug abuse and try to make them more reflective of the actual risks and damages involved.
Associated Press, 23 March 2007
We are so lucky today, that it should be celebrated in the land of
Shri Ganesha, that we should be here to celebrate His Resurrection,
which actually is due to His clean, we can say absolutely Nishkalanka life.
Life which was so pure.
His purity was there because He was nothing but Chaitanya,
He was nothing but vibrations.
He was so pure that He could even walk on the water.
He was so pure that death could not kill Him.
So we have to aim at our purification.
HH Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, 1991
There is a very interesting phenomenon related to the notion of left-sidedness, right-sidedness and being in the centre. In many ways progress – natural growth – develops from left to right, and from right to centre. A new-born baby is a left-sided creature in that he or she is dependent for survival on others. Later, the young child is concerned entirely with himself or herself. There is no other viewpoint; everything is seen, needed, felt, explored, as an individual. Nothing else matters. Later again, the child starts to become conscious of other people’s needs, begins to see alternative points of view, starts making plans, starts moving into the right. Some adolescents don’t fully make this transition. They stay withdrawn, secretive, uncommunicative.
The same progress is typical of the seekers of truth. We tend to begin in the left, withdrawing from the rat-race to feel things through, longing for patterns, answers. Exploration, study and experiment will take us into the right. And, if we are lucky and make the right discoveries – such as, in our day and age, the grace of Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi – we arrive in the centre with the possibility of attaining Divine knowledge, perception and joy.
The painter, Picasso, is an interesting example. After his apprentice years spent copying great artists, he became famous for sad, left-sided, blue and rose paintings. Then he moved into the right, exploring cubism and collage and painting harshly-coloured abstracts, before settling, through an interest in neoclassicism, into a balance where he gained his self-realisation.
Brian Bell