Course convener and pharmacology and toxicology department lecturer Associate Prof John Ashton said the department generally taught students how drugs worked in a biochemical or physiological sense, but the paper had been reintroduced in collaboration with the bioethics department because it taught a necessary aspect of pharmacology.
"Some of our graduates work at places like Pharmac or MedSafe, or advise various policymakers, and this [paper] shows that there’s another aspect to drugs.
"It shows their impact on individuals and on societies, both in terms of drugs of abuse/recreation and in terms of medical side effects, the efficacy of the drugs, how they’re tested, how they’re validated, the cost, the access, the regulations — all these things are another aspect of what we deal with."
Prof Ashton said the paper was dropped in 2006 after a restructuring of the department’s courses.
"At the time there were a lot of new drugs being invented that we weren’t covering.
"We wanted to cover those drugs, so there’s been this gap that was left in our discussions about the impacts on individuals and societies."
He said the course was restarted to cover that information and encourage more non-pharmacy students to pick up the paper.
It had been a second-year course, but was available to any student who had done three courses, now.
The paper was very "discussion-based" and topics included the case for and against decriminalisation of cannabis and medical use; the re-emergence of psychedelic drugs; the legal age to purchase alcohol; the aim to make New Zealand smoke-free by 2050; the use of drugs in sport; the regulation of herbal medicines compared with conventional medicines; why new drugs cost so much; who should pay for them (the patient or the taxpayer); direct advertising of medicines to patients; should patients be allowed to decide what is safe to take rather than MedSafe; who is responsible if someone has a car accident after taking drugs; and how drugs affect individuals and people around them.
"A lot of the questions we are considering, there is no one correct answer. There’s just a room full of consensus or disagreement."
The six-week course finishes on February 18.
