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?

These modernisers want to ban you from smoking in pubs and cars, fine you for dropping litter and fine you for putting your bin our on teh wrong day or leaving your lid open, and they want to make cocaine and heroin legal. It's a world turned upside down. They say they have lost the drug war. Well is it any wonder, the way they think.

They will probably earn taxation from selling drugs to young people and rich company bosses will probably be awarded concessions and franchises to supply the stuff.

Talking of driving - of course if it was decriminalised/legalised you could have limits in the same way you do alcohol and age limits on who it could be sold to.
The other thing is that at the moment children and young people are being told 'drugs are all bad and dangerous and could kill you' - this is an incredible simplistic and naïve message. Surely it would be better to do as we do with alcohol and educate on safe, responsible use which you can only do once it's no longer illegal to take.
People are always going to get hold of and take drugs. They can be great fun and people enjoy them; the vast majority without problems.
A previous poster drew a parallel with abortion which I think is very accurate.

Back

Yes we got the people who ran into sand, so to speak. However this wasn't positively correlated with level of consumption and some people don't need to take a lot of drugs in order to develop the bio-psycho-social problems associated with them.

I wouldn't run prescription services as profit making. The government makes money out of alcohol but I wouldn't advocate the same for other drugs because it clouds judgement and doesn't put the service user and their families at the heart of the service. The monies made and all savings would be down to the reduced crime rate, less demand on front line services by addicts- the police, the NHS, social services.

I am NOT necessarily in favour of making cannabis legal- just because alcohol is legal is no argument for other substances being made legal. I have nursed some frightening psychosis that is directly caused by this drug. Young men especially, as mad as a fish and totally out of touch with everything around them. It is deeply worrying. The cannabis many of us smoked in the 70's and 80's was a totally different kettle of fish to what is about now- the psychoactive compounds that produce the detachment from reality, delta-8-tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabinol are in greater proportion in the stronger varieties of the plant than they were back in my day. There is more of the hallucinatory effects and less of the pleasantly relaxed, I want a cheese toastie feelings we enjoyed.

The brain also produces THC-like substances called endocannabinoids. Even though this THC is not similar to these naturally occurring endocannabinoids, it can fit into the same receptor lock and interfere with the normal functioning of the lock. The receptors influence emotion, pleasure, the perception of time and sensory perception. memory, thought, concentration and I strongly believe that over the next sixty years we are going to see an epidemic of sub clinical and clinical mental health problems because of this drug and others like Ecstasy which are too 'young' in their abuse history to supply reliable data yet.

I was seeing short to medium problems with volition, cognition and motivation plus medium term dysthymia and anhedonia (an inability to feel pleasure in life) in a lot of users- even those who didn't smoke 'that much'- less than four joints a week. These were people with no previous Hx of mental health problems NOT service users seeking to self medicate.

'Surely it would be better to do as we do with alcohol and educate on safe, responsible use which you can only do once it's no longer illegal to take.'

But many people won't be able to use drugs responsibly because some of them are highly addictive and they will suffer. We can't allow this or even encourage its use because our whole society has a duty of care to its citizens that trumps the freedoms of some people to use these drugs.

Don't place too much stock in RB's comments and views on drug use. They are totally subjective and based upon his own experiences (which isn't so bad except he then uses this to justify his views as to what all others should do) I don't agree with his expressed belief that abstinence based treatment is THE only useful one (most drugs workers tend to hold more person centred, individualistic approaches) and he refuses to acknowledge that methadone programmes can be very helpful for some people.

I disliked the way he pressurised those drug users on his programme to seek help when everybody knows that treatment is only successful when the drug users initiates and commits to it without coercion. I disliked how he talked over and basically tried to intimidate the drugs and alcohol doctor he interviewed. He has raised a lot of money for Focus12 BUT it is possible to do this (Like Davina does) without imposing your own agenda onto this.

Yeah, cos of course the drink responsibly message has the desired effect on young people, doesn't it?

I have teenagers, and the oldest one drinks at parties but doesn't take drugs because he doesn't want a police record to affect his future - many of his friends are the same. Decriminalising them would send out the wrong message, and would open many young people up to a world where they've previously not entered - long may that last. Why should we expose many more young people to this world simply because a minority have chosen that route?

The vast majority of drinkers drink responsibly. There is a small percentage of people who have problems handling alcohol, who become addicts and are then a 'problem' to society.

The vast majority of people who take drugs take them responsibly, do not become addicted, do not steal to fund their habit (don't actually have a habit), hold down jobs, have young children. You probably all know people who take drugs recreationally. You probably think they're perfectly normal, just like you and me (I don't take illegal drugs, and barely touch alcohol either). Your child has probably played at the house of someone who has taken, and may well still take drugs occasionally.

Most people who take recreational drugs don't have a problem with drugs. Just like most people who have a glass of wine don't have a problem with alcohol.

claig
Cannabis was legal in the 1950s : that is why it did not appear in the stats then.

I'm not sure where this obsession with prescriptions and needles and doctors comes from
Heroin and other injectables are a miniscule fraction of drug use in the UK
but they are the bit the medics come into contact with

Cannabis - Colorado style, sold from corner shops, smoked, eaten or cooked
Amphetamines - snorted or in pills
Cocaine - smoked or snorted

no need to further burden the health services with what is going on already, just move the criminals out of the pre existing supply chain

most Cannabis consumed in the UK is produced here

as are most amphetamines
and all of the legal highs
and psychedelics

Some people have died shortly after taking some of these legal highs. I am not in favour of that either.

There is peer pressure and young people go to parties and some feel pressurised to take them with their friends and some have died after doing so. Legal highs did not exist in the 1950s and I don't think they should be allowed now.

There is a brilliant book by Brian Freemantle called The Fix, that chapter by chapter, explores the world of drugs.

The first chapter looks at the creation of the addict market for Heroin and he identifies a London based doctor called Dr Isabella Frankau, who, through naive and indiscriminate prescribing of morphine to addicts, basically created the modern market for drugs that exists today. Up until the late 60's British GPs could Px Heroin (Diamorphine) but they went on to lose the right to prescribe this unless they were specially licensed in 1967.

A few doctors, including Lady Isabella Frankau and John Petro, were responsible for overprescribing and created Britain's first illegal market in pharmaceutical heroin. Several famous jazz musicians and officials at the US embassy in London were among Frankau's patients. Freemantle interviews several of these patients and their story is fascinating, tales of a Doctor basically handing over whatever the person said they needed and they would then sell on the unused part of their scripts.

Basically, these well meaning but over prescribing doctors should have been dealt with by a proper tribunal system but the loss of GPs right to prescribe Heroin under supervision and via regulated drugs clinics led to the UK becoming essentially defenceless at the hands of the mid 80's heroin influx from the Golden Triangle.

A handful of psychiatrists who were not specialists in this area became disproportionally powerful and vocal, influencing policy and in the absence of a coherent government policy developed their own very misguided one- pressurising anybody who tried to advocate other, previously tried and tested approaches from other countries. This led to what I mentioned in my previous posts- a USA influenced moral, Christian approach to the treatment of drug addiction which resulted in the abandonment of the successful pilots (Merseyside was one under Dr John Marks) and the adoption of oral Physeptone) as the gold standard when clinical guidelines were finally developed.

From the 20's to the 60's, the amount of British Heroin addicts stayed remarkably constant whereas in the USA the numbers rocketed upwards under their very draconian criminalised policies.

The effects of Reagan and his crazy drugs policies alongside his totally criminal covering up of HIV and AIDS reverberate still.

The vast majority of young drinkers do not drink responsibly - and given our attitude to alcohol in this country I'm not convinced that adults are much better. You might want to have a look at some figures from Alcohol Concern (in England mainly, just from a quick Google search). 2.6 million children living with adults who are drinking hazardously, for example.

Claig

'Legal Highs' have always existed. The scheduled control of drugs has always worked reactively as opposed to before the fact. Look at the use of Benzedrine, the origins of Ecstasy and every other substance with psychoactive effects. They ALL started off as 'legal highs'...

Legal highs did not exist in the 1950s and I don't think they should be allowed now.
No, they did not, because cannabis, cocaine, LSD, speed and heroin were legal then.
There was no need for legal highs because they had the ones we now mark as illegal

you are incredibly unaware of the history of drugs policy.

This is not the way forward. How will we explain to our children that taking drugs (any drug) is potentially dangerous if they are legal?
Please don't put alcohol at the same level of drugs, they are different.
I really hope this does not happen here, I fear for the future of my kids.

'They ALL started off as 'legal highs'...'

Who created them? Have you read any of those conspiracy theories?

Please don't put alcohol at the same level of drugs, they are different.

Do, please tell me how cannabis is more harmful than tobacco?

How ecstacy is more harmful than alcohol?

What makes you think that magic mushrooms on a Saturday night is worse than a row of tequila slammers?

That a line of speed on a party weekend is worse than lots of double espressos?

Our children will hopefully grow up in a society that sees the 1970's drug laws a a stupid aberration

A lot of the super wealthy elite families of today earned much of their wealth pushing opium to the Chinese via the British East India Company. The drug trade is extremely lucrative and the dealers etc are only at the low end of the trade. Drugs are glamorised in pop videos and I think Scotland has teh highest herion addiction rate in Europe and trendy movies glamorise that too.

And you think a row of tequila slammers is OK? Or lots of double espressos?

None of these are desirable in any way, shape or form - why on earth would you want to add something else which is just as undesirable into the mix?

Interesting article about this in the telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11199849/What-happens-if-you-decriminalise-drugs.html

"Renowned British intellectual Aldous Huxley was one of the most important figures in the early history of LSD. He was a figure of high repute in the world of letters and had become internationally famous through his novels Crome Yellow, Antic Hay and his dystopian novel Brave New World . His experiments with psychedelic drugs (initially mescaline) and his descriptions of them in his writings did much to spread awareness of psychedelic drugs to the general public and arguably helped to glamorize their recreational use , although Huxley himself treated them very seriously."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_diethylamide

Papaver Somniferum is a species not a variety- nobody 'created' it- it evolved unless you believe in God that is. Same with the Coca plant and Cannabis Sativa which got its name from the Hebrew 'Kaneh Bosm' which translates as "smelly plant". People have always chewed on Salix bark and it was mentioned in ancient texts from Assyria, Sumer and Egypt. Many substances were used centuries before their cultivation was formalised and used as basis for mass importation of their active components. No conspiracy theory makes any sense because although the desire to experience other consciousness is not a primary drive, it is a fundamental

Benzedrine was given fighter pilots and other service people to keep them alert. MDMA and LSD were widely exploited by intelligence agencies in various ill and not so fated experiments.

Don't believe the conspiracy theories. There's enough above board murk without inventing it.

No conspiracy theory makes any sense because although the desire to experience other forms of consciousnessness is not a primary drive, it is a fundamental drive for humans (and some animals even!).

How will we explain to our children that taking drugs (any drug) is potentially dangerous if they are legal?

Well I'm assuming it still would be illegal for children. but several people have thought of this and it is something we have to address. Not everything legal is desirable though and generally speaking we ought to be able to teach them the difference. I'm not sure if we can or not.

Please don't put alcohol at the same level of drugs, they are different

Alcohol is addictive. It is physically and psychologically damaging and costs the economy, the NHS and the police a fortune.

People die in large numbers from using it for an extended time or from abruptly consuming too much. People regularly die from traffic accidents and from violence caused by alcohol. Including lots of people who didn't choose to have it, but suffered at the hands of those who did.

So in what sense is it different?

I think Claig has a point though. Let's make drugs illegal and then no one will take them and the problem is solved...