THE DARK SIDE OF BOOZE

Alcohol has been implicated in about half of all violent crimes. It’s not clear why, but recently, researchers gave 50 young men either vodka shots or a placebo and slid them inside an MRI scanner. When they performed a task designed to get them seriously wound up, the intoxicated men showed decreased firing in the prefrontal cortex, the region that co-ordinates emotional control, among other functions.

“We think normally people restrain their aggression through conscious and subconscious processes, and alcohol dissolves that, so they explode,” Nutt said.

However, a 2002 Canadian Senate report concluded that marijuana itself isn’t a cause of violence, delinquency or crime. Overall, the committee found that “for the vast majority of recreational users, cannabis use presents no harmful consequences for physical, psychological or social well-being in either the short or the long term.”

Selby, of the centre for addiction, said the problem with booze is that social constraints aren’t sufficient to creat “normative” drinking patterns. Instead, it’s a kind of free for all. “We get bombarded with a lot of advertising, the culture is about drinking to intoxication,” particularly in university, he said.

Nutt said we could see a slight bump in social harms with pot legalization, although he doubts masses of people will suddenly start sparking up spliffs.