One thing I missed off the list was The War On Drugs.
I hate Fat Bitch Smith more by the day. Let's just look at this short sentence:
"While cannabis has always been illegal, reclassifying it to a Class B drug reinforces our message to everyone that it is harmful and should not be taken," she said.
1. Cannabis has only been illegal since 1928.
2. If we assume that cannabis use is A Bad Thing, then empirical evidence from e.g. The Netherlands and other European countries shows that decriminalising can help get usage down slightly. So why not go the whole hog and treat it like tobacco or alcohol - legalise it, tax it, regulate it, restrict sales to minors and educate people about the delights and dangers of smoking cannabis?
3. Indeed, from The Guardian: Paul Corry said: "Gordon Brown should put aside his personal views on cannabis and accept the fact that it does not make sense to reclassify. Use of the drug has gone down since it was downgraded in 2004 and research by Rethink shows that only 3% of users would consider stopping on the grounds of illegality."
4. If it is true (which I doubt) that people are smoking stronger types of cannabis, then the reason thfor this is because "you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb". In other words, if you could buy perfectly ordinary cannabis from the off-licence for a reasonable price, there'd be practically no demand for the stronger stuff, it being a question of quantity vs. strength.
5. Labour politics works by generating a Climate Of Fear. Clearly, they can't tell us that cannabis is deadly, because out of millions of users, it is a direct or indirect cause of an average of about 0.5 deaths a year. So they've come up with this myth that Smoking Cannabis Drives You Mad, for which the evidence is tenuous at best.
6. I am not particularly keen that my kids smoke cannabis, as I don't like the stuff, but if they did, I wouldn't want them to be criminalised for what is IMHO not really a crime at all.
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29 minutes ago
4 comments:
OK, I've come round to your way of thinking - but I'm not happy, mind. I only accept that regulation is a more practical and effective option than criminalization.
If you want to make this argument - and you should, because it is a good one - the point you need to conceed is (5). You are trying to make water run up hill here. Too many people - me included - have seen how cannabis works. It isn't a scare story; the stuff is like a fingernail under a scab. It picks at any tendency to depression and irrationality and turns it in to an a festering ulcer. Some people are not affected, true, but the stuff seems to have the capacity to find those people close to the edge and then push them right over. Families are left to cope with the mess.
Show me how regulation will manage this effect, making it less likely that people will become enmeshed with prostitution or drawn in to activities which cross the threshhold of legality, and I'll listen.
To be honest I don't care if wacky baccy sends people prone to mental health problems over the edge. Just tell all the teenagers the facts, and let them get on with it. It's their lives, and if they want to f**k them up, so be it. Legalise the lot, control the supply and tax it. Let the chips fall where they will. If a load of losers kill themselves in the first few years, so much the better. Probably lead to less public spending on benefits paid by the rest of us. Evolution at its best. Survival of the fittest. We are all responsible for what we put in our bodies, and entitled to chose to trash them if we see fit. Unless you propose making smoking, drinking and Big Macs illegal too, I don't see why people can't take what they like (subject to the libertarian maxim of 'as long as you harm no innocent party' of course!)
WOAR, it is not disputed that there is a correlation between depression and cannabis over-use, but the serious question is, which causes which? We are talking about hundreds of cases out of millions of users.
Cannabis is not so expensive (even while it is illegal) as to drive people into crime - it would be even cheaper if legally available plus massive tax, like tobacco, alcohol. And that massive tax could be earmarked for treating depressives (whatever the correlation) and educating people about its effects.
As to prostitution, a sensible programme of legalisation/regulation/taxation and education would sort that out too.
Sobers, I made exactly the same Big Mac point in my article on ConHome a few months ago.
Oh, the logic!
It seems so irrating that much is being criminalized. After all, whatever people are doing, in the end they're just putting themselves into altered states of mind, and the idea of their neurochemical facillitation should be long used to, in a few countries, THC is accepted for medical purposes.
Now, if cannabis is so dangerous, why don't we criminalize all toxic plants? Their obvious danger to human health doesn't seem to be making them worth ingesting.
And anyway as long as posessing a medically speaking perfectly safe plant like Cannabis, which as opposed to Tobacco, not to mention Alcohol, has at least some legid medical benefits, is suppressed, other methods of altered states of mind will be sought, possibly at the risk of physical health. You might for example start huffing starter fluid because there's ether in it. If it weren't for the awful distate for any kind of hedonistic ecstasy, nobody would bother to discourage people from ingesting psychoactive matter by supplying them only with severely harmful things.
In fact, most of the discouraging headlines you might read about distress, overdose, binge or poisoning exists because of ongoing criminalization thanks to the western anti-hedonistic mentality. Fun must come at a prize, you cannot go take a spliff but must come up with enough money for some BS-laden plasma screen telly.
Attempts of repression don't seek to keep harm away from anyone but simply seek to suppress the peoples' psychoactive habits. If ALL psychoactive compounds were publicly distributed in a hygienic manner the consumers' interest will neither rise nor fall. A choice will have to be made, what substance delivers the most attractive experience and is sustainable for longterm use in terms of tolerance, addictive properties and sideeffects.
As a result, legalizing EVERYTHING shouldn't add any problem to currently socially sanctioned modes of intoxication, because no one has the capacity to ingest just anything out of a significant amount of psychoactive substances, some of which may be novel, yet others well researched and even ancient tradition among "primitive societies". The number of drugs at your disposal would be so vast, you WILL shape an informed opinion before you go ahead and ask for anything in particular at the counter, otherwise your choice would be plain random and you will learn to appreciate or avoid individual substances.
No one can suppress all "drugs". The result is searching unregulated but sadly more reckless kicks such as substances, that are psychoactive, but only secondarily so and might primarily facilitate some really ill fate (picture belladonna). Alternatively, some physical exercise that helps releasing significant amounts neurotransmitters (like dropping yourself out of a fucking airplane or doing yoga, both however being enjoyable in their own I must concede).
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