Drugs (please) – is it time to decriminalise them within the UK??

[Isitmebut]

Coalitions eh?, who’d have ‘em, but this is clearly a serious subject, so shall we kick it around?

“No link between tough penalties and drug use – report”
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29824764

“There is "no obvious" link between tough laws and levels of illegal drug use, a government report has found.”

“Liberal Democrat Home Office minister Norman Baker said the report, comparing the UK with other countries, should end "mindless rhetoric" on drugs policy.”

”He accused the Conservatives of "suppressing" the findings for months.”

”Tory MP Michael Ellis said the Lib Dems had "hijacked" it for political gain. The government says it has "no intention" of decriminalising drugs.”

My opening view for what it is worth, begins with that on any substance abuse, comparing other countries experiences with ours, seems to provide pants results.

For a start would we be ready for the likes of legal hubbly bubbly pipe shops, on the high street?

Do you remember extending our drinking hours was going to provide in the UK a European type “cafe culture”, where we would be sipping away to the early hours an alcoholic beverage – but has ended up with citizens lying in the gutter, vomiting, putting daily pressures on the police, NHS A&E staff, and longer term expensive damage to those citizens bodies, the NHS, and society as a whole.

I am not an expert on drug taking/abuse, but alcohol on the other hand I spent a lot of enjoyable time on that subject UNTIL a problem very close to home arose and affected the whole family.

But I’d just like to make a few points before opening the subject to the board.

• Even accepting that within the UK there is no link between ‘tough penalties and drugs’, can we afford to socially find out that if TAKING AWAY those penalties, drug use then markedly rose?

• On the subject of affordability, clearly the more money that can be spent preventing drug abusers/addicts getting into a position to commit criminal acts the better.

So are those overseas results DEPENDING on a lot more money being spent on this, when during our high budget deficit economy now and for years to come - there are so many other money pressures that urgently need more funds e.g. mental health?

• Are we in such a sad economic, social and criminal place, that for the years ahead, taking account of our apparently non café culture, it is more ‘convenient’ to keep our drugs policy as is, trying to ‘lock away’ the problem?

"That the black market bustles in the emerging days of legalisation is not unexpected. By some reckonings, it will continue as long as residents of other states look to Colorado – and now Washington state – as the nation’s giant cannabis cookie jar. And, they add, as long as its legal retail competition keeps prices high and is taxed by state and local government at rates surpassing 30%."

www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/19/colorado-cannabis-marijuana-black-market

Taxation drives the black market as the price is undercut. Government and corporations will probably seek to make money out of it, just as cigarettes and alcohol attract high taxation and then even calls for minimum pricing by the modernisers.

Alcohol is legal and the paucity of services to help those with alcohol problems is a scandal. Yes if we added alcohol in with that we'd be even worse at managing the problem BUT alcohol makes the government a LOT of money and is therefore encouraged.

It is down to pragmatism. I once had a client whose parents raised hell because we 'were teaching this person how to inject'. No we were not. They'd have done it anyway. As I said to them, 'your child may one day decide to no longer use. Would you prefer to have them with all four limbs and no BBV's or not because if they reuse old works, don't adopt hygienic practices and inject with poor technique this will result in abscesses and fibrosis of the lings because they are crushing and not filtering pills?' because that is what education, support and safe prescription can ensure.

Lungs. Not lings.

Well that's why I said it can't be run by a profit making company. What you are describing is allowing the government or private companies to become rival drug dealers out to make the most profit.

In theory dealers could buy it here retail and then sell it in say France, but that sounds harder and less profitable than just buying it directly.

Ordinary French people could pop over for the day to buy it here for their personal use, but a) I'm sure they can get it back home without risking being stopped by customs and b) that wouldn't harm us. It would be up to the French government to stop their citizens illegally importing drugs.

"What you are describing is allowing the government or private companies to become rival drug dealers out to make the most profit."

But isn't that what might end up happening in a dystopian nightmare where the Brave New World Big Brother pushes soma for the populace to keep them zonked out while taxing them for it?

Have you seen the billionaires who are always on our TVs advocating it? Will their companies get the contracts to produce the drugs?

I think the black market won't just be a smuggling one, but will be an underground production one which produces new variations, much like illegal alcohol distillation etc.

LilAnnie if you have to deal with the worse results then I don't envy you. My ideal solution if it were possible would be to UNinvent drugs and alcohol. I don't think they are good for anyone. Though some can be fairly harmless (at least for people who don't already have problems)

Presumably you see the ones who couldn't handle the drugs or who couldn't afford to buy them and ended up arrested for some other crime.

I am firmly in favour of decriminalisation. I have never understood how, rationally, a government criminalises its people for altering their mood. Prohibition did not work in the United States. The war against drugs has failed.

The vast majority of people who use drugs, enjoy themselves, have a good time and don't commit crime. There will always be people who abuse drugs, just as they abuse alcohol. These people need support and help.

The problem with this debate is that it is framed in a way which fails to take into account the thousands (millions?) of people who are already taking recreational drugs quite happily. It's not as if decriminalisation will mean people suddenly start taking drugs. Drugs are already easily available. People have been taking them for centuries. Legislation will not prevent this.

Legalising drugs will provide revenue to the government, will increase the safety of drug-users and will enable better support for drug abusers.

isn't that what might end up happening it certainly is! and that's why my first post said "I'd support decriminalisation if we can find a way to do it right."

Because I think we can find lots of ways of doing it really badly.

But we need to separate the problems which are actually with the drugs themselves from the problems of corruption in government etc.

I mentioned earlier too that the drugs would still be illegal for children so there could be a black market in selling to schools.

Also it might be a good idea to sort out the limits on immigration before we say we make drugs freely available.

There's a lot to consider.

Nope, not in favour of it. I don't see it as a step forward for society at all, and would prefer to be able to go about my daily life without people around me lighting up a joint or whatever in the way that they drink alcohol etc.

Claig I think you're looking at this from a position of fear, rather than hope. I believe the findings of this study were suppressed because drugs are so taboo that people are too full of shock and outrage to listen to what the findings are really telling us.

The black market thing is a red herring. What exists right now in the UK is 100% black market. You cannot grow a plant for your own personal use without being labelled a dealer/farmer/grower/addict (delete as appropriate) and potentially cautioned or worse. What would happen to cannabis farms, which tend to exist in rows of residential houses, were the govt to decriminalize cannabis? If it was safe (IE not the super strength doolally-making strains you can currently get on the black market), if the person selling it to you was 100% clear on what their product was?

Dealers are greedy fuckers. The bulk out the weight of cannabis with water, sand and crushed glass. Fancy breathing that in? No, me neither, it hurts. One of the least dangerous substances you can get, something entirely natural that's been around for freaking millennia, something that's never seen the inside of a lab, is being cut with heavier household substances to make dealers more money.

Not to mention how useful a material hemp is to the textile, manufacturing and pharmaceutical industry. Hemp would become much cheaper, and is very sustainable.

Add in Annie's very eloquent posts and that's the argument for decriminalisation. AFAIK the argument against is a bunch of people who want to keep believing the lies they've been spun.

I am not in favour of it either. Reading MN's teenagers board and the catastrophic effects drugs have on some teenagers makes me relieved to live in Singapore, which has zero tolerance of drugs.

Is this decriminalisation only about cannabis or does it go further to cocaine and heroin?

According to that article I posted from Breitbart, the Tory moderniser, a former speechwriter for the moderniser Cameron suggested the following:

"Mr Birrell dedicated most of his speech to calling for the legalisation of all drugs, claiming the policy could return the Conservatives to popularity. He also lamented that the party was unpopular with “young people and ethnic minorities”.

'makes me relieved to live in Singapore, which has zero tolerance of drugs.'

Yes, I would like to hear more about how Singapore and Japan deal with the problem.

I can see the reasoning behind this because people commit other crimes so they can get money for drugs. But will the message go out to younger people that taking drugs is fine because it's legal and therefore more people are drawn in.

I would be in favour of decriminalising all drugs. If you accept that alcohol, coffee and tobacco are legitimate substances with which you can ingest or inhale, then you cannot draw an arbitrary line against ingesting other substances.

I always like to see what the people's paper - not the modernisers' or the metropolitan elite's paper - has to say about issues like this

"Three weeks ago the World Health Organisation published a definitive 20-year study on the devastating effects of cannabis on young minds.

Its conclusions were chilling. Cannabis use doubles the risk of schizophrenia in youngsters, seriously impairs intellectual ability, and is a gateway to ‘harder’ drugs. A terrifying one in six teenagers who use it become dependent.

So was the liberal Left – which for decades has peddled the lie that cannabis is an innocent, non-addictive substance – chastened by these irrefutable findings?

Not a chance. Yesterday the Liberal Democrats – the party that wants to criminalise smoking in cars – threw its somewhat puny weight behind a report that backs decriminalising drugs.

Commissioned by Lib Dem minister Norman Baker and using highly contentious statistics from Portugal, where drugs were legalised in 2001, the report said punishing people for possession had no effect on drug usage.

Mr Baker and his leader Nick (Mr Six Per Cent) Clegg – both enthusiastic supporters of decriminalisation – saw this as vindication and took to the airwaves with alacrity.

Their language was depressingly predictable. Anyone who opposed a change in the law was ‘facile and backward-looking’. Those in support were ‘mature’ and based their opinions ‘purely on the evidence’.

And in case the BBC failed to agree with this glib narrative, Mr Clegg’s special adviser sent an email telling them to interview Mr Baker, advising which parts of the report to emphasise and giving the names of two ‘third party voices’ to invite on to their programme.

These ‘independent’ pundits turned out to be from the pro-legalisation lobby groups Transform and Release. Indeed Release was behind a letter recently sent to David Cameron – signed by celebrities including Russell Brand and Sir Richard Branson – demanding decriminalisation.

The Mail does not pretend there is an easy answer to the scourge of drugs, but the ‘evidence’ used by the Lib Dems to justify decriminalisation is simply bogus.

We do know there’s a world of difference between the chattering classes snorting cocaine and smoking spliffs in Hampstead, and the back alleyways of Liverpool where children who start on marijuana and graduate to heroin ruin their lives.

The report fails to mention that drug taking among 15 and 16-year-olds has doubled in Portugal since 2001, or that in Britain total drug use has fallen by more than 25 per cent since 2004.

And besides, would you gamble your children’s future on the say-so of Nick Clegg, Russell Brand and Richard Branson?

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2815164/DAILY-MAIL-COMMENT-Clegg-deadly-gamble-drugs.html

Richard Branson - I am glad the Mail mentioned him - the billionaire Channel 4 News sometimes invites on to advocate decriminalisation.

Claig I got halfway down your essay, wondering what on earth the "peoples paper" is. The blue link at the bottom of your...erm, post... drew my eye. I saw the Daily Mail link. I immediately stopped reading.

"The report fails to mention that drug taking among 15 and 16-year-olds has doubled in Portugal since 2001, or that in Britain total drug use has fallen by more than 25 per cent since 2004."

"And besides, would you gamble your children’s future on the say-so of Nick Clegg, Russell Brand and Richard Branson?"

Sorry had to address this.

Yes I would. Well maybe not Cleggy but actually I think people with views that go against what passes for normal among the political classes are worth hearing, otherwise how can a society make progress? I don't agree with Brand's idiotic views on voting, but when it comes to drug use and abuse he does know what he's talking about.

To so many people drug addiction is just one problem. But it isn't. It affects vulnerable people in so many ways. It's easy to only talk about cannabis and only talk about heroin, because they're both debilitating one is (wrongly) seen as a gateway drug. What we don't talk about are the waves of casual cocaine users or those who 'do a bit of ket' at a party. They're vulnerable too, because they're choosing to take a controlled substance in a not very controlled environment from a terribly controlled source.

People will always find a way to get their rocks off, so let's make it as safe as we can.

'People will always find a way to get their rocks off, so let's make it as safe as we can.'

In the 1950s, people were not using drugs to the same extent they are now and it is because of supply. Now there is a large supply and that needs to be addressed and suppliers need to be stopped. Then people won't be able to use drugs in such large numbers.

Metropolitan Clegg told us that 2000 people a year die of drug abuse in Britain and that we need to find a better way. But we can't make policy for millions based on 2000.

This is from Breitbart about a conference full of Tory moderniserrs

"Other speakers at the event included Jeremy Mayhew from the City of London, who said Conservatives must “reflect the diversity of modern Britain” and another former Cameron advisor, Sam Worth said the Conservatives “had a whiff about them”.

What worries me is what this whiff is?

It's not just deaths though, it's all the millions of people who live with the risk that accompanies drugs every day.

Christ, we legislate for fewer people dying from road traffic accidents because getting in a car carries a risk.

'Christ, we legislate for fewer people dying from road traffic accidents because getting in a car carries a risk.'

But we have speed limits, we don't make it a free-for-all.

No one is suggesting a free for all, you seem to have made that up.

I'm not sure what that means - if decriminalising drugs isn't making them a free for all, what it is doing?