to be a little shocked at the laissez faire attitude to drugs on here?

[ThatVikRinA22]

at risk of sounding like your mum and pulling a cats bum face

im a bit shocked. Ive seen reference to drugs and recreational drug use on here before, and while i love the diversity of mn, im always quite shocked at what seems to be a majority? view that recreational drugs are just part of life, that its ok because 'professionals' do it too, that its not the same to be seen to use cocaine at the weekend as it is to be a shoplifter or prostitute with an addiction to herioin....

is it just that no one sees the murkier side of drug use?

i suppose i see the darker side because of what i do for a living, but even before that, i would never have been tempted to try. There are the wider issues with production, trafficking, crime, gangs, and the environmental issues in production
just one such story here

my brother was a heroin addict, and i lost my sister to drugs, one way or another, i believe drug use contributed to her death. Seriously, most the crime i deal with is in some way drug related. Two weeks ago i was involved in an attempted murder over cocaine and cannabis supply.

i am not some rabid campaigner, but this is mumsnet - are most of us parents? i find it odd that people can froth about the small stuff, that people get pilloried for some really bizarre stuff on here while threads about drug use get a fairly "meh" response. (yes its a thread inspired by the coke using teachers assistant....)

why is that? genuinely interested to explore why coke use is seen as ok, and wonder what is not ok?

if its ok for the TA to use coke at the weekend, is it ok for them to smoke crack? or use heroin? doctors were mentioned on the last thread....would you undergo an operation knowing your doctor or surgeon had used coke? or smoked cannabis?

if its just part of life, where would you draw the line?
do people not realise what it takes to get that gram of coke at the pub at the weekend?

Well, unless people want to become hermits, live in a cave and wear course hessian undergarments that they have woven from their own yoghurt they are in no position to judge.

For the record, I am for decriminalising all drugs. I'm not against responsible drug use either. I do worry about DS getting into drugs, but only because I have seen how it's affected his estranged father tbh.

People experiment, and I think it's natural. I also think alcohol ruins lives. Again, DS's father is a prime example of that. I don't have any real solutions other than decriminalising drugs and better eductation tbh. Parents need to play their role too.

Why can't these coke sniffers just take some magic mushrooms,?

people that like Cocaine want the effects of cocaine and not those of mushrooms.

i have known people synthesise their own coke too. it is chemically similar to painkillers eg lanacaine - used in teething gel.

im still reading, just not devoting too much energy to this discussion any more.

im sure that people who work with drugs users see a different side to the side i see.

they probably dont have to attend reports of gun shots being heard in the same month as 2 officers were shot dead, or stand for 10 hours in the pitch black (the torch in the car didnt work typically) and pissing rain guarding a potential murder scene that hasnt been searched yet, or redirect irate drivers who cant get down their road, or fend off questions from family and friends, or travel in the ambulance while paramedics struggle to save the life of someone who got on the wrong side of a rival dealer. Im sure someone somewhere is missing their coke and cannabis this week.

They probably dont have to enter a house wondering what they might find, they dont have find people dead, bag and tag them, or deliver the news to their distraught families.

The members of my own family who used drugs became people i neither liked nor recognised. Alcohol can ruin lives, but the scale of the change in personality, only ever came with drug use in my own personal experience. My sister, ironically, was totally anti alcohol, as our other brother is an alcoholic, but he holds down a job, he is still the person i always knew, he gets up and goes to work, he drinks himself into a stupor at night. Since i joined the job he no longer speaks to me, but he is still alive, my sister is not. When my sister became a drug user she also became vehemently anti police.

my other half brother is an alcoholic and a drug addict, still smokes weed, but cider didnt give him Hep C. I wonder what he and his wife have cost the NHS. 10 years as addicts. Neither work. His ex wife is also an addict. She gave birth to a child at 25 weeks weighing 1lb 8 oz, that child is disabled and was born methadone addicted. No one i know who has used heroin has only used heroine.

and the drugs people take do not just affect them.

ive no idea what the answer is. Perhaps the government should experiment with decriminalisation/legislation.
it would make my job easier, but i would still absolutely panic if i thought anyone of my immediate family were "experimenting". All drugs have inherent dangers with their use. Cannabis is far from harmless.

luckily for me, DS has aspergers and is not a rule breaker. DD is eminently sensible and moves in sensible circles. i hope that continues into her late teens.

I really do not know anyone else who uses drugs recreationally. My friends are few, mostly aging mothers much like myself, who have similar views to me. I live in a small northern town, i mix mostly with people who have kids with SN. They all knew me long before i was in the job and we are able to be honest with each other. I do not police where i live. When my hair dresser tells me she had to break the speed limit to get to work on time i do not run and dial 101. There are some things you have to turn a blind eye to, and there are others that i could not turn a blind eye to.

The type of people that my family hung around with when they used drugs are not the type of people i like and i would distance myself, as i had to do once again, when my brother tried to engage in some contact.
i tried.
but i found myself judging. i found that he talked a huge amount of self justifying hippy bollocks, while happily fathering a disabled child due to his (and his wifes) hippy bollocks thinking. (and then there were other issues that were just to big to overcome)

so.
i have no idea what the answer is, but how i feel is how i feel. Whatever that makes me look like, im fine with that.

am probably signing off this discussion now. Thanks for all the "hellos" and the kind thoughts, i am fine, i have dealt with the fact that i am the black sheep of my family and im ok with it

Vicar I really do feel for the pain you have experienced and witnessed in your life, and the dangers you have personally faced.

I cannot say too much about my own life (cannot out myself for various reasons), but I have been on both the wrong end and the right end of the law when it comes to dealing with the nasty fallout from drug abuse.

I have held a weeping stranger in my arms (whose son had just killed himself whilst in an altered state). I have held a screaming baby covered in its own feces and its mothers vomit, because she was on a cocktail of alcohol/drugs and completely unable to look after her own children for who knows how long. I have seen the scars, and the abscesses, and the rotting teeth and skin.
There is much more, years and years of the same filth and misery.

As I said earlier in the thread, I have also lost my own loved ones.

I want a solution too. I really do. I just sincerely believe that illegality is more of the problem than the solution.

Legal drug use is far more deadly in the UK.

What about the 100,000 people who die every year from tobacco related diseases, or the 100,000 deaths from alcohol related diseases? And all the families that affects?

Tobacco and alcohol are both pretty grim tbh.

I have no idea what the solution is, in my job we only care about the effects not the illegality so from my point of view making them legal would not change anything.
The only jobs which make me scared are the ones involving drugs, they make people act irrationally. When I have been attacked it has been by people under the influence of drugs. So far, ketamine, MCAT and cannabis. I have never been attacked by a drunk and neither have any of my colleagues.

Surprisingly I have never been threatened by a heroin user but that is possibly because we only get called when they've stopped breathing, they can get a bit abusive when we've resuscitated them because we've wasted their fix but they usually just storm off.

Vicar you sound like the white sheep tbh

Vicar - I stopped posting on this thread because I CBA. Those who are pro-drugs simply will not listen. It hasn't harmed them, so they are OK. The 'I'm Alright Jack' Brigade.

I didn't want you to think, though, that I had disappeared or didn't support you and your views. And I want to say this publicly rather than via PM.

I stopped posting for the same reason.

I hate pompous people who dismiss others' experiences as irrelevant. And I agree with BIWI's "I'm Alright Jack" statement.

I know I'm late to this but just to register that this isn't my experience either. Other than a tiny amount of cannabis when I was a student I've never taken drugs, never been offered drugs, and never have anything more than a couple of glasses of wine (occassionally more). I've never asked the question, but the people around me that I know and am friends with seem the same.

vicar maryzed BIWI It is the moral relativism that is annoying me most: as if you can't live your life trying to be as ethical as possible / doing the right thing because you have bought chocolate or like a glass of wine! Illegal drugs and unethical behaviour are being held up as a healthy life choice, because it hasn't happened to people that they know/ or them YET. Yes, anecdotes are not the same as facts, but there are too many facts about the horrors of drugs, you'd think that the badness of it all would be taken as read!

Yes, people on the front line see the worst side (medics, police, SS, drug counsellors etc) but that doesn't mean that people like my DH aren't dealing with the fallout from regular drug abuse too. He works for a small company with a low skill / low education workforce, he is seeing the mental health issues / personality problems such as inability to deal with temper / time management problems / falling apart of home life and the strange medical symptoms that seem to increase year on year, yet these men are ONLY using cannabis, a supposedly soft drug. These men are going to be at the mercy of the State when they are unable to finally drag themselves out of bed to go to work, have no savings, only debts and are only declining and not improving after working for a few years. They are already costing the NHS more and more, year on year. Yet these are mainly nice people, but they find real life a bit too much and prefer to spend their free time stoned. These men are slowly having their personalities erased and replaced by a stoner one.

Also I've had professional friends develop a heart murmur or have a collapsed lung (because they like to party on the weekends) with an otherwise healthy lifestyle. I think there is a hidden health cost, how many admit to illegal drug use when presenting symptoms to the doctor? Blood tests do not always pick up on past drug use.

True there are 90 year old men who've smoked 20 woodbine a day and die of old age not ill health. Or women who drink a bottle of wine a night, but don't die of cirrhosis of the liver. They are the statistical anomaly.

Im on the fence about the legalisation of drugs, but I dont get the 'well tobacco and alcohol are just as bad so lets legalise the whole lot' arguement.

I really doubt that if class A drugs were legal people would suddenly start taking them moderately and it would be peace and love all round. And I suspect that the reason that more people die from smoking and alcohol than drugs is because they are legal and therefore more people have access, not becuase they are actually more dangerous. Why is then a good idea to give people access to more potentially life threatening substances that they could become addicted to?

I have never touched cocaine but if it were legal I am pretty sure that I would have at least tried it with what consequences? Just because I am not addicted to nicotine or alcohol I dont think it follows that I would not become addicted to coke or heroin? Why put that further burden on our resources?

there is no evidence of any benefit in drugs being illegal.

none.

i think it increases the possible harms to drug abusers - they can add a criminal record to their troubles - really difficult to get away from in the days of CRB checking for a plethora of jobs.

Erm. Don't do them in the first place then?

blimey - i though CRB checks were there to protect the vulnerable? I wouldnt want anyone openly able to use, or talk about using illega or mind altering substances in certain professions.
i think thats right.
people who use, justify their use. Rightly or wrongly, i dont want my kids exposed to that way of thinking, certainly not by their teachers, or teachers aids for instance.
im happy for CRB checks to root out anyone for whom their drug use has become enough of a problem to commit crime., for those professions tht need a check.

I reckon they should legalise driving drunk and without insurance, petty larceny and public order offences (as well as many other things) so that people don't have their employment opportunities affected by having criminal records.

It's terrible, this making things illegal

drugs harm you, if anyone.

it isn't going to kill someone else.

i don't get how someone can argue 'they should be illegal because of the harms to users' when illegality is one of the harms!

"
im happy for CRB checks to root out anyone for whom their drug use has become enough of a problem to commit crime"

so if someone gets a caution for carrying some weed, as a teen, you don't think they should ever work with children?

look, just because im not so far to the left on this issue does not make me some crazed right wing tool of the state.
that is not what i am saying edgar and, i think thats pretty obvious.

i could give examples all day. i really could now, i have tons of examples, both through my history and home life, to now, where i see the results of drug use daily and the very diverse ways that it affects all kinds of people.

but its pointless. and so im not going to waste any more time on it, or arguing a point - ive said im actually all for looking at arguments for decriminalisation, and whether that would have an positive effect.

but drugs do harm. they do not just harm the user. thats a fallacy.

Hear hear Vicar You're talking a lot of sense as always.

that has been the effect of drugs law though. unlike drunk driving (where thousands of lives have very definitely been saved) there's no evidence of any being saved by drugs law.

the fact that a lot of the population doesn't support my belief doesn't make them right (as quite alot of people do believe that any drugs use is evil, and you should be jailed for long periods for it).

i don't think MH issues should be approached as criminal ones.

suicide, and other forms of self-harm aren't illegal. for good reasons.

so if you believe drug use is associated with MH problems - as another form of self-harm , I don't see why anyone would want it illegal for that reason.

other forms of self-harm have immense negative impacts on those that love or depend on that person, just as drug abuse does.

personally i think the majority of drug use is harmless, and there is research to back that opinion. The part that isn't harmless, is abusive - that isn't helped by illegality.

MaryZed ^I stopped posting for the same reason.

I hate pompous people who dismiss others' experiences as irrelevant. And I agree with BIWI's "I'm Alright Jack" statement.^

Yy- It makes it pointless trying to debate. I tried a bit of ironic piss taking, but even then I was taken seriously and derided! Some people will argue black's white just for the sake of it.

I will add another experience for dismissal- I know someone who was stopped at least twice whilst driving and smoking spliff- both times let off. That person ended up on smack down the line.

I wish to god he'd had the book thrown at him when it first happened- it might have made him stop and think, I wouldn't have cared less if it meant he could never work with kids.

There were six teenagers (a couple of whom ds knew quite well) killed in a car crash near me last year.

The driver survived (sort of - he's still in hospital).

He was stoned.

Anecdotal of course. He shouldn't have smoked dope. They shouldn't have got in the car. It was entirely their fault of course. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the growers and importers of cannabis have any responsibility at all. [ironic]

Thanks Doris.