Out of curiosity, I was trying to work out just how nasty cocaine is. Trying just using standard internet sources to find out much about the effects of cocaine in Britain. Eventually I found this from the Office of National statistics
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_320841.pdf
Cocaine
There were 139 deaths involving cocaine in 2012. The male mortality rate declined significantly between 2008 and 2011, but then increased again slightly in 2012 to 4.3 deaths per million population in 2012. The equivalent rate in females was lower than for males (0.8 deaths per million population in 2012), and this rate has remained relatively unchanged since 200
This document believes that 2.2% of the adult population have taken powder cocaine in a given year.
What does this mean? Well playing with stats a minute:-
4.3/1m = 0.43/100,000
However that's for the whole British population, and we know that only 2.2% take cocaine. So, we get per user, a fatality rate of
0.43/0.022 = 19.5 fatalities / 100,000 users.
By comparison, the fatality rate for GA is about 1 per 100,000 flight hours.
I'm not sure we have a reliable estimate anywhere for hours per year flown by an average GA pilot, but let's go for 40.
So, per year, the risk of being killed by being a regular GA participant 1 per 100,000 times 40, or 40 fatalities per 100,000 users. I'm going to assume that's male pilots (in practice probably slightly worse, as I suspect that statistically women do less daft things when in charge of aeroplanes.)
Now, I'm no drug use promoter - the only recreational drug I've ever taken is alcohol, and I have no plan or desire to ever take any other. But it does rather look like the risk per year, for an adult male, of being killed taking this drug is about half that of being killed flying a light aeroplane, for a PPL.
Or put more bluntly, being a PPL is twice as likely to kill you as being a coke-head.
Feel free to pick apart my statistics anybody, but I thought it was an interesting little thought experiment. I'm sure that cocaine is worse than I show because, for example, I'm not showing HIV deaths from needle originated infections, and nor am I showing the people damaged but not killed by drugs (on the other hand, nor am I showing people injured but not killed in flying accidents.)
G
Fan of Professor David Nutt.