If Drugs Were Legal

BrianH

BrianH

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We have debated the issue on here a couple of times (the first, I think, goes back to the Channel 4 days) and it has long been my view that society's biggest problem with drugs is that they are illegal. Now we have a couple of television programmes in the offing which I shall watch with interest.

Firstly, on BBC2 this coming Wednesday in the If... series we have If...Drugs Were Legal a dramatised documentary followed by a Newsnight Special debate with participants who hold a variety of views on the subject. Then starting on Channel 4 next Sunday, and running for two more Sundays after that, is Cocaine, a documentary based mainly in Colombia and other parts of South America mae by the award winning documentary maker Angus Macqueen. Macqueen freely admits that prior to setting out on the eighteen month journey that he took to make the series he firmly believed in the criminalisation of hard drugs and the policy of governments such as our own and that of the USA to fight against them in every way posible. Now he has changed his mind.

I have made a note of the dates and times.
 
you can see in theory why it would make sense for them to be legalised and the
downgrading of cannabis was the first step but, cannabis in the 60's was a different
strength to what it is now and responsible for much of the mental illness there is today.
I speak from a very personal point of view with a very close relation of only 21 having never worked since leaving school and now a serious paranoid schizophrenic.
 
The damage that drugs do to people has nothing to do with their legalisation. Anyone who wants to obtain illegal drugs today can get them as easily as buying a newspaper. The problem with most western governments is that they take a populist stance to be "hard on drugs" because "drugs cause crime and violence". Quite, but because of the illegality. Prohibition in the USA from 1920 to 1933 added to the problems that it was designed to solve. Without it organised crime (a US politically correct euphemism for the Italian-American mafia) would not have become what it did.

Medically, tobacco is far more life threatening than either cocaine or heroin. Neither of these two drugs of choice is a direct cause of violence, as is alcohol.

It's not too often you would find me agreeing with the monetarist economist Milton Friedman but he was right when he said: "I do not think you can eradicate demand. The lesson we have failed to learn is that prohibition never works. It makes things get worse not better."

In the past fifteen years the USA has spent £150 billion (that's pounds, not dollars) trying to stop its people getting hold of drugs. Every penny appears to have been wasted. I don't know the equivalent figure here as it hasn't been published but it won't be a small amount. Both here and in the USA almost 20% of the prison population is inside for drugs offences. This doesn't count those who were sentenced for crimes which they committed in order to obtain the funds to buy their drugs fron the dealers.

Anyone interested in the debate and learning more about the subject should watch these programmes.
 
Saw a program the other night which mentioned that drugs is the only area were there has been no improvement in 40 years and no change to government policy.
 
Coke and heroin are far less damaging than cannabis and in most cases have no long lasting effects but my point is that one of the most damaging has in effect been legalised, not quite but almost.

Prohibition just puts up the price and gives gangs more power and in some countries, political clout.
 
I suspect that most of the people who want to legalise it don't have kids.

It's hard enough these days to get people to keep the birth rate up, without introducing more disincentives.
 
For everyone legally addicted to nicotine, from which governments world-wide extract trillions of dollars/pounds in taxation, there can be only one stance: legalize the whole lot. I've never wanted to smoke, and I don't care how legal or how cheap the muck is. If you've never wanted to snort, inject, freebase, etc., you ain't gonna do it because the price just came down and the police won't bang you up for possession.

Certain types of people are always interested in doing what they're told they shouldn't do because it's bad for them: base-jumping, bus-roof riding, inhaling fumes, playing chicken on railway lines. It stands to reason that some get killed.

I know loads of people who regularly use cannabis and as much coke as they can afford. They're professional people who have either enjoyed, or enjoy, very highly-paid jobs, take their work responsibly, have good social lives, and just don't make a song-and-dance about their recreational drugs. They don't foist the stuff onto others like people try to get others to drink at parties, and they strangely are very careful drivers, never speeding or doing daft things with their cars, unlike many non drug users who regularly drive at 40mph in towns and past schools, etc., without the slightest concern for killing people.

As someone prone to driving well over speed limits out-of-town, I'd also like to petition for the abandonment of speed limits and cameras. I know it won't work, because fining drivers is a nifty little earner, but it isn't SPEED that kills - it's STUPIDITY. Same with rec drugs - use them responsibly, like booze, and you get what you wanted from them. Use them like a plonker, and expect to get sick, go broke, etc.

As for the thing about being a parent: if your kid knows that drugs aren't taboo, they're far less likely to be fascinated by them. If they're found in possession of them, then their supplier should be prosecuted in the same way as shopkeepers who sell alcohol to under-age users. You can't protect YOURSELF, as a parent, from your kids trying to find out how things work and disobeying you anyway, whether it's smoking, drinking, or bonking by 14, any more than today's adults protected their own parents from their experiments!
 
I doubt if there are many kids - including those who have been brought up to in such a way as not to want drugs - who couldn't tell you exactly where to get hold of them.
 
Certainly agree re nicotine, that and cannabis are lethal.

I saw what appeared to be an old woman in Laos recently who sat and scratched constantly like a mangy dog, she told me that she was allergic to everything and her skin from head to toe was a real mess.
I asked her age which turned out to be 28, she looked at least 60.

She left her plastic bag of belongings and was gone for 10 minutes and returned to carry on scratching but soon her head dropped and she fell forward onto the table.
The injected drug had kicked in and she stopped scratching.
 
This reminds me of the book that I read in the summer about the Beatles - Revolution in the Head' (Ian MacDonald)

The introduction ended as follows:

'The Sixties seem like a golden age to us because, relative to now, they were. At their heart, the countercultural revolt against acquisitive selfishness - and, in particular, the hippies' unfashionable perception that we can change the world only by changing ourselves - looks in retrospect like a last gasp of the Western soul. Now radically disunited, we live dominated by and addicted to gadgets, our raison d'etre and sense of community unfixably broken. While remnants of our once-stable core of religious faith survive, few are very edifying. Till hard drugs are legalised, the old world will retain some moral hold on us; but when they are, as the dictates of vulgar pragmatism predict, the last ties will be cut with our former way of life, far away from us on the other side of the sun-flooded chasm of the sixties - where, courtesy of scientific technology, The Beatles can still be heard singing their buoyant, poignant, hopeful love-advocating songs.'



I just don't see where you go from the legalisation of drugs. There's nowhere TO go.
 
I accept the intellectual rationalistion for legalisation. I prefer however to keep the banned. It is a simple moral statement from society that overrides pragmatism.
 
I am against legal drugs.



First of all it should be done in all the countries of the world and is not a decision only one country can do.

Second
You should name the drugs you legalise and people will continue to use other not allowed for economical reasons and also because part of the pleasure is to do something is not allowed.




The problem should be solved with education and punishing the big sellers.


It is a very difficult problem to resolve.
 
"The problem should be solved with education and punishing the big sellers."
Click to expand...
And for how many more years do we allow that to fail?

I do suggest that, whatever your views on the subject, those who are able to watch the programmes.
 
Erm... what exactly IS he saying, terry? :blink: I wasn't a hippie in the 60s. Like the majority of the population, I went to work and paid the taxes which subsidized the hippie life of grimy leisure - mostly begging in the streets, squattting, dope peddling, and nicking anything that stood still long enough. The Beatles were the cleanest, neatest, tidiest little band around and certainly didn't contribute anywhere near as much to social conscience as Bob Dylan, Buffy St. Marie, Donovan and other leading folk singers did, much as their mythology would have people believe otherwise. They were capitalists, as any respectable, but upwardly ambitious, working-class bunch of lads would've been at the time.

The 60s certainly knocked about and seriously damaged many of the holy cows of white Western society, such as deference, autocracy, the notion that Church and State were always right, that homosexuals were the spawn of Satan, black people were lazy/evil/criminal and would ruin the neighbourhood, and that unmarried mothers were disgusting trollops who deserved locking up, etc., etc., as well as what should be - and thankfully is - a continuing critique of military decisions. (Creedence Clearwater Revival was way better than the Beatles at whacking that one about.)

I don't see the 60s as sun-drenched at all. There was a huge degree of tension between uni students, unions, governments, and authority figures. The French student riots were undeniably vicious, and the massacre of protesting students at Kent State Uni in the US embodied much of what the struggle was about. Brutality upon brutality was visited upon black folk in the USA, just trying to get themselves accepted into a society hugely founded on the blood, sweat, and tears of their slave ancestors. Nah, sun-drenched - my arse!
 
I agree with the legalization of Cannabis, but only for medical purposes. It has been proven to alleviate pain in a variety of medical conditions, relieves side effects of chemotherapy and in a recent study, can restrict the growth of brain tumors.

In terms of side effects, Cannabis has little to none in regulated doses - unlike the opium-based analgesics that are pumped out by pharmaceutical companies. Many med-users have found that cannabis can help them to function, rather than being bed-ridden all day and night.

There are some very rare cases where the use of cannabis has been stated to trigger underlying mental illnesses, but these cases do not warrant prohibition in my opinion. The risks are minimal, but upon medical legalization (should it EVER happen) a full physical and mental evaluation should be performed before prescribing the drug.

Bloody hell it's windy again.

Going back to recreational use of cannabis and other drugs, I'm still unsure. Whilst cutting out the dealers and organised crime would be extremely beneficial to society, it would be impossible and quite stupid to legally distribute highly addictive, damaging substances such as crack cocaine.

Psychedelics, on the other hand, such as fresh Psylocibe Mushrooms should be kept legal, but only for use as part of a Shamanistic group. Pretty hard to moderate that because people are still going to go mushroom picking every Autumn, regardless of whether they're healing themselves or not.

Got an assignment to be handed in on Tuesday... back to work.
 
I have long believed that drugs and other forms of self-harm should be legal, but that free health care for those who put their own lives in danger by electing to take such substances or indulge in such practices should be restricted.

''Call yourself a socialist, Davies?'' :lol:

I have always failed to see what is socialist about the majority bearing the cost of the bohemian excesses of the minority, excesses which, if indulged in by us all, would cripple the NHS overnight. B)

Needless to say, you could legalise all drugs tomorrow and make heroin et al available on free trial at Boots, but I still wouldn't touch narcotics with the proverbial barge pole.
 
yes brian

we have had this discussion on a talking horses forum a few years ago

i think all drugs should be legalised


making drugs (or indeed anything people want) illegal dosnt stop supply it just puts control of supply in the hands of gangsters whom have no social responsibility they are only interested in profit. it has been known for gangsters to mix drugs with dangerous chemicals to reduce costs and increase profit.

if drugs were legalised it would put the criminals out of business as they couldnot compete on price

the price would reduce so its users would be less dependent on crime to pay for them

some of the profits could go to hospitals , drug councellors etc to reduce the burden on the state

by making drugs legal some of the appeal of drugs would also be lost
 
Jon, you'd need to read the book to understand a paragraph from it but here's another paragraph which perhaps puts the first one into a better perspective:

'A transitional period, the sixties witnessed a shift from a society weakly held together by a decaying faith to a rapidly desocialising mass of groups and individuals united by little more than a wish for quick satisfactionfrom a sheltered assumption of consensus, hierarchy, and fixed values to an era of multiplying viewpoints and jealously levelled standards; from a naive world of patient deferral and measurable progress to a greedy simultaneity of sound-bite news and thought-bite politics; from an empty and frustrating moral formality to an underachieving sensationalism. What playwright (and A Hard Days Night scriptwriter) Alun Owen had called the 'divine right of the establishment' was definitively punctured in that decade and, while the establishment itself survived, its grandly complacent delusion of immunity did not. Thirty years later the conservative political culture of the west, democratised from below and harried by a contemptuous media, is riven by factions and rotten with corruption. Yet, ironically, orthodox socialism - the secular faith of humanism - appears equally obsolete in the face of the multifocal chaos of modern selfishness. The truth is that the sixties inaugurated a post-religious age in which neither Jesus nor Marx is interest to a society now functioning mostly below the level of the rational mind in an emotional/physical dimension of personal appetite and private insecurity.


Basically what he is saying is that it was ordinary people who wanted a piece of the action for themselves and the price paid for getting that is a society with nothing holding it together. Everybody blames everybody else for this but in the end we are all to blame. So hard drugs probably will be legalised eventually, but where do we go from there?
 
I will try to watch the programs but have to admit to a pretty closed mind on the subject, in favour of total legalisation. The reduction in crime that would inevitably result is a really strong argument for me.
 
I'm in favour of keeping them illegal.

If anyone wants to put forward any examples of the state of society in countries where their use is legal I'd regard it as evidence in support of a ban.

Any comparison with the legal or moral issues of abortion is invalid.
 
I find the idea of legalizing drugs in the world as utopic as the one of peace in everyplace of the world.

It is a decision that should be adopted in all the countries of the world at the same time and this is absolutly impossible to adopt.



The fact of legalization would not stop some points:
First there would continue exiting illegal ones and most of the people would still use the illegal ones.
Second, corruption would continue and they would continuee mixing it with cheaper products.
Third,for the use of heroine is necessary the use of smal syringes,why rest of people should pay for them to use it.
 
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