Disputes over quantifying the addictive nature of drugs is probably a mute point in the context of this discussion.
It's only one factor when assesing the overall harm of a drug.
Ok, but also looks to me like you could draw a nice 45 degree best fit line passing through the origin on that graph > the more addictive it is, the more harm it does, pretty much.
This doesn't prove that addictiveness causes the harm but I'd guess there are underlying neurological causitive links in some cases.
I don't think we can be drawing those sorts of conclusions.
They don't plug in an addicto-meter and take a reading, then plug in a harmo-meter and take another reading. The numbers are based on a whole host of observations and collated in an arbitary way (pulled out of their arse would be one way of putting it, but to be fair a lot of studies do a good job in trying to quantify the unquantifiable)
Of course addiction is a big factor in how dangerous a substance is (with exceptions obv) but the reason I said it was a mute point is that we're unlikely to get any kind of consenus as to the schemantics of the words addiction and dependance. Crack and Heroin are addictive and dangerous. If something else may or may not be more addictive it's a bit of an irrelevance is it not?
That is to say, is it not pretty evident that Crack and Heroin are the most dangerous and destructive drugs in terms of the affect they have on the users life as well as their family and neighbours. Why do we need charts and tables for this?
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