Roar Mikalsen - HUMAN RISING - radiofri..

cocaine use escalates into addiction, several researchers have found that people can
maintain patterns of moderate use for years. Dan Waldorf, Craig Reinarman, and Sheigla
Murphy interviewed a group of twenty-seven cocaine users in 1974 and 1975, then followed
up with twenty-one of them more than a decade later. ‘Casual use was the norm among
these users, and they experienced remarkably few negative effects,’ they write, summarizing
their initial findings. ‘For nearly all of the follow-up subjects,’ they add, ‘regular ingestion of
cocaine over an eleven-year period did not result in a pattern of compulsive use or
addiction.’ In a separate study, Waldorf et al. interviewed more than 200 heavy consumers
of cocaine, and even in this group they found many examples of controlled use. ‘While
control over cocaine use is not easy for everyone and is in no doubt difficult for most,’ they
write, ‘the possibility cannot and should not be denied. Our respondents were among the
heaviest users in the nation and, if many of them are controlled users, then surely most of
the other 25 million Americans who have tried cocaine are too.’” (Jacob Sullum, Saying Yes;
In Defence of Drug Use (Tarcher/Penguin Books 2004) s 218-19)
De nederlandske forskerne Peter Cohen og Arjan Sas har gjort tilsvarende studier, og
kommet med tilsvarende konklusjoner: De intervjuet 160 ”tyngre” kokainbrukere i 1987 og
intervjuet 64 av dem igjen i 1991, etter at de hadde hatt et rimelig omfattende og
regelmessig bruk i ti år. De konkluderte da slik: ”One of the main conclusions of our 1987
cocaine study was that a very large majority of the investigated users gave no evidence of
ever losing control. (…) After analyzing longitudinal data on our 64 follow-up respondents we
conclude that the main tendency of experienced cocaine users over time is towards
decreasing levels of cocaine use, stability of low level use, and abstinence.” (Jacob Sullum,
Saying Yes; In Defence of Drug Use (Tarcher/Penguin Books 2004) s 219)
Av de 64 som ble fulgt opp, hadde så godt som alle moderert rusvanene sine;
halvparten av dem brukte kokain i mindre og stabile mengder, og den andre halvdelen
hadde sluttet å bruke stoffet. Bare fire av dem hadde vurdert å søke hjelp til å slutte, og bare
en hadde faktisk gjort det.
Det er også viktig her å huske på at rusmidler som tobakk og alkohol utgjør et større
farepotensial for brukeren enn kokain gjør, målt ut fra dødsstatistikker og helsemessige
konsekvenser. Sullum forteller dette om overdoseproblematikken: “Fatal overdoses are rare.
The federal government’s Drug Abuse Warning Network reported that cocaine, used by
about 3.7 million Americans in 1999, was mentioned by medical examiners in 4864 cases
that year.(…) Even assuming that each user took the drug only once, these numbers are
modest. Furthermore, only a small fraction of the cases where a given drug was mentioned
involved deaths that were directly caused by the drug. The cocaine ‘mentions,’ for example,
include cases where other drugs were also present and where cocaine was detected but did
not necessarily play a direct role. Only 308 deaths (6 percent of the total) were listed as
caused by an overdose of cocaine alone.” (Jacob Sullum, Saying Yes; In Defence of Drug Use
(Tarcher/Penguin Books 2004) s 213-14.)
407