Coke, it's the legal thing

[Gob]

Professor Sir Ian Gilmore said making drugs such as heroin and cocaine legal would “drastically” cut crime and addicts’ health problems.

State-regulated use of drugs would also save money and avert the need to try to stop drug production in countries such as Afghanistan, he said.

Sir Ian has recently stepped down as president of the Royal College of Physicians, and in a valedictory message to colleagues, he called for laws to be “reconsidered with a view to decriminalising illicit drugs use”. He said: “This could drastically reduce crime and improve health.”

Sir Ian said he agreed with the argument put forward by Nicholas Green QC, the chairman of the Bar Council of England and Wales, who said last month that it was “rational” to consider “decriminalising personal drug use”.

Sir Ian also said he was persuaded by a recent article in the British Medical Journal, which argued that the prohibition of drugs had been “counterproductive”, made many public health problems worse, and stimulated organised crime and terrorism.

Sir Ian said that banning drugs had harmed society. “There’s a lot of evidence that the total prohibition of drugs, making them totally illicit and unavailable, has not been successful at reducing not only the health burden, but also the impact on crime,” he said.

“I’m trying to take a fresh look, as many people have done. There is a strong case for a different approach.”

There should be a “regulatory framework around illicit drugs, rather than a blanket prohibition”.

Evidence suggested that state regulation of drug use “doesn’t increase the number of drug users,” he said.

Regulating drug use would mean “helping people with addiction problems, rather than putting them in prison”.

He also suggested that regulating drug use would save money on policing and on international efforts to reduce the cultivation of narcotics. “It’s more cost effective to try to treat people with drug problems than to close down poppy fields in disparate countries.”

Danny Kushlick of Transform, a drug reform campaign group, said Sir Ian’s statement was “a nail in the coffin” of the current drug laws.

Keith Vaz, chairman of the House of Commons home affairs select committee, said the legalisation of drugs “would simply create the mistaken impression that these substances are not harmful, when in fact this is far from the truth”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healt ... octor.html

[Lord Jim]

“There’s a lot of evidence that the total prohibition of drugs, making them totally illicit and unavailable, has not been successful at reducing not only the health burden, but also the impact on crime,”

No shit Sherlock...

There's the understatement of the year....

[dales]

It's cold at the North and South Poles, too.


What a dullard.

[Gob]

Interesting Article;

In this country we are reluctant to ban things and the Rolleston doctrine became known internationally as the "British system". What it meant was that, while some patients were put on a withdrawal programmes in institutions, others were prescribed doses of pure heroin. It was a matter for doctors, not the police.

read the whole text here.

[Andrew D]

“There’s a lot of evidence that the total prohibition of drugs, making them totally illicit and unavailable, has not been successful at reducing not only the health burden, but also the impact on crime,”

No shit Sherlock...

There's the understatement of the year....

It's cold at the North and South Poles, too.


What a dullard.

So why is it that drug prohibition continues? If (at least partial) legalization is so obviously the best way to proceed (which I think it is), then why is it making no headway (except in the case of marijuana, and even the things that have gone on there are, at best baby steps)?

Could it be that organized crime, with all its political influence, is strongly against legalization (gee, I wonder why)? Could it be that law enforcement has had such a field day with forfeitures (as well as more direct corruption; see organized crime)? Could it be that all the people, groups, and institutions with vested interests in the continued criminalization of intoxicating drugs use their power to oppose legalization?

And (politics making strange bedfellows) in California, where a marijuana-legalization ballot measure is coming up in November, people running medical-marijuana operations have been coming out against legalization. "Legalization, yeah, but only for us."

Follow the money ....

[Gob]

So why is it that drug prohibition continues? If (at least partial) legalization is so obviously the best way to proceed (which I think it is), then why is it making no headway (except in the case of marijuana, and even the things that have gone on there are, at best baby steps)?

Political cowardice. No politician has the balls to be labeled as "pro drugs".

[loCAtek]

Because it's not pro-society. but anti-society. Establishing drugs as 'legal' open doors for all kinds of 'legal' abuse?

[Big RR]

Even if it opens doors for other "legal" abuse, how is it "anti-society". I would think making the drugs illegal only encourages those who would profit by the illicit trade to enter it, and makes society much less safe as a consequence. this, IMHO, is the choice that is "wnti-society".

[loCAtek]

Well, in the sense that users of hard drugs, often become non-productive and a drain on their communities.

[Big RR]

So do alcoholics, but we still sell alcohol legally. And as for a drain on communities, the WOD is a much bigger drain than any addicts would be.

[loCAtek]

That's a stereotype, many alcoholics stay productive;

When many people think of an alcoholic, they picture a disheveled, homeless person who has lost everything because of a life spent drowning in alcohol. However, there are countless numbers of people suffering from alcohol addiction who meet the clinical criteria for a medical diagnosis of alcoholism. The face of an alcoholic can be stereotypical, but there are also others with alcohol dependency that function well in society and still have their family, jobs and home. The term used to describe a person with this type of addiction is “functional alcoholic.” [me.]


A person who is classified as a functional alcoholic may rarely miss work or neglect obligations because of drinking, though it does happen sometime, they are usually very good at hiding the extent of the drinking and perform well in life. Typically, a functional alcoholic is a smart person who is successful in many areas of life, to everyone who knows them, they may appear to be doing fine and living a normal life.

To be an alcoholic, doesn't automatically mean to be a drunk.




2) Where I've lived the WOD got the draining drug users out of the community.

[Lord Jim]

So why is it that drug prohibition continues? If (at least partial) legalization is so obviously the best way to proceed (which I think it is), then why is it making no headway (except in the case of marijuana, and even the things that have gone on there are, at best baby steps)?

Here's what I think the main reason is:

Because any active office holding politician, (as opposed to the retired ones, who frequently have an epiphany about this after they are no longer politically vulnerable) Republican or Democrat, who came out in favor of some sort of legalization plan would the next day find himself with an opponent demagoging the issue to the hilt, claiming that "Congressman So an So wants to make it legal to sell crack to elementary school children!"

The only way to stuff the guts into the political class on this, (because I'm sure they must see the logic just as clearly as any one else who looks at the numbers and huge costs of the WOD compared to the niggardly benefits that have been derived...they're just scared of the issue...easier to just keep throwing more money down the rat hole...) is to first lay the predicate in terms of public education, so that you can build majority public support for the policy.

Until that happens, the politicians will not act.

ETA:

Political cowardice. No politician has the balls to be labeled as "pro drugs".
Top

I missed Strop's comment; that is exactly right....

Of course he said it much more succinctly....

But then, you know me....

I've never been the kind of guy to say something in ten words when a couple of hundred would do just as well....

[Big RR]

To be an alcoholic, doesn't automatically mean to be a drunk.

Indeed, but there are many who are and who wind up losing everything. Go to an AA meeting and see what some have lost because of alcohol, and calculate the cost to society.

and yes, there are finctional alcoholics, just as there are functional drug addicts (I know many, my sister it one). Far from casual or recreational users, these people are addicted, and both the functional alcoholics and durg addicts eventually cost society a lot because of their ultimate health problems.

2) Where I've lived the WOD got the draining drug users out of the community.

To where? To become another community's problem; that's hardly a solution. And think of the cost, and the violence needed to counter the drug trade which is profitable ONLY because the drugs are illegal. That's a much bigger drain on communties and their quality of life than a bnch of burnouts living there.

[loCAtek]

AA has many voluntary functional alcoholic doing something before their health becomes a burden on society. I've met a few functional addicts, who won't go to treatment until after they've been arrested a few times. Often the law gives them their wake-up call.

Most law enforcement arrests of drug traffickers make every effort to be non-violent; a friend of mine is a SWAT officer who 'issues warrant for your arrest'.

[dales]

Drugs are a medical problem and NOT a law enforcement problem.

Treatment and not incarceration,I believe would be more conductive and balanced approach to the problem.

The WOD has soaked up millions of $$$$$ that could've been spent on treatment.

[loCAtek]

As I said , drugs users can get treatment now, but they choose not to without law intervention.

[Gob]

As I said , drugs users can get treatment now, but they choose not to without law intervention.

All the drug rehab and treatment here is on a voluntary basis. You do not have to be forced to go, as that is seen as counter productive.

Most people go when they see the need.


Jim; Would it not be fair to say that those on the right of politics are far more likely to want drug prohibition to continue than those on the left?

Why is this, when the right is supposed to be FOR liberty, choice and minimum intervention by the state?

[Andrew D]

Your way of thinking about this, loCAtek, is a big part of the problem. The War on Freedom -- let's call it what it is, not what its proponents want to deceive us into thinking that it is -- is, charitably put, a giant blunder. More accurately put, it is a giant crime.

It is risibly ineffective: People can get better drugs cheaper (in inflation-adjusted dollars) now than they could when the "war" was declared. It is preposterously expensive: About half of the zillions of dollars we spend incarcerating people are spent on incarcerating people for non-violent drug "offenses". It is insanely hypocritical: People blather on about the "dangers" of those drugs which we have chosen to criminalize -- with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail in the other.

Most fundamentally, it is evil: Its core premise is that the government has some just power to tell people -- ordinary, adult, non-insane people -- what they may and may not put into their own bodies. That is not treating people as sovereign individuals; it is treating people as the chattels of the state.

Newsflash: All that "burden on society" crap is just that -- crap. Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the other way around.

If I want to sit in my own house and pump heroin or cocaine or methamphetamine or whatever into my veins or into my lungs or up my nostrils or wherever (which I don't), that is no one's business but my own. (And my loved ones'; but that is because I have chosen to make them integral parts of my life, not because they have some right to impose their will upon me.)

Yes, it is possible that my doing such things will result in costs borne by society (medical treatment, etc.). So what? If I choose to subsist on a diet of double $6 burgers, lard-saturated fries, and hyper-caffeinated sodas, that may well result in costs borne by society. Should we criminalize fatty foods?

We abandoned the great stupidity that was Prohibition (of alcohol), because we realized that the "solution" was far worse than the "problem". Most of us know that the same is true of criminalizing other drugs. (And those who don't yet get it need to wake up.)

But we persist in the War on Freedom, because various powerful interests, for reasons unrelated to "the good of society" (as if the good of society could rationally mean anything other than the good of the individuals for whom society exists), want it that way. Those interests range from the simply monetary (e.g., alcohol companies oppose legalization of marijuana, because they are afraid, quite correctly, that the market for alcoholic beverages would decline) to the overtly tyrannical (e.g., using the "scourge" of drugs to eviscerate search-and-seizure protections acclimates us to ever-increasing invasions of privacy).

That, and only that, is why we criminalize some self-destructive behaviors -- and some behaviors that are not actually self-destructive, so they have to be lied about -- and not others: If a behavior threatens the interests of the powerful, we criminalize it; if a behavior furthers the interests of the powerful, we encourage it. And "the good of society" be damned.

The only moral response to the War on Freedom is to defy it. Everyone incarcerated for a non-violent drug pseudo-crime has an absolute right of escape. Every prosecutor has a duty to refuse to prosecute such pseudo-crimes. Every juror has a duty to acquit anyone charged with any such pseudo-crime. Every judge has a duty to overturn any conviction of such a pseudo-crime. Etc.

The principal purpose of the War on Freedom is the infantilization of the populace. It is good for the powerful that the rest of us accept being treated like sheep. It is long past time for us to insist upon being treated as sovereign individuals.

[loCAtek]

Freedom is based on rights we must all have. Rights do not allow one citizen to infringe on another's peace, happiness or freedom. This is why you are NOT free to blare your favorite music at 1,000 decibels to the neighborhood, that is disturbing the peace. It is a detriment to the community. (Studies have shown that simple audio disturbance can cause significant stress)
The presence of hard core drug users and dealers in your community is stressful, because you never know how or when they will act out erratically while high. People constantly coming and going; leaving trash everywhere. Loud music. Urban squalor. Violence in the middle of the night. Greater instances of spouse/child abuse. Disregard for your property; you and your children's safety. That is not freedom, but anarchy.

You want those kinds of living conditions, move to Mexico.