Assessing the Real Dangers of Illicit Drugs - Risk Analysis as the Way Forward?

Abstract

How risky is heroin? How risky is ecstasy, cocaine or cannabis? Well it depends on who you talk to, what position they are coming from and what agenda they want to pursue. There is, therefore, a great deal of variance in the understanding and propagation of the dangers attached to illicit drug use. Too little of this variance however is based on reliable and appropriate risk appraisal and too much is based on historical attribution and emotive reasoning. As an assessment of prospective danger and the basis of ongoing and future policy, risk analysis and information pertaining to drug risks has got to be less subject to personal and emotional bias and more reliant on reasoned, comparative and reliable appraisal of the risks than at present. Although drugs control policy has always, in spirit at least, been strongly related to notions of dangerousness or risk it has not always (and it remains true today) been based on very sound analysis. In fact “proper” risk analysis has only really developed in the last thirty years or so and is, in many ways, still in its infancy (Renn, 1998). Despite this development however, risk assessment in relation to illicit drugs remains woefully defi-