LOL, the religious right in America insist that there be a “war on drugs.” Yet when the Taliban had an actual war on drugs in Afghanistan, they were able to almost wipe out Afghan opium production.
Then the good old USA waded in and enlisted the Opium Warlords to fight the Taliban, and now it’s business as usual for Afghan heroin.
War on drugs nil, war on Islam one. All about priorities, eh?
I side with Mark on this - for instance, criminalising drugs makes them more desirable in the eyes of certain impressionable types who wish to appear “cool” and “edgy” (how many smokers on here started in school for example?), but I’m reasonably confident that paedophilia being illegal doesn’t have the same effect!
Drug taking (and I include alcohol and nicotine) appeals to almost everyone, paedophilia is (imo) a rare form of mental illness suffered by tiny numbers of people.
They’re both difficult to eradicate, but for very different reasons, and require quite different approaches to control.
I doubt perception of transgressiveness has much to do with it for most drug use, as most people will not (at lower levels) get caught for it.
That said, while my view is that both drug use of the types currently illegal and prostitution are very damaging for society, criminalising those who are being damaged (addicts and the actual prostitutes) seems like it will never help. My hunch (which would need evidence if it were to be a viable policy) would be that decriminalisation of those while bring more attention on the supply for both and the, generally, men who use prostitutes would have much more of an effect.
There is part of me that wonders if there was a straight choice for drug users of “tell us all about where you got this and no action will be taken, hold back and we won’t” would be desirable. Would addicts cover for their dealers if there were alternative sanctioned supplies as part of a programme to get them clean?
Perhaps ‘rife’ would cover what was going on in Lisbon? I believe rampant is a fair use of the word…
The UK spends £3bn each year fighting drugs. Curiously drug treatment programs have had their funding slashed and drugs remain freely available. Perhaps we should keep imprisoning people and spend more money? The US spends more than $51 billion each year, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. As of 2012, the US had spent $1 trillion on anti-drug efforts.
Clearly if we locked all users up the public would be safe?
But we can’t even keep drugs out of secure facilities so there seems little chance of doing so in free society.
Perhaps spending more on treatment and less on imprisonment may slowly bring change? Perhaps some of the money saved from incarcerating sick people could be spent on also treating pedophiles?
My point wasn’t particularly about driving but more about parity.
It won’t happen mainly for cultural reasons, drinking is manly, doing heroin is for losers.
For reasons I won’t go into, in the early 90s I once spent a week living with a bunch of Iranians in the South of France.
They didn’t drink and were horrified that I was downing a couple of bottles of wine a night, and told me how dreadful it was, while they were spending every evening smoking their opium.
I agree with a lot of what you say but you’re missing my point in much the same way that Mark was. My point was not about the crimes, which I agree are different. It was about the proposition that failure to succeed completely is a justification for giving up trying. Excessive cost is a justification for giving up trying. Doing more harm than good would be a justification for giving up trying. Doing no good at all would be a justification for giving up trying. But only achieving some, rather than complete, success is not a justification for giving up trying.
For the record, even though criminalising drugs might make them more desirable, it’s still only driven the usage rate (people who’ve broken the law on drugs in the last year) up to 8%. So 92% of us haven’t broken this law in the last year. I’d say 92% isn’t a trivial indicator.
Turning to the two legal drugs, the majority of us - 57% - take alcohol. I think a case could be made that most of the differences between weed and booze are ones of degree. They’re small differences. And in my personal opinion most of those differences actually favour weed. All other things being equal I’d probably take weed rather than booze. But in the real world (OK, UK) consumption is the other way round. More people take booze than weed. And not just a few more. Seven times more. HUGELY more. I’m going to suggest that that’s because as well as all the tiddly differences between them there’s just one BLOODY GREAT BIG difference. Booze is legal, so it’s in the shops. Weed isn’t. I reckon the different legal status of these two drugs IS having an effect. Maybe I wish it wasn’t. But pretending that it isn’t just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
VB
On a global scale, tobacco kills 5 million ish and heroin about 100,000. In Portugal, death rates reduced following decriminalisation of heroin…
we can’t even bring ourselves to sell tobacco from licensed premises, any old supermarket will flog you this deadly drug with your weekly shopping.
I take with a pinch of salt statements that think currently illegal drugs are a threat to the very fabric of society.
You’ve quit the fags then?
Which proposition was that? It’s only ever been about which approach leads to the least amount of harm because there are no magic fixes [no pun].
Criminalising users is backward and unhelpful and always will be IMO.
It was this one:
The truth is a small minority - 8% currently - of people are going to use. And I might argue with ‘always’ too since it seems the 8% is falling (it was 10% a decade earlier).
VB
Yeah fuck ’em. It’s only a few people after all.
I get you, but alcohol is deeply ingrained in our entire culture in a way that other drugs are not, so it’s sure to be more acceptable - dope’s brief window of legalisation saw use increase a little, but not at anything like the rate it might if it was viewed on a par with alcohol.
I’m playing devil’s advocate to an extent, because having tried most things except smack, I’m not a lasting fan of any currently illegal drugs - the effects vary from disappointing to massively unpleasant, and the effects I’ve witnessed on others vary from annoying to horrifying - e.g. a friend of Sam’s nearly lost her own life to a husband suffering from paranoid psychotic episodes caused by heavy skunk use and had to “disappear” for her own safety, only to lose her daughter-in-law and one grandchild a decade later when her elder son suffered exactly the same kind of episode for the same reason, and murdered his family.
Still, while the stats speak for themselves, I feel that prohibition causes as many problems as it solves, punishes and stigmatises the wrong people, diverts resources, fosters ignorance and inadvertently glamorises drugs in some people’s eyes.
Of course, this is nuanced, not black and white - evidently criminalisation does work to some extent, and legalisation is indeed not a cure-all - no doubt it’ll shuffle problems around to a significant extent - especially if education and support are not comprehensively implemented, but I do feel it offers hope for improvement, while prohibition offers only stalemate.
Up until ~60 years ago we prosecuted attempted suicides for their self-harm - we stopped because it was both inhuman and counterproductive. Drug addicts, too, mostly harm only themselves - punishing them more seems inhuman and counterproductive too.
Something new and better is clearly needed…
It is now. But once upon a time opium used to be legal in this country. When it was legal it was “as popular as alcohol” Victorian Drug Use. Would it really be a good idea to go from “only a few people” with an opium problem back to where we were i.e. “a fuck of a lot of people” with an opium problem ? How about we concentrate on keeping the number of people with the problem small. I absolutely agree though that they need to be helped to give up the drug. But the best way to do that is probably not to make it available on Amazon and in Greggs.
VB
To all intents and purposes this has already happened. Buying drugs over the internet has become a trivial matter, not quite as trivial as buying a sausage roll from Greggs, but I think you would be surprised by how easy it is. With some bitcoin in your pocket, that’s about all you need.
Your second point: the evidence from decriminalisation of drugs shows negligible increase in their use. But it does show many positive outcomes for users. I’m sure you’d agree the best approach is evidence-led and not what we think or feel might happen.
"The report, ‘A Quiet Revolution: Drug Decriminalisation Across the Globe,’ analyses over 25 jurisdictions around the world that have decriminalised drugs, finding a surge toward this drug policy model in the past 15 years. Among the positive outcomes identified as a result of decriminalisation are:
Furthermore, the report shows that despite critics’ fears that decriminalisation will lead to a surge in drug use this has simply not been borne out in the evidence, with drug laws revealed to have a negligible effect on drug use levels."
Release UK March 2016
Drug treatment and education is not failure.
Portugal for example has not simply said ‘We quit’ they have shifted the emphasis to registering and helping the addict and hindering the importer / dealer. Registering addicts and having facilities to assist them in becoming productive members of society ultimately has better outcomes for the individual and society. The rising death / incarceration / re offending rates perhaps indicate a justification for change?
That’s not legalising the drugs then. That’s decriminalising the use of the drugs. It sounds like that can sometimes improve the situation.
When I was at secondary school there was a bit of weed. Quite a lot of us tried it, as we tried tobacco and alcohol (we were all well under-age, so all of this was technically illegal). A mate of mine bought the weed and sold very small amounts on. He was caught and convicted of dealing. That conviction had all sorts of unpleasant consequences for him, both in the short term and in career-limiting ways downstream. It sure as hell scared a lot of us away from dabbling though. We hear about the few people whose lives are blighted for the worse. We never hear about the lots of people whose behaviour is changed for the better (yes, I agree that in the case of weed vs booze there’s a real debate to be had about what really is ‘better’).
But if Portugal is concentrating on hindering the dealer then presumably a larger fraction of the people like my schoolmate will be slapped pour décourager les autres.
VB
A sensible approach in that case would again be to scare your friend but with no long term consequences if the trail upwards was made clear and if there was no repeat.
Edit: and medicinal use when medically controlled is a completely different thing. If there currently only anecdotal evidence for some properties of cannabinoid products being useful in some cases rather than evidence then the answer is evidence rather than the current “drugs are bad, m’kay” line.
Pineapple, hot green chillies and onion…on pizza.
It’s possible that would have scared him (although TBH he was quite scare-resistant, at least partly because of what looked like a wilful tendency to ignore risk). I suspect that the system was much more interested in scaring the rest of us though. Sending the message that it’s OK to try this once, just as long as you’re not planning to take it up long-term, was not what they were about.
VB
I personally never advocated for complete legalization but rather to treat drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal one. I believe no one should have more than a personal amount and would rather see drugs prescribed / dispensed than sold on the black market.
