Mummylonglegs stepped up to the oche, and I left a comment as follows (repeated here for posterity):
Completely agreed. And with drugs, there is a sliding scale, and I would suggest legalisation as follows:
1. Magic mushrooms - available from any greengrocer who can tell a poisonous mushroom from an edible one.
2. Mild cannabis - available from normal tobacconist/off-licence, over-18s only.
3. Ecstasy - available only at chemists, max. two tablets per customer Fridays and Saturdays only, over-18s only.
4. Cocaine - same as ecstasy - max. 1 gram per customer.
5. LSD - same as ecstasy, two tabs per customer but with six monthly renewable certificate from psychiatrist to say you are not nuts.
5. Heroin for injection - available with monthly repeat prescription from doctor at pharmacists.
6. Crack, still illegal, obviously.
And so on, I'm sure I've missed a few, but you just slot them in. All of these to be taxed like booze or fags, to be handed out with tedious leaflets with helpful advice for safe use and an admonishing glare.
Thursday, 2 June 2011
That whole 'legalising drugs' thing
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31 comments:
Completely agree. I take a very occasional peep into police life via Inspector Gadget, but if this is his best effort at thinking out of the box, then forget it.
Can't you see the obvious flaw in this plan? Hmmm.
What's to stop you picking up a bottle of ammonia in Boots with your gram of coke and making the crack yourself?
Disagree. People should be able to do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it. If they do bad things because of it, they should be aware of the consequences, and if that has an adverse effect on society our law enforcers should follow through.
And if they take too much and die, feck em. That was their call...They better have insurance though to cover the funeral
AKH, ta.
SL, if people really want to make crack, then they will do it. As long as they buy their coke and ammonia legally at boots and not from a crack dealer is the main thing.
JQ, I'm just sketching out policy here. We'll see how it beds in once implemented and then maybe relax laws in some areas and tighten them up in others, adjust the tax rates up or down to maximise revenues etc.
We cannot rule out the 0.00001% possibility that the whole country will indeed descend into drug fuelled chaos and confusion within minutes and the whole economy grinds to a halt :-)
If you listen to both the current and previous governments, that 0.00001% is probably more like a 51% probability:)
Apparently all these high financiers and politicans are high on drugs most of the time anyway.
I doubt anyonw would notice the difference. An acid revival could be interesting though.
JQ, clearly the risk isn't that high, as we can see from the experience of other countries who have legalised certain drugs, or never banned them in the first place, or indeed how things were before various substances were banned, so I'll stick with 0.00001% for the time being.
Sl, yes, for the bankers, only being able to buy cocaine two days a week will be a severe restriction. But there again, they'll have no money left to spend on drugs any more either once I'm in charge.
What JQ said.
Except I might do things differently. For drugs that alter your reality, I'd make the drug taker the responsibility of the drugs seller until you come down.
I'm not sure psychiatrists will be very happy with 5. But there may not be an NHS by the time something like this actually comes to fruition.
And all still supplied in parallel via the black market to minors, people who want more and people who want a stronger dose. With huge leakage from the legal to the black market - after all granny can buy her weekly two tabs of E and just sell them on. Not gonna work.
Now, I am not defending the current policy in the slightest, but at the end of the day society has to decide which substances can be allowed to individuals to be consumed in a broadly responsible manner, and which can't.
I really fail to see how legal tolerance of LSD, crack cocaine and heroin can work. Prescriptions for existing heroin addicts is a different issue.
> there may not be an NHS
One can only hope.
> but at the end of the day society has to decide which substances can be allowed to individuals
Clap-trap. The only sensible answer is that it's up to individuals what they take, not other individuals.
Curmudgeon,
And all still supplied in parallel via the black market to minors, people who want more and people who want a stronger dose. With huge leakage from the legal to the black market - after all granny can buy her weekly two tabs of E and just sell them on. Not gonna work.
So where's the multi-billion black market in booze or cigarettes being sold to minors, controlled by gangs with knives? There isn't one.
The thing with drugs is that dealers have little to lose selling to minors, unlike a licensed dealer who would put his license at risk by doing so.
Sure, maybe some grannies will sell their E to kids, but how many already buy booze to sell to kids at the moment?
Mark: I remember the religious types claiming that all-afternoon opening would lead to the workplace collapsing as people would just not work in the afternoon. And for a few weeks, people enjoyed their new found freedom before returning to normal, yet having the option for the odd all day session.
C, AC1 and JT have responded most admirably, I'll just add...
"granny can buy her weekly two tabs of E and just sell them on."
That's not a weekly ration, it's per person and per chemists and per day. If Granny can be bothered going round all the chemists in her town all day Friday and all day Saturday, she might well end up with twenty, but who's she going to sell them to?
"people who want more and people who want a stronger dose." Most don't and won't. Do all smokers smoke eighty a day? Is everybody who drinks a raging alcoholic?
"society has to decide which substances can be allowed to individuals to be consumed in a broadly responsible manner, and which can't." I just did, see list above.
"I really fail to see how legal tolerance of LSD, crack cocaine and heroin can work." We managed perfectly well with legal LSD and heroin right up until the day they were made illegal. And like I said, crack cocaine will not be available legally, you'll have to make your own.
The bit about dealers still supplying has been answered by someone, but this bit remains seriously wrong:
"at the end of the day society has to decide which substances can be allowed to individuals"
No, individuals can and do make that choice regardless of the state of the law. That's always going to happen. What society can do is keep the hell out of the private lives on consenting adults and refrain from causing the horrific effects of prohibition.
These proposed regulations just represent more rules for people to circumvent if they wish. The answer, as with everything else, is to allow consenting adults to act as they wish, prohibit them interfering with others while doing so, and try to restrict the sale of some things, like booze and other drugs, to adults only.
BTW, the couture version of crack, freebase, has been around for decades, pre-dates crack, and never seemed to cause the concern crack did. Having freebased coke myself, a long time ago, I can testify the thing about instant addiction is complete balls.
But you do, I hope, know why coke started being sold as crack? It was purely a response to prohibition (as was the development of skunk-like cannabis). It made it more affordable ($10 rock vs $80 gram coke), and smaller and easier to handle in the climate of illegality. If you're so bothered by crack, why would you want to perpetuate the cause of crack?
MW: "We cannot rule out the 0.00001% possibility that the whole country will indeed descend into drug fuelled chaos and confusion within minutes and the whole economy grinds to a halt :-)"
Well I can say with total honesty that if all drugs which are currently illegal were suddenly made legal, I would not be rushing out to boots to buy them. My brother died of a smack overdose when I was 15 and since then I am rather put off the idea.....
Having said that, I agree 100% with legalisation because it's such a waste of fucking money chasing after druggies when we've got murderers & kiddie fiddlers on the loose. Add to that the majority of studies performed by somebody with an ounce of grey matter all point to decreased use upon legalisation and we're onto a pretty sure fire winner.
PR: "you do, I hope, know why coke started being sold as crack... It made it more affordable ($10 rock vs $80 gram coke)..."
Indeed, I assumed that people knew that. Ergo, if you can buy your regulation 1 gram coke on a Friday for (say) £10, inclusive of tax, then there'll be no demand for crack, and the problem solves itself. Ditto skunk.
SW: "if all drugs which are currently illegal were suddenly made legal, I would not be rushing out to boots to buy them."
Me neither, and I guess the same applies to ninety per cent of the population anyway, the only people who'll now buy them legally are those who currently buy them illegally.
And I'm sorry to hear about your brother, but isn't that the point? Chemically pure heroin in a known dosage is nigh harmless (not to mention that the per capita death rate from legal methadone is considerably higher than the per capita death rate from illegal heroin, plus this will give us a lot of leverage with Afghanistan).
Aren't you rather missing the point here? All these illegal drugs were banned because some puritanical types wanted a bit of power to control other people and these substances are the obvious candidates. To them, it's the banning that counts, not the substances banned, hence the current campaigns to ban alcohol and tobacco and ancient campaigns to ban sex. AC1 and PR have got the right point, it's the principle of control that needs to be fought, not what substances are controlled.
B, am I missing the point? I don't know, I'm not puritanical and don't want people to have power over other people, but it's all a question of degree.
Do people have the 'right' to listen to Rammstein? Yes of course. Do they have the 'right' to listen to it at full blast at three in the morning in densely populated areas? Nope.
Bayard,
To them, it's the banning that counts, not the substances banned, hence the current campaigns to ban alcohol and tobacco and ancient campaigns to ban sex.
The sex thing is a bit more complicated. It was more about parents protecting their kids from unwanted, unsupported pregnancies.
The main reason why drugs aren't legal is that it's a minority hobby (unlike sex), and frankly, too many people are illiberal bastards when it comes to other people.
Codswallop. Besides the absurdity of keeping some drugs illegal, we have a particular lunacy of rationing. Perhaps I could get my two tables of E with my officially approved four tinnies of small beer and teeny bottle of scotch.
I mean, for fuck's sake Mark, were you on drugs when you wrote this?
I find I just get more and more immiserated by constantly facing the fact that people who are clearly intelligent are so fucking incapable of any sense. We had a "Cameron backed" report today that says that it should be illegal to sell black bras to girls under 16, and dangerous pictures of ladies' boobies must be hidden from sight.
What the fuck is the matter with all you people? Which part of "Fuck off and leave everyone else alone" do you not understand?
Really, this is pathetic.
IB, yes, that's the purist view (which may well be the correct one) but I was doing a divide and conquer.
Yer average member of the public is conditioned to believe that all "drugs" are the same, this meaningless and rag tag category includes whatever it is they want it to include. My point was more that most "drugs" are either harmless or no worse than booze and fags, ergo if we legalise (say) cannabis for over-18s, that is quite a different matter to legalising (say) heroin for under-16s.
And then, once we have shown that nothing terrible has happened, we can relax all these rules a bit more as appropriate and in the light of actual evidence.
I must say that I agree with Ian B. The only people who should be responsible for seeing that under-18's or children of any age don't ingest mind-altering substances are their parents. The moment the state starts taking any responsibilities from parents, it might as well take the lot, because there'll always be some parents who don't care whose children can be held up as an excuse for more state intervention.
Bayard,
The only people who should be responsible for seeing that under-18's or children of any age don't ingest mind-altering substances are their parents.
Ideally, yes. But the fact is that most parents are quite happy with the current arrangements, and these arrangements also allow them to give their children the freedom to go off and do things, knowing their children are basically protected.
At the same time, parents can choose to allow their kids a drink by serving them a little at home.
B: "The moment the state starts taking any responsibilities from parents, it might as well take the lot..."
Nope. It is a question of fact and degree.
What about 'education vouchers'? What about social workers who, all in all, do a good job of protecting children from violent parents (fewer than 75 children murdered by parents every year in the UK)?
It takes a village to raise a child, there's only so much that even the most conscientious parent can do - imagine your child has a choice between going on a class trip to
a) a country with no age of consent, drugs and alcohol freely available to minors, with religious sects standing at every street corner, where children are conscripted into rival armies etc, or
b) a 'normal' country
how would you feel about that? (which echoes JT's point).
I still completely fail to see how it can be acceptable to allow substances to be legally sold that would fall foul of both food and drug safety legislation. Or should we allow expectant mothers to take Thalidomide if they, as responsible adults, freely choose to do so?
C, of the things on my list, is there anything which consider particularly dangerous?
The issue is not whether substance x should be legalised or not, but whether substance y, even if known to be highly addictive with an elevated risk of physical and mental harm, should also be legalised. And what if scientists develop substance z, producing even more intense pleasure, but even more risk to health? Should that be legalised without any kind of safety testing?
My argument is that, even though there may be a good case for legalising some currently illegal drugs, you cannot simply give carte blanche to legalising all "drugs" full stop.
"It takes a village to raise a child, there's only so much that even the most conscientious parent can do - imagine your child has a choice between going on a class trip to
a) a country with no age of consent, drugs and alcohol freely available to minors, with religious sects standing at every street corner, where children are conscripted into rival armies etc, or..."
Well, leaving aside the total unlikelihood of this happening, the answer is that any responsible parent would say "no". However, 1) it is still the parent's and not anyone else's choice to say no and, 2) leaving aside the the coercive "children are conscripted into rival armies" bit, that is a fair description of Victorian England, where millions of parents managed to bring up their children in safety.
C, as you will see, I certainly did not give carte blanche, so out of interest, which items on my list would you wish to remain completely illegal?
B, there are lots of things we can learn from Victorians but "caring for children" is not one of them.
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