Sunday 11 March 2012

Prohibition working as well as ever

From The Observer:

Mephedrone more popular since being banned – survey

The full story is here, but the following provides a summary of how well the prohibition of mephedrone (bubble, m-cat, meow meow), and prohibition generally, has worked:

"Since we carried out our first study the purity of mephedrone has fallen, the price has risen, yet the results of our second study showed both use and popularity had increased in the year since the ban.

"The results of our two studies showed that not only were club-goers undeterred by the change in law, but the drug had in fact increased in popularity among our sample."

Winning!

Readers of The Art of Suppression might be interested in this next finding...

The survey found the dance drug GHB – also known as GBL – was the second most popular drug among clubbers

GHB isn't actually the same as GBL, but that is just routine journalistic ignorance of designer drugs. Neverthless, I trust you get the point.

2 comments:

Curmudgeon said...

And Call Me Dave has been on today about banning more "legal highs"...

Mag said...

From the original author of “heart-attack miracles” junk and other assorted trash, Stantonitis Glands [obviously] speaks highly of Pell’s “pregnancy miracles” agenda-driven contribution to the demise of coherent enquiry:

Daniel Mackay, Scott Nelson, Sally Haw and Jill Pell just published a very nice paper that looked at the effect of the Scottish smokefree law on complications of pregnancy (small for gestational age, preterm delivery and spontaneous preterm labor, among other outcomes). They found a 5-12% drop in these conditions for women who got pregnant beginning shortly before the law too effect.

This is not only another high-quality study demonstrating large and clinically meaningful benefits of smokefree laws in terms of health, but also shows that the real economic effect of smokefree laws is to substantially reduce medical costs.
http://tobacco.ucsf.edu/new-study-shows-smokefree-law-followed-fewer-pregnancy-complications