If you buy cannabis you are an accessory to the modern-day slave trade that caused the death of the 39 in the shipping container

[Parsimon]

I hate the fact that so many people in this country blissfully ignore the human misery behind the drugs they consume, whether it’s working class kids being stabbed because of their involvement with the gangs that supply cocaine to middle-class dinner parties or the “just a spliff” crowd who are fuelling modern slavery from predominantly Vietnamese trafficked immigrants, often children.

If you grow your own and trace to source everything else then you’re only harming yourself, but I expect that the vast majority of drugs users don’t actually do that.

Excellent article in the Guardian today about the children having to work to support UK cannabis consumption.

amp.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/25/trafficked-enslaved-teenagers-tending-uk-cannabis-farms-vietnamese/

Time to legalise and stop the illegal trading...drugs such as cannabis

Hasn’t had that effect in Canada.

www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-26/canada-legalised-marijuana-why-are-people-buying-from-criminals/11627700

I used to go to a nail bar near me some years ago, but I only became a customer when I asked who the owner was and it was a married couple, both worked sometimes in the bar and I got to know them it was a legit nail bar as far as I could tell. They are still there been there years and always absolutely packed out with customers.

I don’t use drugs though, and I know enough about them to know hardly any of it is ethical. We aren’t living in California it’s raining all the time where do people think cannibis comes from in the UK

I remember when they raided half of Green Lanes in Haringey. The shops were largely owned by Turks and were all almost 24hr bakery and grocery shops. How many grocery shops do you need running for nearly 24hrs a day on one street FFS? Nobody seemed to be competing and although you only saw a handful of customers an hour, they could still afford to keep running. They were laundering heroin money.

I side-eye all predominantly cash in hand, handful of customer shops who can afford London rates.

Not everybody gets their weed from the Vietnamese. I don't have enough fingers to count the amount of people I know doing massive grows. How do you think the 21 year old lad driving an S3 has got the money for that from?

Drugs in general are shite. Alchohol included...i do drink btw.

I'm really naive about drugs. I've never taken any and I don't know anybody who takes them either.
I'm not disputing that nail bars are linked to drugs, but if it's common knowledge why aren't they stopped/closed down?

And I agree with PP who said county lines kids are also trafficking victims. The gang (often made up of damaged kids) dangles a few pounds in front of a vulnerable kid and they get forced into all kinds of awful situations that they can’t get out of. It’s awful.

The dinner party coke crew will work hard to minimise their responsibility though and will only do much as raise an eyebrow if a kid gets stabbed a couple of streets away thinking that as long as Freya goes to the better school in area, all will be fine.

I'm not disputing that nail bars are linked to drugs, but if it's common knowledge why aren't they stopped/closed down?

I'd imagine because money laundering is very difficult to prove without doing a full time-and-motion study on the business and then looking at its books. Also the nail bar, in and of itself, isn't doing that much harm, and if you shut it down another business will just pop up with the same function. The police can either spend time and money doing something that will inconvenience organised criminals, or they can try to stop the funds at source, if you get my meaning.

Have to be a flipping busy nail bar to justify the high reported turnover required to place the dodgy money into the system.

Anyway, got to agree with a number of others on here, legalise at least cannabis. Get a legal standard in place and tax like any other business. If legal, the price will plummet even factoring in tax.

The war on drugs as is clearly isn't working.

I'm not disputing that nail bars are linked to drugs, but if it's common knowledge why aren't they stopped/closed down?
Because no-one in authority cares.

I don't do drugs (or visit nail bars) but I agree we should legalise. I used to think the only thing stopping us was the USA but they seem to be heading that way now.

I definitely think we should legalize nail bars.

Just read that guardian article and it’s a real eye opener, I honestly had no idea people were being trafficked over here to cultivate cannabis. There’s been house raids near where I used to live that were cannabis factories mind you, but I don’t know who exactly was involved in those.

I don’t smoke and never have, but I wonder if legalising it would make a massive difference? Probably not though as there will still be victims of trafficking.

I’ve also never had my nails done in my life so don’t know much about who staffs those.

Illegal activities, drug production and prostitution need legal front businesses to launder their cash, hence the nail bars, also takeaways.

The immigrants who died would have been brought in to run cannabis farms, work in the nail bars, often for no money and what work do you think organised crime would have lined up for young attractive women??

Your drug use is financing this and also even nastier things in drug producing countries in the rest of the world

I'm a drug user. A realistic approach is to accept that people are going to use drugs, and to adapt to that. Criminalisation serves (among many other things) to displace an inelastic demand into the criminal economy. No amount of (what may be perfectly correct) moralising is going to change that.

Not everyone's drug use is financing this.
Lots of people grow their own or know people who grow their own and buy from them.

Anything imported, well it's doubtful you know the history for a lot of things.

Clothes. Wasn't Primark involved in child Slavery a few years ago? Albeit unknowingly. There is a poster further up about the cobalt that's being mined. Coffee, fruit.

The list goes on.

Legalisation for cannabis seems to be the most sensible option at the moment.

“Not everyone’s drug use ...” the exceptionalism of those in denial.

While it’s theoretically possible that all the drug users reading this will have sourced all their illegal drugs through wholesome outlets with not a whiff of county lines, modern slavery, human trafficking or gang violence, it seems unlikely given the scale of the problem. It’s easier not to think about it, if you live in a nice house and your kids are okay, that your drug use is causing misery to other people and their kids.

I maintain that people who buy illegal drugs are contributing to this, whether they think their drugs are exceptionally wholesome or not.

I maintain that people who buy illegal drugs are contributing to this, whether they think their drugs are exceptionally wholesome or not.

You may well be right, but being right isn't going to solve the problem!

100% agree Parsimon and I say this as someone who used to ‘party’ back in the day. But I’m older and wiser now and I can’t unknow what I know. However, many will work overtime to minimise or deny the true cost because it’s unlikely their kids will pay with their lives and they’re so far removed from the suffering that they choose not to see the connection.

What about the people who are making money by exporting medical?
Why is that ok?
The thing we could be doing, learning from other countries experience and funding independent research, legislation ready for the emerging markets like edibles, notice a few milkshake bars opening? Desert edibles available in the high st?
The war on drugs is just not working.

I agree OP.
I'm ashamed of the racist posters on here saying "we're full / too nice" and the rest of that bullshit.
It's nothing to do with that - it's capitalism in action, where someone has to be on the bottom of the pile so the rest of us can have nice things.

And this government are desperate to squeeze Brexit though because their offshore savings will be under scrutiny in January if they don't.
That's the real reason you can't get a GP appointment - look at the corporate tax that would be flooding into our economy if they weren't in cahoots with BJ and his mates.

Drugs are rife.

County lines are real.

Kids are in trouble.

Drug use and problems associated with drugs, are getting worse, not better.

legalisation will line the pockets of the already-rich, but regulated and legislated markets would clearly improve working conditions so i'm with you op :)

DaveMyHat how would legalising/decriminalising weed have harmed your brother? (Genuine question).

I don't want to speak for Dave but I suspect the answer would be, 'it made it easier to access'. But I don't think that's a strong argument. Cannabis is readily available anyway; were it legalised, there would be more consistency of supply; and there would be less stigma attached to seeking treatment if someone's use became a problem.

Legalising/decriminalisation wouldn't have changed anything in his case I suspect. But I don't believe that making it legal would stop there from being a "black market". People like my brother (not much money, no medical reasons for it, from a deprived, low income, high crime area etc) would probably still buy the illegal stuff. And there'd be more people taking it legally who wouldn't necessarily have used it before, which I think could possibly:

a. Create more people like my brother who have problems from it.
b. Give some sort of legitimacy to people like him even if they're getting it illegally...sort of make it more acceptable.
c. Some who buy it legally may eventually turn to illegal sources where I assume it will be cheaper, unregulated, still rooted in criminal activity and exploitation.

In my mind the best way to sort things out would be to try and change the social perception of it. I saw another pp mentioned how most people she knows who take drugs are very "woke" people yet they don't care where the drugs come from. I think that could be changed, just like the attitude towards smoking and even drinking seems to have changed over the last ten years or so. Everyone hates smokers these days...I am one myself and I'm very embarrassed about it. I think certain drugs are seen as cool and edgy by certain groups, but I think that perception could be changed.

I don't think someone who smokes weed should be sent to prison for it or anything like that, but perhaps more information shown in schools about where stuff comes from and the potential bad effects.

I don't know...like I said in my previous post, I'm pretty ignorant about the whole topic and obviously it's fairly emotive for my family so maybe my thoughts are stupid ones. I'm not actually a hardcore anti-drugs person or anything. I used to take drugs when I was younger, mainly cocaine and ecstasy, and I had no idea back then about all the sort of stuff that goes on. Would I have still taken them if I had known, I am not sure tbh. Now I'm 32 and that would be enough to put me off. I don't know if I would have had the same thoughts when I was 19 but I don't think I'd have started smoking if the attitude about it back then had been the same as it is now.