Events
Is Alcohol or Cannabis more Harmful?
Saturday 8 October 2011
Deciphering the hype from reality with regard to drug use can be a challenge for most of us. Professor David Nutt in the UK has given me permission to post a link to the paper he has co-authored with Ruth Weissenborn that looks at the reality of a comparison of harm caused by two common intoxicants - Alcohol and Cannabis. That paper has been published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology under the title 'Popular Intoxicants: what lessons can be learned from the last 40 years of alcohol and cannabis regulation?' Professor Nutt is a strong proponent of evidence based responses, rather than those often based on what might be kindly called hype.
Some interesting comparisons are drawn through assessing the two drugs on a scale that looks at 'harm to user' and 'harm to others'. The short takeaway for me was that in terms of 'harm to user', alcohol was about two times more harmful than cannabis. When including 'harm to others', alcohol was about FOUR times more harmful. As some of you know, my early career was a member of the police force in Victoria. I can say categorically that when needing to arrest a cannabis intoxicated user, I have no recollection of having any trouble at all. The same cannot be said for arresting those using alcohol where aggression by the alcohol user was a common experience. You can download the paper here - many thanks to Prof. David Nutt for providing it to me. If you'd like to visit his blog go to his wordpress site here
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Events
Tuesday 8 May 2012
Have just spent a few hours discussing the Future of Money, hosted by James Bibby at Microsoft in Sydney and facilitated by Peter Vander Auwera from SWIFT/Innotribe. I'd like to flag that everyone understood that the session was way too short for such a big topic and everyone would agree that we just scratched the surface (not that the scratch would leave too much of a mark just yet). The session was a kick start for a group from a wide variety of interests: banks, payment providers' IT specialists and some specialty consultancies.
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Wednesday 2 May 2012
Ernst & Young and GreenBiz have completed a survey of business executives looking at the development of Corporate Sustainability around the world. The report shows that there has been a clear rise in awareness; that employees are a core source driving sustainability actions; that reduction of costs is a core appeal and that return on investment in sustainability actions is required to be judged in the same way as other corporate investments. For me this poses a dichotomy of thinking - the environment was built up over millennia and our use of it has taken just a couple of centuries yet we judge sustainability actions at the same 'speed of delivery' criteria. That poses a challenge and is perhaps an unrealistic set of expectations.
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Tuesday 24 April 2012
On the eve of ANZAC day here in Australia ABC Radio Darwin's Vicki Kerrigan chats with futurist Marcus Barber on the future of war - what the future triggers of war might be and how war will be fought
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