THC4MS

@Lensman wrote:

Prohibition was never enacted in Britain, so that argument is that all our current alcohol problems are due to that is entirely without substance.

I am not saying it’s due to prohibition. I am saying that having lived in several different countries I have noticed a strong correlation between relaxed drinking laws and mature attitudes to drinking. I am convinced the UK drink problems partially stem from our out-dated approach to its regulation.

@Lensman wrote:

Booze is legal, and if anything there is MORE crime related to that than to drugs.

I’d love to see the statistics on that.

@Lensman wrote:

Popularising something will increase the associated problems because hard drugs are highly addictive.

Since when has legalising something been equated with popularising? Walking naked through a swamp with a broom stuck up your jacksie is legal but hardly going to be popular. Often legalising something has the opposite effect…it reduces its popularity.

@Lensman wrote:

People steal for fag money already – just because they can be purchased over the counter does not change how people acquire the funds.

And people get drunk and fight, go home and beat up their wives, plough their cars drunk through innocent pedestrians etc. etc. This doesn’t mean we should ban alcohol, because the majority of people do not do this to get their “fix”. People steal for fag money! Well yeah, but we can’t ban cigarettes because that happens…

And who said anything about purchasing? The really hard drugs could maybe be made available to addicts in conjunction with some form of medical assistance to break the habit. And that is just one of many suggestions.

@Lensman wrote:

Legalising such drugs says society deems it acceptable to become dependent upon them.

No it doesn’t. What it says is that society has a mature attitude to problems inherent with drugs. What it says is that should you get into trouble, society will attempt to help you. What it says is that the consumption of hard drugs is a serious problem which is not solved through prohibition (how many more years do people want to watch the flawed policy fail?), and that society was smart enough to try another approach.

@Lensman wrote:

That’s what drugs do – make you dependent. The same is not true of alcholol – in itself it is not addictive. Most people who consume alcohol do not become addicted; most people to consume hard drugs do. Worse than that, for some drugs like heroin you need ever increasing doses to get the same “hit”.

Alcohol is addictive. Alcoholism is a dependence on alcohol. The amount of alcohol consumed in order to become drunk also increases as our body becomes used to ever increasing amounts. But we saw what happened when alcohol was banned in the States, it didn’t reduce the problems but drove them underground. The same is true of drugs.

@Lensman wrote:

I don’t see how legalising something and, by implication, easing access to it could result in less people trying it, and therefore a reduction in addicts. The opposite would be true.

well one reason is the “cool” factor. People are known to try things simply because they are illegal and/or taboo. I can guarantee now that if heroin became the drug of choice for the over 70’s it’s popularity would fall amongst the under 30’s. And legalising doesn’t have to mean “easing” access to something. To most people addicted to illegal drugs access isn’t even difficult…funding is. I could tell you now where to go to score pretty much anything you want, if you have the cash. Legalisation would remove this black market to a large extent and may even make access harder.

@Lensman wrote:

Can someone explain how a small increase in tax revenue can possibly compensate for allowing more young people to become junkies?

Who said small?Think about the billions spent fighting the unwinnable “war against drugs”. Who said more junkies? My whole argument is that this approach would probably reduce dependence in the long run.

@Lensman wrote:

I’m fairly agnostic on legalising of cannabis, to be honest – it’s a Class C drug that I don’t know too much about, other than it’s addictive qualities are pretty low (much lower than nicotine, I believe).

But legalising Class A drugs – pure and utter madness. And no, I don’t read the Daily Mail.

Class A? Class C? Class bollox. The classification system is almost completely arbitrary, with most experts agreeing it does nothing to in anyway help the situation. The classification of drugs in this way is more often political than scientific and should have nothing to do with a debate about legalisation.

Lensman, I’m not having a go at you personally, and I respect people having different viewpoints, but my thesis is that prohibition doesn’t work. It has never worked. It will never work. Faced with this I can do nothing other than suggest a new approach. An approach which therefore removes the failed prohibition policy is by nature something that advocates some form of legalisation.

Now where’s my Guardian?….

the guy on drugs is winning the argument…..says it all really

@=XDC= wild egg tamer wrote:

i read the daily mail from time to time………whats the problem? 😕

… i’ll help the fucker get over it……make him dig a hole then shoot the fucker! One less problem for society to have to deal with.

Nuff said, lol 😉

I’m not sure I can defend prisoner’s suing of prisons for making them go cold turkey but I will draw a parallel. I once tried to quit smoking [cigs] for a girlfriend and it was painful because I wasn’t doing it out of choice and ultimately I blamed her and went back to smoking. When I finally quit it was because of me. The nature of addiction is such that the only way you can get over it is if you persuade yourself of the need to quit. If what I read about cold turkey is true, it’s a pretty horrific experience. It could be said that essentially these people were tortured even though it was done to help them. There might have been more humane ways to help; I’m not really sure. Giving up smoking may be easy for some but for me it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done [and I spent a year studying martial arts with the Tokyo riot police to give you some perspective] so I can’t begin to imagine the horror of cold turkey from heroin.

The fact that the prison was trying to help these people is a valid argument but it is also an argument that the end justifies the means. Perhaps in this case it does. That’s something all of us have to decide as a society.

The problem with “The Daily Mail Perspective” [for me] is that it’s usually a knee-jerk response that almost never empathises with all the people involved. “Fuck the crims – what empathy do they deserve? What about the victims?”, you might say. The test for me in these situations is always, what if that were a child of mine? [not that I have any yet]. I certainly wouldn’t want my kid to remain addicted to heroin and cold turkey would be an option but one that might come after exhausting other possibilities [not sure if the prison did]. And if my kid had hurt someone to get themself in prison, that would be really, really bad but it wouldn’t remove their right to be treated as a human being.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a liberal apologist for criminals. If you break into my house, I will use violent methods and I will escalate all the way up to fatally violent methods to get you out of my house but that farmer that the Daily Mail supported a few years back, shotgunned a teenager in the back. He crossed a line and deserved some prison time as much as did the kid he killed. He didn’t treat that kid with any humanity.

As for the legalisation of drugs, I’d apply the same child-of-mine test to that too. If I found out that my daughter had turned to prostitution to feed her habit like those girls in Ipswich I would be gutted that we have a society that stigmatises addicts rather than pulls out all the stops to help them get well again. I would be gutted that chosing to sell her body was easier than seeking help and potential imprisonment. Humans experiment – it’s in our nature and sometimes people fuck up but I think we’d have a better society if we tried to help people out rather than criminalise them.

A lot is said [in forums like The Mail] about throwing money at Chavs and criminals having more rights than victims but I’m certain that’s not the case if you look at the problem from a certain perspective. Since globalisation and the loss of Britain’s industrial production we have huge urban zones of poor, white, unskilled unemployed that we belittle as Chavs instead of try to help. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of them are scum but unless you put money into welfare or education they will always be scum and a blight on our society. It strikes me that we can either try to help them and give them more opportunities to get out of their cycle of poverty [which takes money and acceptance that often it will fail], disown and stigmatise them and leave them to fester committing heinous crimes such as wearing Burberry or more extremely rid our society of them by euthanasia.

In that final [admittedly extreme and hypothetical] example, the end justifies the means if it rids society of the people who commit most of the crime. But the question that we all have to ask ourselves is what kind of society do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a society that doesn’t care about some of its members? That’s something we all have to decide.

Anyway to get back to the original point of this thread, the reason that made me post on here was an article I read yesterday about the couple who are being prosecuted for “dealing drugs”. You may suspect the article of left-wing bias due to its source but for me it clearly shows that these people were only trying to relieve the pain of others [and more crucially believed they were doing so within the law]. There is really no public interest served by prosecuting these people. All they were trying to do was help other people. This really does seem to be a travesty of justice.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/drugs/Story/0,,1975104,00.html

Well that’s me done. I’ve climbed off my pedestal and climbed on to my high horse of moral outrage and will now ride off into the sunset with a copy of the Guardian tucked under my woolly, liberal arm… yeehaaaah 🙂

[oh and if I were the judge, I’d accept that those prisoner’s rights had been breached but would rule that they forfeit any right to compensation by breaching their contract with society and ending up in prison]

@=XDC= wild egg tamer wrote:

well i agree with this bit…..

There is really no public interest served by prosecuting these people. All they were trying to do was help other people. This really does seem to be a travesty of justice.

From memory didn’t that martin fella (the farmer) have to put up with continual break ins and even warned the chaps of what he was liable to do ? If that is the case then i can have no sympathy for the guy being shot in the back, its a shame he didn’t manage to take the other fella out too!

😉

The farmer had a contract taken out on him by ‘Romany folk’ (same ones involved in the continued break ins). He’s now living under police protection.

My question about legalising drugs is this:

If much of current crime (including prostitution) is cause by addicts trying to raise money for their habit, how will legalising the drugs stop this? Are most designer drugs made to be addictive, or is that a sideffect of the substance?

Surely if an addictive drug is legalised and people need money to feed their habit, won’t they still go to any lengths to obtain it, regardless of if it’s from some guy in an alley or over the counter at Boots?

Regarding treating criminals as victims; If you’re a victim in the UK you get special treatment. Just look at any cause, political ideology or special interest group; they all WANT to be victims. Victims garner sympathy and aren’t held responsible what’s happened to them. If you can prove that you’re a victim you get a shorter sentence or benefits.

At least if you’re a victim you can blame someone else for your situation. The rest of us have to be held responsible for ourselves AND their actions too.

(Damn….thought this thread was dead….)

Neon’s echoing what I’ve been saying – if people are addicted and need it, they need to fund the habit irrespective of legality. I also liked WET’s first post – says it all really.

It’s not the legality of drugs that makes it the cause of crime, its the simple fact that people are hooked to them in the first place. Making them legal encourages more people to become addicts, not less.

If anything, legalising drugs could mean less state-help for the addicted. People go into drugs programmes all the time funded by the state – the same is not true of booze & fags. Trying to equate alcohol/fags with hard drugs in the legalisation argument is a pointless exercise. It’s like saying that since it is OK for me to kill a rabbit and eat it, I can do the same to my next door neighbour – after all, killing is killing isn’ it?

The argument over it being my daughter turning to hooking to fund a drugs habit doesn’t hold water either. It assumes that all addicts become prostitutes, and that the prostitution is simply to fund the habit. A major factor in turning to the street is that there is not the family support or background to help the girl (or boy I suppose) tackle the real problem of drug addiction. Also, in many cases girls become junkies after becoming hookers. The real-life situation is that the causes of prostitution are way more complex than simply feeding the drug addiction.

Drugs can really really fuck you and your family up. Legalising them is not a solution – particularly one based on the reasoning of “well, let’s give it a go as keeping them illegal has not worked”.

@Lensman wrote:

It’s not the legality of drugs that makes it the cause of crime, its the simple fact that people are hooked to them in the first place. Making them legal encourages more people to become addicts, not less.

That’s why they should give them smack/crack on the NHS. Why would they have to rape, pillage and murder for something when it’s free? In combination with rehabilitation and the drugs being free on the condition they enter rehabilitation, it would inevitably eventually get rid of the problem. It wouldn’t be lagalised in the sense you could buy it in your supermarket, more along the lines of something prescribed.

Opiates were legal in the UK up untill 1966. There was no real drug problem then as it was under control. The junkies would get their scrip from the doctor and go about their business privatley. Making these harder drugs illegal caused them to go underground creating criminal syndicates that couldnt give a shit if you bought cannabis or cocaine off them as long as they had your money. In the mean time, No one can keep track of the epidemic as it’s all happening underground. Billions are spent on fighting a losing battle. Exactly the same as what happened in the US with the alcohol prohibition which made the mafia the power that it is today. People steal, drug problems or not just like those tards that only go out on a weekend looking for a fight they’re just tards. Those addicts that need their fix pay way over the odds because of the law. most people that go on to stronger drugs are introduced to them via the illegal network.
I’ve taken every kind of drug in my lifetime. I stopped doing them (OK OK i still occasionally drink and smoke cigs) over a decade ago. Why? because I wanted to. The world is full of addicts of one form or another. Just look at how many muppets watch east enders every week 😛
The law is flawed. The antiquated cannabis laws which date back to 1937 are just a joke. and here we are..still living in it :
http://www.ephidrina.org/cannabis/taxact.html

want to read up about when the law was changed for narcotics here:
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/bulletin/bulletin_1966-01-01_2_page006.html

@xdc the doc wrote:

Drugs are only expensive because they are illegal! Make em legal and sell em cheap – crime in this country will halve within a week! Sure some chavs will still steal to fund their highs- but its a hell of a lot easier to get 10 quid a week for your habit rather than a hundred quid a day!

Riiiiiight. That makes sense, although the big companies would still have to price their drugs sensibly (I had to buy some anti-malaria pills for £76 and they’re legal 😯 )