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Yet another report pointing out the drug war is lost
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
For those of you who missed it the UK Drug Policy Commission (a think tank) has stated the blindingly obvious yet again. Enforcement of the drug laws doesnt do any good, has next to no impact on supply or demand and probably actually does more harm than good.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7531860.stm
Any guesses as to how long this disaster is going to continue? I think it will be at least another 10 years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7531860.stm
Any guesses as to how long this disaster is going to continue? I think it will be at least another 10 years.
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
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Comments
haha, all they are probably thinking of is "making it more illegal".
That poll shows they are caring more about weed than the more harmful and deadly drugs.
My guess is a considerable more time than that.
There is too much money in it to stop the war.
Now the uneducated (in regards to drugs) are going to think everyone who uses mdma goes home and comes down with brown. What a joke.
There never going to be able to stop supply. The only way for the government to start resolving the drug problem is to make it less profitable for the suppliers. IE make it legal for registered addicts, which will mean quality control and a much lesser attractive market for organised criminals.
Naff. It makes no sense to focus on the effects of drugs more than the supply of drugs themselves. It should always be both.
Legalisation, if it ever comes, will be a sad day. The government knowingly allowing people to take substances which harm them, ruin their lives, and the lives of those who love them. It's as gross and amoral as legalised brothels.
Alternative solution???
Are you suggesting that it's the states job to protect people from possible bad choices by refusing them the liberty to even make those choices? Sort of like a nanny....a nanny state? Taking that attitude to it's logical extreme the state should also protect people from drinking beer, eating fatty foods and so forth maybe even spilling over into information itself; "don't read this book it's immoral", "don't read that newspaper they promote immorality".
Worth pointing out that the government already does this with alcohol.
Most drinkers don't ruin their lives through alcohol, most people who take illegal drugs don't ruin their lives either.
I do not need the state to tell me what substance I can or cannot use.
Can't say, completely giving up the fight isn't it though, that would only make things worse.
I'm suggesting that it's the state's job to protect society from things that are harmful to it. You're taking it to an illogical extreme. Alcohol is deeply rooted in our culture and I don't see any government banning it even though it does cause a lot of harm to society. Fatty foods, immoral books and newspapers aren't as harmful as drugs. It's absurd to suggest that a burger is as harmful as heroin.
A lot of lives are ruined by alcohol. As I say, drinking alcohol is deeply rooted in our culture and I don't see any government making it illegal. The fact that one harmful thing has been legal for eons may be a reason for banning it now, it is certainly not an argument for the legalisation of other harmful things though.
It's equally absurd to lump all drugs together and paint them as 'harmful to society' whilst keeping tobacco and alcohol legal. Cannabis for example is not as harmful to society on the same level as alcohol is. Whether something is rooted in culture has no relevance; culture changes. Considering the rising numbers of people using cannabis it will soon become part of culture too, in that case why keep it illegal? Why waste tax money, court time and create a black market for the substance? As far as I'm concerned making it illegal is far more damaging to society.
It's not giving up the fight, it's not a black and white issue. There is a very strong argument for decriminalisation as being the best way to limit the damage drugs do to society.
And you have no idea if it would make things worse.
That doesn't automatically mean making it illegal is the best way to go.
He's not. Most people do drugs without any serious negative effects, as with drinking alcohol and eating fatty foods most people do it responsibly.
So are drugs and they have been for millenia.
Your right, but it does serve to highlight the hypocrisy of others who drink whilst callign for drugs to remain illegal. I assume you drink?
People who continue to advocate drug prohibition are the best friends a dealer could ever have. :yes:
I believe that drugs policy is in massive need of reform. This brief should immediately be handed over to the Department of Health, in my view. I also believe that some form of legalisation needs to occur. However, I have my doubts about a total legalisation of all Class A and B drugs. What age limit would you have in order to purchase such material? How would you strictly enforce these laws, ensuring that children do not get access to potentialy deadly drugs? How do you ensure that you do not have people walking the streets at night high on drugs, terrorising others? (yes, I include alcohol in this category) What do you then do with those people who become addicted to the drugs that they have bought?
So many questions, so little time.
The facts are the most illegal drugs aren't just fundamentally safer than legal drugs, they're fundamentally safer than just about everything, including trousers, aspirin, and domestic appliances, so putting needless resources into policing things like marajuana, LSD and ecstacy is a huge waste of time imo. And this is the illegal stuff. It would be even safer if it was controlled, licenced and came with guidelines of how to use it. I also suspect that it would lead to more people choosing these less dangerous drugs instead of the more dangerous alcohol (as indeed plenty of people do already). The fact is that the only reason that most of them are illegal is simply because they come under this umbrella of "drugs" and people have been taught from a young age that drugs are bad. Any discussion on what to do about drugs absolutely has to first acknowledge the differences between drugs and agree to look at each one individually. If people can't do this, then they have absolutely nothing of interest to say on the topic. And this is why, as SG points out, the war on drugs as a whole is destined to fail, because it has no basis in fact.
18, same as alcohol.
Well you never will completely. But then I don't think the average drug dealer currently checks ID before selling drugs anyway. And using them properly, most of the drugs we're talking about aren't deadly anyway, at least compared to legal drugs.
Proper policing, same as alcohol. But afaik, there isn't another drug that would cause this to occur to anywhere near the extent of alcohol. And if more people choose to smoke weed for example, instead of drink, then you've probably cut the problem.
Proper treatment facilities. But firstly, this sort of assumes that more people will choose to take drugs just because they're legal, which isn't necessarily true (after all, people can generally get hold of drugs if they want them). Plus a lot of the drugs we're talking about don't cause people to become physically dependent on them (obviously anything that makes you feel good can become addictive in a small number of cases, such as shopping, but that's quite different from highly addictive stuff like tobacco or heroin).
Yes and no.
It is the states job to sheild the public from proven harms, such as poisoned water, or radioactive waste.
It is not however the states job to tell the public how to spend their free time. Horse riding, rock climbing, sailing, riding a motorbike - all easily as dangerous if not more so than recreational drug use, yet not banned.
We need to remove ourselves from the Victorian moral panic about intoxicants, realise they have always been around and always will be. Legalisation is not a great solution, but it will be better than the unmitigated disaster we have now.
I take your point that there is a contradiction in having some harmful drugs as illegal and having others as legal. Yes, all illegal drugs are not equally harmful, which is the reasoning behind the government's classification system. The relevance of the fact that alcohol has been rooted in our culture for centuries is that it explains why it is legal right now when other harmful drugs are illegal. And why few people are in a hurry to ban alcohol. Culture does change. If cannabis becomes an accepted part of British culture then chances are it will become legal, but it isn't yet. Non of that changes the fact that cannabis and alcohol are harmful though, and government has a duty to reduce the harm done to society.
I don't take your other point which seems to amount to saying that there's no point banning something which is harmful because money will have to be spent enforcing the law, and a black market will be created. There's nothing wrong with money being spent enforcing laws. There will always be people who break laws, the fact that people break laws isn't an argument for not having laws. If more and more people are breaking the law then that is an argument for doing a better job enforcing it. Which may mean, among other things, spending more money and that's fine.
Logic suggests that if a harmful thing is illegal and the law is properly enforced it will be harder to get. If fewer people can get it it will be doing fewer people harm. If it is legal it will be easier to get, more people will be able to get it and it will do more harm.
Perhaps, but it seems illogical (to me) for lawmakers to recognise that a thing does harm, and then to make access to that thing easier for the sake of reducing the harm it does.
He was. He might as well have said: "oh, so you think it is right that heroin should be illegal because of the harm it does, do you? You cunt. Well, by that reasoning the government would logically go on to make drinking water illegal too because water can do harm if you drink too much of it. And the government would ban shoelaces too because they can do harm if they come loose. And the government would ban the sun from shinning because it has been known to do harm."
I'm no historian but i'm pretty sure that no other drug has been consistently considered normal and acceptable in English culture for as long as alcohol has.
I have, but I don't. They are not necessarily hypocrites. Some probably simply aren't aware of just how much harm it does because of its place in our culture.
Not to you.
The connection between drugs and mental illness has no basis in fact? The connection between drugs and addiction has no basis in fact? What a bizarre thing to say.
I've got no figures to back this up, but I'd guess the main users of cannabis are from about 16-25 (certainly amongst my Uni contemporaries most had pretty much stopped by there mid 20s) and part of the attraction for many people was the sense of doing something illicit and rebellious.
If cannabis became legal there wouldn't be the same thrill and more would move onto harder drugs to get the same thrill. and whilst I accept something like cannabis is about as dangerous as alcohol, everything I've seen suggests things like crack and heroin are much more so.
Which drugs?
My point isn't so much that the state shouldn't ban harmful things because money would be spent enforcing it, more that there's no point banning things when more crime and harm is done by banning them.
For example, everyone knows that heroin is best avoided. Legalising it would not create a surge of heroin addicts. Putting aside personal harm the actual damage to society caused by heroin is the crime commited by addicts for them to afford their next fix. Opiates themselves are dirt cheap to manufacture, the high prices and crime to meet those high prices are a product of a black market. Legalise it, treat it as a health issue and you strip away the weath and power base of a significant number of criminal gangs involved in its supply, you reduce the crime by the addicts themselves and make them more likely to come forward to deal with their addiction when there's no chance of legal repurcussions. Public money is saved, prison spaces, police time. I would ever go as far as to say we should legitimise the poppy growers in afghanistan and elsewhere.
Either way, what they're doing now just isn't working, nor did alcohol prohibiton work in the US. Sure, they stopped a few people drinking but that wasn't worth the cost of crime, death and damage to society it caused.
Legalisation doesn't mean cultural acceptance or encouragement of use. I would not suggest letting 18 year olds nip down to the crack and meth shop to pick up a few bags for a few quid.
Merely conjecture. And while most people probably try cannabis when they're in uni, in my experience, those who enjoy to do so will continue long after that. But there is no evidence that relaxing cannabis laws leads to people taking harder drugs in larger quantities. In fact, I think the Netherlands actually has lower rates of hard drug use than most other countries.
Where do you get your opinion that cannabis is about as dangerous as alcohol? It's nowhere near as dangerous.
Heroin is actually pretty damn safe, the health problems are more to do with the addicts neglecting themselves than the heroin itself.
So why do we use a lot more hard drugs than Holland?
If anything the gateway effect is because of the law - you have to buy from dealers to get pot, and once you have broken the law for that why not try others. Holland have successfully seperated hard and soft drugs, which is why their crack and heroin problem is a lot smaller than ours.
Even the government knows this isnt a logical argument. I suggest you read this secret policy document which was produced for Number 10 a while ago (then leaked), it states in simple terms why the drug war is absolutely and completely lost. Even if we could enforce the law more effectively the actual harm to society and individuals would probably go up.
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2005/07/05/Report.pdf
It's worth nothing cannabis used dropped in Holland after decriminalisation and IIRC it's stayed stable.
But then use here went down slightly after it was moved to Class C too, not that that stopped them moving it back to Class B.
Personally I think comparisons with Holland only go so far, the laws are really only one part of the problem. Our drug problem is made worse by the laws, but it is created by the nature of our society in Britain.
Legalisation would help but it wont stop people wanting to use or abuse drugs.
Cocaine? Heroin? Meth?
Which one? Mental illness or Addiction? And that's a reason to ban steroids, ecstacy, LSD and cannabis is is? Because some completely different drugs cause particular problems?
The fact that laws do more damage than good is an argument for not having those laws though. And in the case of most illegal drugs, especially heroin, that is the case.
Experience suggests people will always do drugs despiute the law. Experience suggets that the law creates a black market, which in turn creates more problems for the user and soicety.
Almost all the problems associated with heroin are caused by this black market.
It funds terrorism, quality is so bad and unpredictable, disease is rife, crime to fund habit is often necessary. Keeping it illegal creates so many more problems.
Clean free gear, a safe place to to take it with clean needles would eliminate or greatly reduce so many of these problems.
It seems logical to me that if a substance can be harmful, it's better to have control of that substance. At the moment these so called 'controlled substances' are controled by organised crime, the government has no control.
Ignorance is not a good excuse, it's still hypocritical.
Trust me, the thrill from doing something naughty plaes in comparrison to the thril you get from some drugs.
I took drugs because I liked them, not to rebel. Whilst I'm sure there are people that do take them for those reasons, they are in the minority.
Drugs feel good. That is why people do them.