Tuesday 17 December 2019

"Dick" by name, dick by nature...

From The Evening Standard:

Britain's most senior police officer has described the legalisation of cannabis in Canada and parts of the US as "interesting experiments" that should be watched... She said the debate around the subject was "complex"...

No it's not, it's perfectly simple.

... and believed if the UK was to legalise drugs immediately, it could lead to a variety of health problems.

Nonsense. We know from places where they legalised it that usage does not change massively (up or down), so there is little or no net effect. I, and I assume most people, don't like the stuff and wouldn't be interested even if it were legal.

However, speaking to radio show host Eddie Nestor on Monday, Dame Cressida said: "I think it is worth looking at what is happening in Canada and parts of the United States, albeit we have to recognise culturally that is very different."

Very little is 'happening', that is the beauty of it. As to 'culturally very different', she really is scraping the barrel. A sane person would consider Canada, the USA, Portugal, Netherlands as 'culturally very similar' to the UK.

"My concern is, I’m not a health professional, but you see what is happening with skunk and some of the damage done to people with mental health issues, is absolutely huge."

No you aren't, and no it isn't.

"The organised crime groups, in my view, would come in and cause problems in different markets and start selling different things to people. Let's see though what happens."

Wait, what? "The organised crime gangs would come in"??? They're already in! If you make something illegal, you end up with criminal gangs (Prohibition in the USA). If you legalise something (repeal Prohibition), the opposite happens.

And nobody said we should make the really strong varieties legal, that's no argument against legalising (and of course regulating and taxing) the normal strength stuff. You might as well say that because it's (quite rightly) illegal to drive a car that's not roadworthy, that you should simply ban all cars.

5 comments:

Shiney said...

The 'police' don't want an end to the 'war on drugs' (via legalisation) because they'd then have to do other 'old fashioned coppering' rather than behaving like they're the paramilitary arm of the Home Office.

Same goes for the 'war on terror'.

Physiocrat said...

The government could probably kill of most of the interest in hard drugs by making them available, possibly on prescription, through mainstream pharmacies. Being able to get your heroin fix by popping into your local Boots would kill the bad-boy appeal.

Graeme said...

Legalisation would also give you some control over the strength and purity of what you are buying. Quite a few overdoses are down to people accidentally taking too much purer or less adulterated with baking powder or powdered glass stuff. I'm sure that some of the psychotic effects of the really strong varieties of cannabis - some strains contain 25 times the active agent of normal strains - could also be contained

Mark Wadsworth said...

Sh, do you mean when they dress up like soldiers and do Dawn Raids on [large number] of addresses across [your town]?

Ph, which is observedly true. Until fifty years ago, you could get heroin on prescription and few people took it. Usage didn't become widespread until they stopped prescribing it and made it completely illegal.

G, yes, that is the whole point.

Tim Almond said...

"and nobody said we should make the really strong varieties legal"

The whole reason "skunk" exists is because of the illegal market. I'm quoting the Drugwise site here:-

"Cannabis resin has been adulterated for years with everything from boot polish to ketamine. But skunk buds are easy to identify and difficult to fake."

In other words, because there's no open, legal market with brands that people trust, people go for the option they can trust with their own eyes.