"But Rachel also has another hobby, one that makes her a bit different from the other moms in her Texas suburb—not that she talks about it with them. Once a month or so, after she and her husband put the kids to bed, Rachel texts her in-laws—who live just down the street—to make sure they’re home and available in the event of an emergency.

“And then, Rachel takes a generous dose of magic mushrooms, or sometimes MDMA, and—there’s really no other way to say this— spends the next several hours tripping balls.”

  • Dasus@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    “whole mortality number thing under suspicion”

    You’re acting as if you’re arguing this in good faith. That’s not the case anymore, since you’ve ignored half a dozen replies in I point out that there are two facts which I’m sure you can not disagree with. 1. Smoking is one of — if not the — most popular ways of consuming cannabis. 2. Smoking anything is unhealthy and causes an increased risk of cancer.

    There is a third fact as well. Namely that they clearly say “Mortality is defined as risk of lethal overdose (drug-specific), OR BY life shortened by factors other than overdose (drug-related)”

    If I were to ask you to name anything risky in relation to the usage of cannabis (not the substance itself), would you be able to name anything, or would you just stand there like a teenager who discovered pot, claiming nothing related to cannabis can ever be harmful?

    Just like with the crack v cocaine harm part of it, it’s not due to the pharmacological properties of the substance that the chart is like that. Smoking is more addictive than other methods of use (sometimes in some studies even more so than shooting up, depending on the substance). It’s also unhealthy.

    You’re treating this as some DARE propaganda. It’s well researched data, and I’m pro drug legalisation, and I’m sure you won’t argue the facts over smoke in your lungs being bad for you. So I genuinely don’t understand what you think you’re protesting here.

    I don’t think I’ve ever used this saying in such a suitable moment; you’re barking up the wrong tree.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      None of that is the source for the mortality numbers either in that chart.

      I’m not why you can’t just admit you don’t know the source. You don’t. You simply don’t.

      Also, why are you even talking about cannabis overdoses now? Do you know the LD50 of THC?

      • Dasus@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        There’s nothing that would satisfy your criteria for the “source”. I’ve literally pasted the DOI number of the study that the numbers are from. You’re sealioning, just like I said.

        I’m quoting the study where the numbers are from, and I still haven’t mentioned any “cannabis overdoses”. It literally says “Mortality is defined as risk of lethal overdose (drug-specific), OR BY life shortened by factors other than overdose (drug-related)”

        This means that the “mortality” bit of the chart isn’t even implying that cannabis has directly caused someone’s death. Not even remotely has anyone implied that, yet it’s all you keep going on about, while ignoring the facts.

        We know where the numbers are from. First off, we have the actual study, go ahead and read it. Secondly, (AND THIS IS THE PART YOU KEEP IGNORING), do you disagree with the following facts; first that smoking is a popular way of using cannabis and secondly that smoking causes cancer?

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          24 days ago

          There’s nothing that would satisfy your criteria for the “source”.

          Aside from an actual source of actual mortality numbers, which I asked for. And yes, I looked up the links you pasted, which you did not. None of them give the source either, other than Nutt.

          All of this comes from this Nutt, who is apparently aptly named, because he’s apparently just making shit up. And you just accept it for no apparent reason other than you want people to die from cannabis.

          First off, we have the actual study, go ahead and read it.

          I read your links. You clearly did not. In fact, you pasted them within minutes of my responses so you didn’t even have time to. It’s pretty silly to tell someone to read links you haven’t read as if they prove your point.

          do you disagree with the following facts; first that smoking is a popular way of using cannabis and secondly that smoking causes cancer?

          We’ll discuss this as soon as you acknowledge that there is no legitimate source for the death information in the chart you gave. It all comes from one guy who just doesn’t like cannabis rather than any sort of actual medical information.

          Edit: If you are going to lie and claim you read all of that, I think this part of the conversation where you didn’t realize the chart had mortality information and told me to read the chart to see that there isn’t any when there is shows quite clearly that you don’t read the information you provide very carefully:

          • Dasus@lemmy.world
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            23 days ago

            Nutt, who is apparently aptly named, because he’s apparently just making shit up.

            You’re being serious? Discrediting all of his science, because he’s probably bias? Not childish at all.

            I read your links. You clearly did not.

            No you didn’t.

            Did you read the full text from the Lancet? (It’s free but requires logging in.)

            https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61462-6/fulltext#box1

            You started this protest by protesting the “mortality” bit of the chart. (Which, admittedly, I had forgotten about.) We then started arguing over it, you going on about people claiming there are arguments of “cannabis killing people” and asking me if I “know the LD50 of cannabis”. I replied by saying that I know about studies like this, and I understand that the mortality figures also come from drug-related diseases, like lung cancer if you’ve smoked the substance of your choice. You ignored that bit, and are still ignoring it.

            From that link:

            Drug-specific mortality Intrinsic lethality of the drug expressed as ratio of lethal dose and standard dose (for adults) Drug-related mortality >The extent to which life is shortened by the use of the drug (excludes drug-specific mortality)—eg, road traffic accidents, lung cancers, HIV, suicide

            Road traffic accidents and lung cancers? Just like I said way back. That yes, the mortality stat is sus to an extent, because of the mechanism of say, a drunk driver killing themselves, then having blood taken, it having cannabis, and that being attributed to cannabis mortality. However, the other part which is more objectively reasonable is the lung cancer bit. Why? Because it’s very popular to SMOKE cannabis and smoking anything causes cancer.

            I do not have access to the individual datapoints of their study. They’ve used sophisticated software to analyse it. Do you think you’d analyse the data better?

            My point has been, all the time, that while the data for mortality probably isn’t accurate, we can say for certain that some, probably most of it, is due to the increased mortality from smoking. Like I said, if everyone just ate it, the mortality should be zero, and if we knew everyone took edibles and never smoked, and if there still was a wide mortality rate in a chart like that, then we could say it was wholly suspect.

            See if you had actually opened the full study on the Lancet, you’d have seen that more accurate chart. Almost as if you didn’t and are just somewhat childishly trying to win this debate, even though I consider it a conversation and thus there are no winners or losers. I’m not arguing anything. I’m saying I know that most of the mortality is due to smoking reducing lifespans and a lot of cannabis being smoked. I too smoke. It’s unhealthy. I’ve tried changing to vapes several times, but it’s just not as good. A dab pen would be. Maybe even just an electric nail to my bong. But then making my own dab feels like a waste as smoking bud just makes it last longer.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              23 days ago

              I am not replying to you multiple times. You pick a thread and I’ll answer you in that one.

              • Dasus@lemmy.world
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                23 days ago

                My god, more excuses.

                No need to reply to my one sentence comment pointing out the same problem were arguing here. Just answer the comment above yours.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  23 days ago

                  Sure. I’ve read everything you have told me to read except that long PDF, which I am guessing you also did not read.

                  Nothing you have pasted, nothing in those studies tell me where the chart got its cannabis mortality figures from or how they calculate them.

                  That is all I have asked for from the beginning. You can get angry about it, you can paste as much as you like, but none of it tells me where that chart got its information on cannabis mortality.

                  Because, and this has been true since the beginning, you have no idea.

                  • Dasus@lemmy.world
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                    23 days ago

                    Nothing you have pasted, nothing in those studies tell me where the chart got its cannabis mortality figures from or how they calculate them.

                    So you haven’t read them. And still with this inane sealioning, purposefully ignoring what I keep repeating.

                    You know smoking is the most popular way of using cannabis. You know smoking causes cancers. You also know these mortality figures have “drug-related” mortality in them, and that is specifically said to be from, among other things, lung cancer.

                    So stomp your foot all your want but you are wrong and this childish bullshit is making you lose a whole lot of respect you’ve gained on Lemmy.

                    Methods Study design The analysis was undertaken in a two-stage process. The choice of harm criteria was made during a special meeting in 2009 of the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), which was convened for this purpose. At this meeting, from first principles and with the MCDA approach, members identified 16 harm criteria (figure 1). Nine relate to the harms that a drug produces in the individual and seven to the harms to others both in the UK and overseas. These harms are clustered into five subgroups representing physical, psychological, and social harms. The extent of individual harm is shown by the criteria listed as to users, whereas most criteria listed as to others take account indirectly of the numbers of users. An ACMD report explains the process of developing this model.

                    Fig 1

                    n June, 2010, a meeting under the auspices of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD)—a new organisation of drug experts independent of government interference—was convened to develop the MCDA model and assess scores for 20 representative drugs that are relevant to the UK and which span the range of potential harms and extent of use. The expert group was formed from the ISCD expert committee plus two external experts with specialist knowledge of legal highs (webappendix). Their experience was extensive, spanning both personal and social aspects of drug harm, and many had substantial research expertise in addiction. All provided independent advice and no conflicts of interest were declared. The meeting’s facilitator was an independent specialist in decision analysis modelling. He applied methods and techniques that enable groups to work effectively as a team, enhancing their capability to perform,7 thereby improving the accuracy of individual judgments. The group scored each drug on each harm criterion in an open discussion and then assessed the relative importance of the criteria within each cluster and across clusters. They also reviewed the criteria and the definitions developed by the ACMD. This method resulted in a common unit of harm across all the criteria, from which a new analysis of relative drugs harms was achieved. Very slight revisions of the definitions were adopted, and panel 1 shows the final version.

                    Panel 1

                    Evaluation criteria and their definitions

                    Drug-specific mortality

                    Intrinsic lethality of the drug expressed as ratio of lethal dose and standard dose (for adults)

                    Drug-related mortality

                    The extent to which life is shortened by the use of the drug (excludes drug-specific mortality)—eg, road traffic accidents, lung cancers, HIV, suicide

                    Drug-specific damag…

                    (I won’t list the rest of the panel because no relation to the matter at hand and you can still look it up yourself, which you’ve been lying about.)

                    Scoring of the drugs on the criteria

                    Drugs were scored with points out of 100, with 100 assigned to the most harmful drug on a specific criterion. Zero indicated no harm. Weighting subsequently compares the drugs that scored 100 across all the criteria, thereby expressing the judgment that some drugs scoring 100 are more harmful than others.

                    In scaling of the drugs, care is needed to ensure that each successive point on the scale represents equal increments of harm. Thus, if a drug is scored at 50, then it should be half as harmful as the drug that scored 100. Because zero represents no harm, this scale can be regarded as a ratio scale, which helps with interpretation of weighted averages of several scales. The group scored the drugs on all the criteria during the decision conference. Consistency checking is an essential part of proper scoring, since it helps to minimise bias in the scores and encourages realism in scoring. Even more important is the discussion of the group, since scores are often changed from those originally suggested as participants share their different experiences and revise their views. Both during scoring and after all drugs have been scored on a criterion, it is important to look at the relativities of the scores to see whether there are any obvious discrepancies.

                    Weighting of the criteria

                    Some criteria are more important expressions of harm than are others. More precision is needed, within the context of MCDA, to enable the assessment of weights on the criteria. To ensure that assessed weights are meaningful, the concept of swing weighting is applied. The purpose of weighting in MCDA is to ensure that the units of harm on the different preference scales are equivalent, thus enabling weighted scores to be compared and combined across the criteria. Weights are, essentially, scale factors.

                    MCDA distinguishes between facts and value judgments about the facts. On the one hand, harm expresses a level of damage. Value, on the other hand, indicates how much that level of damage matters in a particular context. Because context can affect assessments of value, one set of criterion weights for a particular context might not be satisfactory for decision making in another context. It follows then, that two stages have to be considered. First, the added harm going from no harm to the level of harm represented by a score of 100 should be considered—ie, a straightforward assessment of a difference in harm. The next step is to think about how much that difference in harm matters in a specific context. The question posed to the group in comparing the swing in harm from 0 to 100 on one scale with the swing from 0 to 100 on another scale was: “How big is the difference in harm and how much do you care about that difference?”

                    During the decision conference participants assessed weights within each cluster of criteria. The criterion within a cluster judged to be associated with the largest swing weight was assigned an arbitrary score of 100. Then, each swing on the remaining criteria in the cluster was judged by the group compared with the 100 score, in terms of a ratio. For example, in the cluster of four criteria under the category physical harm to users, the swing weight for drug-related mortality was judged to be the largest difference of the four, so it was given a weight of 100. The group judged the next largest swing in harm to be in drug-specific mortality, which was 80% as great as for drug-related mortality, so it was given a weight of 80. Thus, the computer multiplied the scores for all the drugs on the drug-related mortality scale by 0·8, with the result that the weighted harm of heroin on this scale became 80 as compared with heroin’s score of 100 on drug-specific mortality. Next, the 100-weighted swings in each cluster were compared with each other, with the most harmful drug on the most harmful criterion to users compared with the most harmful drug on the most harmful criterion to others. The result of assessing these weights was that the units of harm on all scales were equated. A final normalisation preserved the ratios of all weights, but ensured that the weights on the criteria summed to 1·0. The weighting process enabled harm scores to be combined within any grouping simply by adding their weighted scores. Dodgson and colleagues3 provide further guidance on swing weighting. Scores and weights were input to the Hiview computer program, which calculated the weighted scores, provided displays of the results, and enabled sensitivity analyses to be done.

                    Figure 4 shows the contributions that the part scores make on each criterion to the total score of each drug. Alcohol, with an overall score of 72, was judged to be most harmful, followed by heroin at 55, then crack cocaine with a score of 54. Only eight drugs scored, overall, 20 points or more. Drug-specific mortality was a substantial contributor to five of the drugs (alcohol, heroin, γ hydroxybutyric acid [GHB], methadone, and butane), whereas economic cost contributed heavily to alcohol, heroin, tobacco, and cannabis.

                    We also investigated drug-specific mortality estimates in studies of human beings.13 These estimates show a strong correlation with the group input scores: the mean fatality statistics from 2003 to 2007 for five substances (heroin, cocaine, amfetamines, MDMA/ecstasy, and cannabis) show correlations with the ISCD lethality scores of 0·98 and 0·99, for which the substances recorded on the death certificates were among other mentions or sole mentions, respectively.

                    So just like I’ve said FROM THE START, the mortality comes from drug-related disease, like lung cancer, and drug-specific mortality comes from dying in a car crash with the coroner reporting cannabis AMONG other substances, which will still make it count towards the stat, while not having had an effect on the crash compared to the others. But no. You sit there claiming that I haven’t understood and that these studies somehow claim that people are dying of cannabis-overdoses. Which you’ve asked explicitly several times over, despite me trying to explain this to you in the simplest way possible.

          • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            24 days ago

            I think this part of the conversation where you didn’t realize the chart had mortality information and told me to read the chart to see that there isn’t any

            Well, when you revise history and change what you said originally it’ll come across that way, yeah

            As you can see in your own fucking picture there: you originally kept asking who cannabis was killing, which isn’t on the chart mortality is, but that goes beyond direct killings, which has been their entire goddamn point

              • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                23 days ago

                You just pay 0 attention to what people clearly and concisely explain to you, dontcha squid?

                Drug mortality is defined as any contributory cause-of-death that involved one or more of the following drugs:

                And then it lists off shit like meth, coke, anti depressants, etc. as you can see, I’ve bolded the relevant part

                You originally said “who got killed by weed”, which is different entirely. Nobody has died of smoking weed (that I know of), people HAVE died because they were high (that’s a mortality)

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                  23 days ago

                  So the mortality for cannabis doesn’t apply to people who just use cannabis and it has no indication of what other drugs they might have used?

                  That is beyond useless information. That tells you absolutely nothing. Your chart is garbage.

              • Dasus@lemmy.world
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                23 days ago

                It is, yes.

                Drug-specific mortality and drug-related mortality are two different things.