".a 'harm reduction' policy is precisely to stop people hooked on drugs from wrecking their lives."
But people are hooked on drugs because of the supply. Making the supply legal will just increase the supply and end up hooking more people. This will end up ruining more lives over the long term than ending or drastically reducing the supply which leads to people being hooked. The number of people dying per year will decline if you limit the supply, it won't remain at 700 per year.
What they are arguing for is to reduce the 700 dying per year by legalising supply, but the result will be to trap and hook many more people in the net. And of course, the government will earn tax money from this net and the billionaires and pharma will earn money from this net legitimately and more people will become dependent and caught in this net and more people will therefore suffer and have health problems which will lead to shortened and ruined lives.
The alternative they don't mention is not the status quo but to limit the supply by arresting and jailing dealers and increasing police numbers so that fewer people become hooked in the first place.
"Alcohol kills around 40,000 people per year in the UK. If the alcohol pricing policy reduced that by just 2%, that'd be 800 lives saved."
I would like to see their figures to see if it was alcohol that directly caused those deaths and also over what period alcohol actually caused it if it did. We live in a free country (although increasingly the elite are telling us more and more what to do and telling us more and more how to lead our lives without asking us which oc course is leading to teh rise of people saying "they can all go and stuff themselves"). Alcohol has been part of our culture and traditions and way of life for centuries in Britain. We are not in a country whose culture bans alcohol. Our liberties are being restricted by busybodies telling us what to do in our country without asking us (which of course has led to the rise of teh People's Army).
"Proudly anti-intellectual, the People’s Army knows what it is against (banks, bankers, toffs, Brussels, immigration, human rights, political correctness, busybodies, jobsworths and Little Hitlers)"
www.conservativehome.com/highlights/2014/12/the-five-tribes-of-ukip.html
These busybodies pretend that an increase in alcohol prices which will restrict a free market (which those modernising Tories pretend they believe in) from allowing the offer of 2 for 1s so that people can freely choose to save money by budgeting and taking up offers in a free market, will save lives and they have graphs and figures to tell us why. We don't believe them, where is their evidence? Also what these busybodies always do is claim that they are preventing harm but their policy results in harming the miliions who don't die by buying 2 for 1s in order to cut down those that they say do. Their argument is always "if it saves just one person then it is worth it" and that is wrong because it restricts the liberties and rights of millions to save what they claim is 1.
There is a balance in a free society and self-appointed busybodies and charidees and pressure groups have no right to make policy that affects millions without putting it to the people in a referendum. Plus the People's Army believes that one hidden objective of their policy is really to raise more tax and revenue from ordinary people and the elite are not bothered by these policies because they have enough money not to be affected or because they are flipping their homes and enjoying publicly subsidised alcohol in their publicly subsidised House of Commons' bars.
"Neither of these are easy choices to make, but don't you think they deserve more thought than just whatever the knee-jerk reaction of 'The People' is?"
They are spending public money (our taxpayer money) to write their reports and they have a duty to put it to the public before trying to sneak it in and get it through. They invite Brand with his ripped jeans to their Parliamentary Commissions and make a mockery of our democracy (paid for by the taxpayer) and use trendies and celebrities and hyped clowns (whom the BBC sometimes asks to make TV programmes that they promote to argue for a change in public policy) to get their policies through and pretend that that is what the public approve of because the celebrities are popular and well-known. They have to ask the people before they spend our money and make policies that affect us.
"I mean, making a decision on these things involve a lot of reading dull statistics and looking at graphs and stuff. Most of us can't be arsed. That doesn't mean our 'common sense' reaction is right."
Who makes teh final decision and who lobbies them and who benefits from their decisions? Is it the Exchequer, the billionaires and Big Pharma or is the people and the People's Army? Their arguments are nearly always one way only - how good the great and the good are being to us the people, but never what harm they are doing to the people and to their rights, freedoms and liberties.
Put it to the People's Army. Let's see if they agree. It is called democracy.