No, that's the opposite of what they should be doing...

From The Evening Standard:

BT is facing demands from councils and police to disable the free calls function on its new “smart” telephone boxes amid claims they facilitate drug dealing and anti-social behaviour...

One drug gang is thought to have made £1.28 million worth of sales from a panel in Whitechapel. After the call facility was switched off, there was a “significant decrease in anti-social behaviour” in the streets around the phones, a council spokesman said.

Assuming that catching drug suppliers and their customers is a worthy aim (it isn't, but the law is the law), that's the opposite of what the authorities should be doing. This is an ideal opportunity for a bit of easy data mining and a fishing expedition!

Firstly, don't flag up that you know something which the other side doesn't appear to know that you know.

Sift out which 'phone numbers are rung most often and which of those result in clandestine handover meetings.

Maybe some customers are so dumb as to withdraw cash from nearby cash machines. So you know exactly who they are, with corroborative photos from the banks' CCTV, or maybe clear up a debit card theft.

Follow callers on CCTV or for real - nowadays, it is perfectly normal to see people standing or walking around wearing an ear-piece, staring at and talking to a mobile 'phone. They can use that to see CCTV footage while keeping in contact with base - now you know where they live and/or where they meet.

Clearly, you don't want to nick customers or suppliers a few minutes after they've put in their order from the public 'phone, that would give the game away, so spend a few weeks or months getting plenty of CCTV footage and incriminating photos, compiling your list of 'phone numbers, names, addresses, when the deliveries seem to come in etc.

Finally, you do a dawn raid in random nearby areas at random intervals and present the Court with some nice fat folders full of evidence.

(If you just turn off the 'phones, suppliers and customers will find some other way of getting touch, making the police's job all the trickier.)

Job done.

Until the next generation of drug suppliers steps up to the plate, rinse and repeat until they legalise,  regulate and tax the supply of the stuff.

Double- double--etc bluff

From The Evening Standard:

Some of the UK’s biggest music festivals are planning to let revellers test their illegal drugs before destroying them.

Reading and Leeds Festivals and a number of other live music events will introduce the testing, with the support of local police forces, for the first time this summer...

1. For this to make any sense, we have to assume that people will buy slightly more than they intended to use, secrete most of it and then take a token amount for testing. If they get the thumbs up, they sacrifice that bit and consume the rest.

2. AFAIAA, testing for what's in substances is heinously difficult. If you take some random powder or liquid and test it to see if it contains cocaine or speed or whatever, you can normally get a 'yes' or 'no' answer. But you can only find what you are looking for, you can't tell what else is in it.

3. The list of chemicals in the so-called designer drugs is more or less endless, you'd need a fairly big sample (several grams?) and plenty of time to go through them all, and the user would have to give the tester a fairly accurate description rather than using the drug's street name.

4. Some drugs are often cut with something else to bulk up the volume, some are harmless, some are downright dangerous. the tester can probably test for the common ones, but not all of them.

5. So even if the tester can confirm that the substance actually contains what the user intended to buy, the answer will probably be "it's 60% [what you actually wanted] plus 30% [icing sugar] plus 10% heck knows what".

6. It's usually the "heck knows what" that kills you, meaning that an ethical tester will have to inform most users that the drugs are "probably" unsafe, even though statistically, only about one dose of illegal drugs per several hundred thousand is actually fatal.

7. So in most cases, the user is none the wiser. Even if the tester can identify some chemical or other, how is he to know whether the user will have a bad reaction to it? Clearly, most don't or the number of drugs deaths would be tens of thousands a year, not a few hundred.

8. It's highly unlikely that such market forces will work back to the actual source. If the manufacturer/importer knows that his drugs will be tested this way, he'd concentrate on producing the purest, safest stuff. But the distribution networks are so long and vague, this is unlikely to happen.

9. This is all beating round the bush:

David Raynes, of the National Drug Prevention Alliance, said: "I'm cautious about it because it normalises drug taking behaviour. Every year there will be a new generation of of festival goers who will be influenced. Those [drugs] are illegal because they are unsafe and it will lull people into a false sense of security."

No, you twat. Drugs are unsafe because they are illegal and not the other way round.

"Maria Sharapova distances herself from Nike following 'sweat shop' rumours"

From the BBC:

Maria Sharipova has moved quickly to distance herself her sponsor Nike after rumours surfaced that the company's products are made in factories in Asia where child labour is common.

Ms Sharipova said she was "saddened and surprised" at the company's admission that even adult workers in those factories are paid less than $1 a day, meaning it would take them six months to earn enough to buy a pair of the overrated and overpriced shoes.

Nike said that they had been sub-contracting to sweat shops since 1996, on the advice of their accountants.

She is one of the highest paid female athletes with earnings of over $30m last year from winnings and endorsements, meaning she earns more money than every one of Nike's single sweat shop workers put together.

More Problems from the War on Drugs

From the BBC

A senior paramedic has warned that so-called legal highs are leaving ambulance services baffled when it comes to treating casualties.

Sarah Harrison said the complex make-up of the substances is leaving staff playing "catch-up" in the battle to develop effective treatments.

Legal highs exist because of the war on drugs. A drug is made illegal because of the chemical composition. By slightly changing the chemical composition, it's now legal. But mostly has the same effects. Then the authorities discover that drug, make it illegal, and the producers just modify the drug again.

And one result of that is that there's little knowledge of what's being produced. Which means that paramedics don't have a clue about what to do with particular drugs, and can't keep up, and there's no information because it's all rather secretive. And people suffer and die. Because of the war on drugs.

So, let's imagine a different scenario: we tear down the drug laws that exist. We have licensed retailers and producers. You can sell cannabis, ecstacy, cocaine, with all sorts of controls on what you can sell. We have a body like the MHRA, but for getting off your face. And then with the range of products available, we can train paramedics in how to deal with the effects of certain drugs. "Legal highs" would disappear because there would be no demand for them if you can just buy an ounce of weed in Aldi or Waitrose.

What puzzles me is how they can charge $750 for a drug whose patent has expired.

From the NY Times:

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.

The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars…

Turing’s price increase is not an isolated example. While most of the attention on pharmaceutical prices has been on new drugs for diseases like cancer, hepatitis C and high cholesterol, there is also growing concern about huge price increases on older drugs, some of them generic, that have long been mainstays of treatment.

I accept that the trademark 'Daraprim' is protected, but surely the patent expired decades ago, so surely everybody else can happily manufacture generic versions and sell them for cost-plus?

"Drug deaths in England and Wales reach record levels"

Shock horror from the BBC:

More than 3,300 people died from drug poisoning in 2014 in England and Wales, the highest figure since modern records began in 1993, the Office for National Statistics says...

A Department of Health spokeswoman said: "Although we are seeing fewer people year on year using heroin, in particular young people, any death related to drugs is a tragedy. Our drugs strategy is about helping people get off drugs and stay off them for good, and we will continue to help local authorities give tailored treatment to users."

Hang on one cotton pickin' moment, 3,300 deaths (assuming it to be ballpark accurate and over-reporting and under-reporting net off) is about one per cent of all deaths per year in England and Wales.

So assuming that rather more than one per cent of the population is a fairly regular drug user (the official estimate is 300,000 'opiate and crack cocaine users' plus as many again for other stuff), this means that the chance of a drug user dying is no different to a random person plucked from the population as a whole.

Admittedly, drug users are mainly in the 20 - 40 age bracket, so their chance of dying in any one year is higher than for other 20 - 40 year olds, because the average chance of dying is heavily skewed by old people. But it strikes me that drug users still have a pretty good chance of surviving.

If half a per cent of drug users die each year because of drugs (3,300 out of 640,000, let's say), then the chance of surviving a twenty year drug career is still pretty good i.e. ninety percent (=0.995^20).

"Methadone programme 'is a black hole', says drug misuse professor"

From the BBC:

The methadone programme in Scotland is "out of control", an expert has warned.

Prof Neil McKeganey, from the Centre for Drug Misuse Research, said "it is literally a mathematically defined region of spacetime exhibiting such a strong gravitational pull that no particle or electromagnetic radiation can escape from it, into which people are disappearing".

Prof McKeganey has earned praise from English literature professors and scientists at the CERN large hadron collider in Switzerland for his excellent use of English and deep understanding of astrophysics.

Homie Homies

From the Telegraph

The residential property market is surging, up more than 10 per cent in the last year, as people are priced out of other Los Angeles neighbourhoods. Properties are being snapped up by investors and professional house flippers have started targeting the area. Compton's first home with a price tag of $1 million recently went on the market.

Key to attracting companies and families is Compton's geographical location close to LAX airport, Long Beach port which is the second busiest container port in the US, and near office buildings in downtown Los Angeles.

Mrs Brown said: "In California they're not making any more land. And with the high cost of land, from a business standpoint, being able to move your goods quickly and cheaply makes Compton an attractive place to be."

"And traffic is so horrible here in Los Angeles, and getting worse, that if you want to have a quality of life not on the freeway, you may want to live nearer where you work. I think people are getting to grips with that. I think Compton is a really attractive place for young families."

That's one smart 32-year old mayor. Understands how land values work, and that all that's depressing them in Compton at the moment is the dealers and the violence. So, she's got the gangs together an stopped them fighting which has made it a nicer place to live (and raised land prices).

Give it a few more years and California will probably legalise cannabis, at which point, the dealers will largely disappear and it'll be a pretty pricey place to live.

"Yacht loaded with £40m Michael Caine fleeing London is seized by police"

From The Evening Standard:

A yacht has been seized in the Caribbean loaded with up to £40 million worth of Michael Caine trying to escape the streets of London.

An 81-year old man and his 57-year old wife were arrested on the SY Hygeia Of Halsa after a joint operation involving Scotland Yard, the National Crime Agency and HM Revenue & Customs.

Detectives say they are investigating a London-based land-owning group, with connections to the Caribbean, who are suspected of large-scale avoidance of the Mansion Tax.

The UK-registered vessel was boarded by French Customs officials off Martinique on Monday as it began a transatlantic crossing. Officers recovered up to 80kg of Michael Caine, with a potential on-screen value of between £30 million and £40 million.

Traffic lights and drugs

Oh dear, those pesky facts and real life evidence from other countries getting in the way of blind prejudice again...

Exhibit One

London Assembly Tory transport spokesman Richard Tracey said:

“Every year Londoners waste over 170 million hours sitting in traffic, costing London’s economy £4 billion. Many of these journeys in our city are unavoidable.

"But rather than hurting motorists with ridiculous charges and taxes, we should look at innovative ways to cut congestion and make traffic flow more smoothly. Turning off traffic lights at night, like they do in parts of Europe and North America, is one measure which would boost the economy and help the environment.”

Exhibit Two

There is "no obvious" link between tough laws and levels of illegal drug use, a government report has found.

Liberal Democrat Home Office minister Norman Baker said the report, comparing the UK with other countries, should end "mindless rhetoric" on drugs policy. He accused the Conservatives of "suppressing" the findings for months.

Prime Minister David Cameron said the research did not offer "specific conclusions" and said he did not "believe in" decriminalising drugs.

It strikes me that there are so many well-documented real life experiments in most things from so many different countries, there's little room for airy-fairy debates any more. It's just a question of choosing the ones with the best outcomes.

That goes for speed limits, traffic lights, education, the health, immigration, the tax and welfare systems, legalising/criminalising drugs and prostitution, you name it.

Oooh the irony...

The paper version of the article in The Metro includes a picture of 1D fan "Jessie" burning her concert ticket* in protest at two of the band allowing themselves to be filmed smoking what appears to be a joint.

She's wearing a Rolling Stones sweatshirt.

* The ticket appears to be an e-ticket which she printed off herself, so the physical ticket is worthless, she can easily print another once she's changed her mind.

Astra Zeneca Merger

From the Telegraph

One of the lessons from the banking crisis is that when one of these deals comes along that the boss of a giant firm says must be done, or else we are all doomed beyond doubt, it is well worth saying: "Hold on a minute. We've got some questions you must answer."

Senior capitalists who cannot see this are, once again, doing the work of the resurgent anti-capitalists. The biggest risk to capitalism is posed, unintentionally, by some of its own leaders and their supporters who argue that if a deal can be done then it must always be done, hang the consequences and you must be a communist if you are sceptical about the wisdom of institutional investors or ever consider the public interest.

The problem with Iain Martin's article is that while there were some bad mergers and acquisitions, it wasn't mergers and acquisitions that created the lending crisis. Northern Rock managed to collapse without doing a single merger after demutualistion. And while there were were 16 UK clearing banks in 1960 and 5 in 2010, it's also the case that there were only 5 in the mid 1980s.

And what no-one has been able to explain is what the "public interest" is regarding the Pfizer/Astra Zeneca takeover. What's the worst case? Pfizer move all the jobs to America? So, I get the next cancer or erectile dysfunction drug designed by people who say sidewalk instead of pavement? Sorry, but so fucking what?

BBC or Daily Mash?

Ketamine 'exciting' depression therapy

The illegal party drug ketamine is an "exciting" and "dramatic" new treatment for depression, say doctors who have conducted the first trial in the UK.

Some patients who have faced incurable depression for decades have had symptoms disappear within hours of taking low doses of the drug.

The small trial on 28 people, reported in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, shows the benefits can last months.

Experts said the findings opened up a whole new avenue of research…

Click here to find out.

"Drug demons win battle against Oscar-winning actor after fighting him half of his life"

From The Mirror:

Tenacious Class A drug heroin finally won its battle against Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman after fighting him for more than half of his life.

The century old morphine substitute won its final victory at the weekend, leaving the 46-year-old star dead in his New York apartment. The highly addictive substance had to first overcome his treatment for heroin use and dependency to pills.

Sources close to the illegal opiate said the 'demon drug' had long been struggling to overcome the actor's attempts to stay clean.

But last year it was reported that the popular sedative had managed to pull him back "off the wagon" 23 years after he first quit booze and drugs, having feared that it would fail to kill him.

Colorado Cookie Shops Report Strong Sales

From the BBC

A week after recreational marijuana was allowed for sale in Colarado (sic), cookie stores say they have already begun selling out.

Sales of the cookies, which is available to anyone, have already hit $5 million.

Erin Phillips, owner of 7-11, has seen a "vast demographic" of people visiting the store.

She told BBC Radio 5 live's Up All Night: "The demand has just been huge... some of my competitors have already run out of products. It's amazing."

UPDATE: Newsthump beat us to this one by over a week.

"Nigella Lawson was so off her head on cocaine that she allowed her assistants to spend £300,000 on crap"

From The Daily Mail:

Charles Saatchi accused his former wife Nigella Lawson of being 'so off your heads on drugs' that she allowed their personal assistants to spend whatever they liked, a court heard.

Italian sisters Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo are accused of using company credit cards to spend £300,000 on over-hyped 'works of art' including an unmade bed and papier-maché sculptures of household objects...

"You couldn't give this crap away," fumed the multi-millionaire former advertising executive. "And they've filled our whole attic with this bullshit."

I'd love to have scripted that episode of her cookery show:

Nigella, huskily to camera: "If you've just come back from holiday in Amsterdam or Morrocco with a 'little something extra' in your luggage and you've invited friends round to celebrate, remember that they'll get peckish very quickly...

[Cutaway shot: Nigella holding a small brown-ish lump stuck on the end of a safety pin, just above a candle flame]

"It can be awkward deciding who pops out to the petrol station for crisps or chocolate cookies just when everybody's getting mellow, so why not rustle up your own beforehand?"

Outbreak of common sense...

... in Durham:

Class A drugs should be decriminalised and drug addicts "treated and cared for not criminalised", according to a senior UK police officer.

Writing in the Observer, Chief Constable Mike Barton of Durham Police said prohibition had put billions of pounds into the hands of criminals.

He called for an open debate on the problems caused by drugs.

The Home Office reiterated its stance and said drugs were illegal because they were dangerous.

Two-and-a-half cheers for Uruguay

From the BBC:


If the Senate approves..., as is expected, Uruguay would become the first country in the world to regulate cannabis production, guarantee its quality, set its price and tax the revenues. It would also allow people to grow up to six plants of cannabis in their homes*.

The government says the aim is to stop people going to buy cannabis from drug traffickers and to put an end to a recent wave of violent crime associated with illegal drugs. In a BBC interview last year, President Jose Mujica said: "We are not so much worried about the drugs. What really worries us is drug trafficking."

... According to recent opinion polls, Uruguayans have shown to be more open to decriminalising abortion and legalising same-sex marriage than they are towards this new cannabis bill. At least two-thirds of the population are against the legalisation of marijuana, the latest poll suggests.

* That seems a bit stingy and what is not mentioned in that otherwise cheering article is that people will be restricted to buying 40 grams per month from official government shops, which a) doesn't sound like very much to me, and b) how are they going to police it anyway? The mind boggles.

My first thought is that people who want to smoke more than that without resorting to non-government sources will just ask non-smoking friends and neighbours to buy some for them, which gets us straight back to illegal dealing.

But I suppose they have to take into account that two-thirds of their voters oppose the idea, so they can't go too far too fast.

Mendacity Killed the Khat

From the BBC

The herbal stimulant khat is to be banned by the government, against the advice of its own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. In January the ACMD said khat should remain a legal substance, saying there was "insufficient evidence" it caused health problems.(1)

But Home Secretary Theresa May has decided to ban it, saying the risks posed could have been underestimated.(2)

Khat will be treated as a class C drug, like anabolic steroids and ketamine. The Home Office said the ban was intended to "protect vulnerable members of our communities"(3) and would be brought in at the "earliest possible opportunity".

Khat is already banned in most of Europe and in a number of other countries, including the US and Canada. The UK's decision to follow suit is based on security and international considerations, in particular concerns the UK could be used as a transit route for khat to other European countries.(4)

"Failure to take decisive action and change the UK's legislative position on khat would place the UK at a serious risk of becoming a single, regional hub for the illegal onward trafficking,"(5) Mrs May said in a statement.

But campaigners said they were "disappointed and concerned" at the government's decision to reject the advisory council's advice. "A more proportionate alternative to banning khat and criminalising its use would have been an import ban or making it a supply offence only as applies, for example, to controlled anabolic steroids," said Martin Barnes from charity Drugscope.(6)

1. There's a bit in one of PJ O'Rourke's books where he describes taking it and it sounded like quite a mild buzz.

2. That's an argument for doing more research, and perhaps taking the "we want people to make their own choices" line than Cameron likes to roll out whenever it suits him.

3. "communities". Right, so it's puritan dog-whistling in favour of non-white puritans against the non-white people who like taking khat.

4. If they create a stupid law then that's their problem. Let them deal with it.

5. And this is a bad thing, how? Do the French care that white van men are filling up with booze at Calais, despite much of it being illegal? Of course not. Whole industries are built on idiot neighbours, from Canadian whisky to gambling in Nevada.

6. I'll never understand that argument. If we think it's OK for someone to possess a drug, why is it wrong for someone to sell it to them?

Aaaah, that explains the news today that this years Opium crop in Afghanistan is predicted to be a record breaker ...

Since 2008 they've all been switching to something which slows them down and makes them less aggressive, rather than hypes them up !

Ex-drugs tsar: Financial crisis was caused by too many bankers taking cocaine

Professor David Nutt claims the drug made traders 'overconfident' and led them to take more risks
 
Afghan opium crop to hit record high as farmers return to planting illicit poppies 
 

Afghanistan last year provided about 75 per cent of the global crop — a figure that may spike to 90 per cent this year 

nb : correction emailed by one MW "the Afghans do not produce 90% of "global crop". They provide 90% of poppies used for illegal heroin. The Tasmanians produce as much again for legal official uses." so that Indie sub-head relates to "the illicit crop"