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>to rank 20 drugs (legal and illegal) on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society, such as damage to health, drug dependency, economic costs and cri

>to rank 20 drugs (legal and illegal) on 16 measures of harm to the user and to wider society, such as damage to health, drug dependency, economic costs and crime What I don't understand about these studies is what mathematical basis they use for comparing the relative impact of these various factors. I would assume that these would all be completely different, and as a consequence, incommensurable. However, studies like this seem to have found appropriate relative weights for these factors, and were able to add them all together. I would be interested in knowing if it's really possible to do this without producing a figure that's totally bogus, and if so, how.

themgt 14y ago
They explained it pretty simply - they asked the experts in the field to rate the harm on various factors, and they aggregated and compared those ratings. Drugs and the harm they cause to an individual and others is highly subjective and contextualized within a culture/society. There is not going to be some math formula to give you the answer. If you wanted to know the best web application framework to build your next REST API, would you build a mathematical theory for deducing it, or find out what the relevant experts in the field think?
- Alex3917 14y ago
  "they asked the experts in the field to rate the harm on various factors" IIRC they asked psychiatrists and not pharmacologists.
- phren0logy 14y ago
  >Drugs and the harm they cause to an individual and others is highly subjective and contextualized within a culture/society. There is not going to be some math formula to give you the answer. I disagree. I am a psychiatrist and participated in some clinical research. Step 0 is quantifying. It's not always perfect, but if you don't know what you are measuring, your measurements are useless.
  - themgt 14y ago
    The fact that you can quantify a thing by a given metric doesn't change the subjectivity of the choice. You can measure the amount a drug causes the average user to miss work, or die sooner, or number of missing teeth, or anything, but any combination of these will still always be: a) missing other relevant metrics b) representative of one perspective on what is valuable to measure, and what constitutes harm The idea that any one set of metrics and measurements have more intrinsic truth-value than simply aggregating the internal mental weights of all the relevant experts in the field is just like, your opinion man. If you want to present an alternate, mathematical model for drug harm and explain and argue for the validity of the choices you make for how to measure harm and how the data was gathered over what time period, etc etc - no one's stopping you.
  - seandougall 14y ago
    But there's a bar graph! What more could you possibly ask for? Units? Definitions? Those just add visual clutter and make the bar graph less pretty. Beauty is truth, after all.
- pervycreeper 14y ago
  > and they aggregated and compared those ratings Well, see, that's the tricky bit right there.
- bcoates 14y ago
  I wouldn't ask experts about application frameworks, I'd ask the people who use them. Similarly, drug experts, despite their profession, are not in a position to know the aggregate harm levels of various drugs. It's a misapplication of expertise and statistics, which apparently is the sort of thing the lancet has a fondness for. If you wanted to make a legitimate measure of the harm of various drugs despite the inability to build a mathematical model, you could do a survey asking people about how often they use various drugs and their opinion of the harm they've been caused by various drugs (as user or non-user). You'd get systemic bias from peoples imperfect ability to judge harm but at least you'd have something instead of nothing.
sk5t 14y ago
Probably no mathematical basis at all. Asking drug-harm experts to rank them is thoroughly unscientific, unless the topic of study is the opinion of drug-harm experts and nothing else.

themgt 14y ago

They explained it pretty simply - they asked the experts in the field to rate the harm on various factors, and they aggregated and compared those ratings. Drugs and the harm they cause to an individual and others is highly subjective and contextualized within a culture/society. There is not going to be some math formula to give you the answer. If you wanted to know the best web application framework to build your next REST API, would you build a mathematical theory for deducing it, or find out what the relevant experts in the field think?

Alex3917 14y ago
"they asked the experts in the field to rate the harm on various factors" IIRC they asked psychiatrists and not pharmacologists.
phren0logy 14y ago
>Drugs and the harm they cause to an individual and others is highly subjective and contextualized within a culture/society. There is not going to be some math formula to give you the answer. I disagree. I am a psychiatrist and participated in some clinical research. Step 0 is quantifying. It's not always perfect, but if you don't know what you are measuring, your measurements are useless.
- themgt 14y ago
  The fact that you can quantify a thing by a given metric doesn't change the subjectivity of the choice. You can measure the amount a drug causes the average user to miss work, or die sooner, or number of missing teeth, or anything, but any combination of these will still always be: a) missing other relevant metrics b) representative of one perspective on what is valuable to measure, and what constitutes harm The idea that any one set of metrics and measurements have more intrinsic truth-value than simply aggregating the internal mental weights of all the relevant experts in the field is just like, your opinion man. If you want to present an alternate, mathematical model for drug harm and explain and argue for the validity of the choices you make for how to measure harm and how the data was gathered over what time period, etc etc - no one's stopping you.
- seandougall 14y ago
  But there's a bar graph! What more could you possibly ask for? Units? Definitions? Those just add visual clutter and make the bar graph less pretty. Beauty is truth, after all.
pervycreeper 14y ago
> and they aggregated and compared those ratings Well, see, that's the tricky bit right there.
bcoates 14y ago
I wouldn't ask experts about application frameworks, I'd ask the people who use them. Similarly, drug experts, despite their profession, are not in a position to know the aggregate harm levels of various drugs. It's a misapplication of expertise and statistics, which apparently is the sort of thing the lancet has a fondness for. If you wanted to make a legitimate measure of the harm of various drugs despite the inability to build a mathematical model, you could do a survey asking people about how often they use various drugs and their opinion of the harm they've been caused by various drugs (as user or non-user). You'd get systemic bias from peoples imperfect ability to judge harm but at least you'd have something instead of nothing.

sk5t 14y ago

Probably no mathematical basis at all. Asking drug-harm experts to rank them is thoroughly unscientific, unless the topic of study is the opinion of drug-harm experts and nothing else.