The exact date that ancient agricultural workers discovered and enhanced the mind-altering properties of the cannabis plant is unknown to us, but academic consensus is that it may have occurred in central Asia at least 2,500 years ago. Wheat has had a more straightforward evolution: its use as a source of sustenance is older than agriculture. Although we may never discover when the first hunter-gatherer baked bread, we do know that they were making bread at least 14,000 years ago. Since the first loaf, wheat has increased in importance but diminished in stature. The much taller fields depicted in ancient hieroglyphs and by early modern artists such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder are not artistic licence: they reflect the reality of the day (although hieroglyphs may exaggerate somewhat).

Both weed and wheat have been refined and developed over time by farmers, a process that has greatly accelerated for both since the second world war. During the third agricultural revolution, modern techniques and technological transfers allowed farmers to grow more reliable, more tasty, more resilient and more lucrative crops. In the world of wheat, the man who bears more credit than any other for this transformation is Norman Borlaug, the American agronomist. The shorter, more disease-resistant crop he helped develop and introduce in Mexico, India and Pakistan is credited with saving more than a billion people worldwide.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Stephen Bush

The question of whether or not the rich make better decisions is vital in the debate happening across much of the democratic world over assisted dying.

In Canada, where a fierce debate is raging over the looming expansion of the country’s medical assistance in dying laws (Maid) beyond end-of-life cases, critics fear that it will drive up the number of people seeking Maid because of the costs of not doing so. Krista Carr, the vice-president of disabilities charity Inclusion Canada, has argued that Maid expansion is a poor alternative to increased funding for social housing and mobility assistance, saying that people with disabilities “don’t actually want to die, they want to live. But they want to live a life on par with other people, which is entirely possible with proper support.”

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Stephen Bush

Of course, any of these behaviours is harmful to me personally, which is one reason why global governments’ “war on drugs” is a battle on two fronts. There is the global fight against legal but harmful drug usage: the Institute of Alcohol Studies estimates that in the UK, alcohol usage costs the country £7.3bn a year in lost productivity, while hangovers cost somewhere between £1.2bn and £1.4bn a year. In the United States, the CDC calculates that tobacco usage costs more than $240bn in increased healthcare spending, close to $185bn in lost productivity from smoking-related illness, and almost the same amount thanks to premature death.

Then there is the fight that we more commonly associate with the phrase “war on drugs”: the battle to reduce the use of drugs that are both illegal and harmful. The British government puts the cost of illegal drugs to the UK economy at about £20bn a year, while the US Office of National Drug Control Policy’s most recent estimate put the cost of illegal drug usage at $120bn. In 2017, the Trump White House put the cost of opioid addiction, which cannot be neatly split into “illegal” and “legal” boxes, at $504bn in 2015.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Stephen Bush