Anyone else absolutely shocked of three innocent people in Liverpool all drug related!!

[Toosadtocomprehend]

If anyone reading this that takes recreational drugs should be absolutely ashamed of the carnage that their habit is causing…an innocent 9 year old ,20 year old and 22 year old have lost their lives because of other people shitty pastimes …think think think before you snort or smoke that poison!!

Sorry- stupid phone

‘modern slavery’

Your iPhone contains cobalt that is mined in terrible conditions. But that is it. It doesn’t require grooming children to distribute it all over the country.

You really have no concept of the harm caused by the drug production and supply industry just in this country alone.

As a teacher in a nice area I have been part of a project to help protect our kids from country lines. Children are being trafficked (in exchange for drugs) to London and back to be used as mules and for sex. It’s all the same people doing it- the same people supplying drugs to the selfish.

Of course. It's just so happens that the only bad things to consume are the ones you don't want to anyway.

Isn't that convenient? Anybody pointing out the literal wars that are fought and the children murdered for your consumer good of choice are just using whataboutery.

Get a grip.

Almost all our consumption is paid for in blood by people you neither know nor care about. We live in luxury at the cost of abject misery for millions if not billions of people. It's horrifying and too hard to fathom. It doesn't make it less true.

What the actual fuck is your point here. Seriously consider it for a moment. Are you seriously arguing that consumer goods are only immoral if the distribution causes harm? The harm caused by production is irrelevant?

Or is it that its only immoral of it causes harm you can observe? Or causes harm in Western countries?

What crap @Miffee

Because of slave Labour in China you are fine with children being groomed for sex and drugs so people can have a bump of coke at parties.

Yes that is obviously totally on the same scale as having bought a top no ethically produced.

What are you on about? Drug use fuels homelessness/ death/ child neglect/ violence and the biggest victims are often the children of these families.

But carry on without any guilt because your iPhone is also unethical. How ridiculous.

People taking and supplying drugs are taking an active role in ruining the lives of children all over the country and exploiting the poor and desperate. Just because other things are also wrong does not make that okay.

Legalisation and selling drugs in shops is never, ever going to work IMO - unless of course like alcohol you're selling it in every supermarket and every high street. Shops selling only drugs are only going to open in certain places, only be open at certain times and are always going to be far more expensive than on the street. A lot of people also wouldn't want to be openly buying drugs in these places as they wouldn't want the world to know about their fun/habit even if it has been legalised.

There are concerns that Amsterdam/The Netherlands is turning into a narco state because of their relaxed attitude to drugs. Google it. Even Portugal which seems to have a better record hasn't legalised drugs, they've just decriminalised very small amounts and treat it as an illness not a crime. This is not the same as legalising it.

You honestly think what children go through to make iPhones isn't as bad as county lines operations? I mean why compare in the first place it's apples and oranges but seriously?? Very worrying that you are a teacher with that mentality. 2 planks of wood my mum would say.

No I'm not okay with any of these things are okay. I never said I was. I smoke tobacco. I don't consume any other drug including alcohol. I took drugs and drank when I was a teenager back in the 18th century.

I am just sick of the utter fucking hypocrisy. I am not saying the drug trade is okay because mobile phones I am saying I wish people would apply their outrage equally to things they both do and do not wish to consume. Its beyond gross to accuse drug users of being complicit in child murder when you are too.

My point is that you seem awfully keen to defend the indefensible by pushing the focus to other people.

Two things can be wrong at the same time and both worth preventing.

Just because consumer products are often unethical doesn’t give people a free pass to look away from the harm they are doing (actually right under their own noses) for recreational purposes.

You don’t get to take a high horse when you are trying to make grooming and exploitation no big deal because it is happening to poor kids in this country and not abroad. If you had seen some of the things I’ve seen while working with kids you wouldn’t be so ignorant.

Maybe ask for that to be deleted, sweetheart! As you are wrong, ill informed and spouting bigoted crap!

The problem you have here is I have never defended the drug trade or said anything wasn't a big deal.

It's you who minimised the harm of cobalt mining. Not me minimising the harm of the drug trade.

Because you cannot justify your hypocrisy you have created a strawman and assigned a position to me that I do not hold.

Absolutely OP and I don't understand why more isn't made lf this. Police and politicians have a platform, as a result of these tragedies. Why aren't they pointing out that by using recreational drugs people are supporting the trade that directly causes these deaths? The PM made a statement about it yesterday, but missed that opportunity.

The middleclasses fall over themselves over fair-trade coffee/chocolate etc because they care so much about the lives of disadvantaged people elsewhere, but are happy for those at home to be exploited and killed. They'll boycott Starbucks or Nestle for lack of social responsibility, but keep supporting this trade. It's baffling why there's no campaign to make it socially unacceptable.

Of course those using guns and knives are responsible for their actions, but those using the drugs that fuel this culture, and make the violence worth share in the responsibility. It's time to stop pretending that taking drugs doesn't hurt anyone else, it does.

Let me break it down for you @Miffee and you can decide.

A student from a school I taught at about four years ago lived in a tiny flat with his mum, who was a coke head who barely looked after him. We have him a lot of care at school but he was very mistrustful of adults. There were lots of different men in and out of the flat.

One day he disappeared and stopped coming to school. He was under 16 so was reported missing. He was found six months later in London (which was around three hours from the little town we were in). He’d been trafficked for sex by a gang who had also been using him to run drugs via the main train lines into small towns all over the country.

He was entirely broken and drug addicted. It turns out he’d not gotten into drugs via his mum but instead had taken to hiding out at the 24 hours McDonald on the edge of town, because it was warm and had wifi. He was picked où there by a sympathetic’ guy who bought him food and then alcohol and then drugs. Once he was hooked they started asking him to do runs. Pretty soon they were trading him for sex as well

He was 13 when this started happening. And he was only one of four or five kids from that school alone (that we were aware of).

But sure- keen banging on about how buying an iPhone is worse. It’s not a bloody competition but I don’t see how that kid’s life could have turned out worse.

gah 'worth it'. Oh for an edit button.

See also a lot of fake designer goods.

Wow that's disgusting. I don't cross the street to avoid crackhead either. In fact if I had to have a coffee with a crackhead or @Briocche I would pick the crackhead 10x over 😂

I'm not reading all that shit. You seem to be under the misguided impression I am ignorant to this stuff. I am not, indeed I have had personal experience with it.

My point never was X is worse than Y.

Your story doesn't answer anything I have said. You are again using logical fallacies because you showed your true colours by letting slip you don't care about children in the third world as long as it doesn't harm "our" children.

Just ask MN to delete your post, it will save you a lot of effort typing out walls of irrelevant text.

That's just a statement, it doesn't actually change anything, does it? People will continue to take drugs and organised crime will continue to make billions off the drug trade.

if they weren't illegal this wouldn't be a problem tbh

That’s exactly the point - if it was legalised it would be quality controlled and not mixed with chemicals

They seem under the impression that they alone have first hand experience of County lines and know the true cost because they are in a "project" about it. It's very odd. Quite the expert apparently and so cosseted they cannot imagine that anybody else has knowledge or experience of the horror of the drug trade.

@Toosadtocomprehend completely agree. People taking drugs need to think where they come from and what it actually means to be involved in the drug supply / demand chain.

people like @RobertaFirmino can put their heads in the sand and think drug related violence is nothing to do with the user. Complete bollocks.

You aren't being unreasonable, drugs are abhorrent. Even if they were legalised there would still be a criminal underbelly built on violence, exploitation and money- they'd just sell half cut shite that was more likely to kill someone but would be a bit cheaper than off the shelf. Addiction is complex and distain is often reserved for those who grapple with it yet rich people snorting coke on a weekend some see as fine. Its all grim, the only way to truly tackle it though would be to invest in support and services to those vulnerable to it and address the reasons people become entrapped- often they are vulnerable and when there's no hope anywhere else it gives them a chance of an escape. But the government never will. Anything else is just a sticking plaster.

Yeah, Cocaine powder or Ecstasy pills are recreational drugs, be it for nightclubs, pubs, dinner parties, football matches or whatever else to bring people out of themselves.

Heroin, spice and the like are for fucked up people dealing with trauma and then addictions.

Cannabis seems to be more for people to unwind (i've never taken it).

I'd say alcohol is used for all the above purposes as well.

Half of the commons are on drugs. Cocaine is everywhere in Westminster.