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by Broken_Hippo
2368 days ago
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Trying to compare Tylenol (Paracet) to drug education is silly. Few folks take Tylenol recreationally and we don't have decades of propaganda around it. Others have already addressed the veracity of your links: But honestly, we already know of the dangers of tylenol. Liver damage with high use. But it isn't always so simple - it doesn't react with drugs as much as NSAID's do, and for some, it is really the only appropriate option for pain relief. I'm not suggesting at all that it is safe for teens to vape THC either. I'm not sure where you got this information from my writing. Fact-based education would mean things like telling teens that it is probably best to wait until one is older to start smoking regularly, if one smokes regularly at all. At the same time, we could explain that it if one is going to make a habit of a drug, they could do worse. Alcohol and tobacco are both more difficult for most people to quit and alcohol tends to destroy lives at a greater pace (folks can still lead normal lives while stoned). You can do all of this without proving that it is safer than lead in gasoline. I don't even know why this is mentioned as it isn't remotely the same category of things. Few folks are going to huff gasoline at the rates folks do other drugs. |
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The potential dangers of Tylenol/Paracet is not about liver damage. There is an unexplored correlation with behavioral disorders in pregnancy that is not entirely explained away by assuming that people with behavioral problems take more Tylenol. Yet in the widespread population Tylenol is basically considered completely safe, as safe as apple juice.
My point is that drug education is not trivial and is full of unfinished threads, and there is plenty of room for abusing the messages.
Lead in gasoline is my benchmark for how hard it is to know that a drug (atmospheric lead) is having a negative widespread effect in the population (violence and IQ reduction). In that case, it took decades before the data was there, and decades more to build political action on the issue.
Yes, drug education is a good thing, but we also have to know that messages can and must change when data comes back. At what point is the data strong enough to put in high school literature? For example, the research showing a correlation between chronic marijuana use and testicular cancer[1]; should we put that in the literature? It is impossible to say at this point whether that is causal or simply related to a behavior that occurs when using marijuana, or perhaps even hormonal (people that like marijuana have a body chemistry that also maybe produces testicular cancer)? We simply have no idea. So yes, drug education is good, and we need more research on the effects of marijuana, and I don't think we can really speak authoritatively on its risks relative to nicotine or even alcohol. (No, not everyone can lead a normal life while stoned. Learning is most certainly inhibited, and a normal life involves learning things.)
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4642772/