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Champion
 
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Flannel (2/5/2008)
The Police claim they are spending a disproportionate amount of time policing cannabis. They have two major misconceptions.... firstly that they have no choice about the time devoted to cannabis...
I believe that the time issue arises when small amounts of cannabis are discovered during a search and they then have to spend time filling in paperwork. I have heard of police officers finding a small lump wrapped in foil choosing not to unwrap it, as otherwise they know the person is in possession and would then have to make an arrest. Flannel (2/5/2008)
“that means there may be about 1,500 people who are developing schizophrenia who, without taking cannabis, might not otherwise have had this long sentence of mental illness." There ‘may’ be? Well yes, there may be people who can fly you know…. there ‘may’ be a lot of things we have no evidence for. On and these people who ‘might not otherwise’…. Kind of indicates you don’t have a clue. The reason you don’t have a clue is that you cannot demonstrate a causal link. Last time I looked, no one could demonstrate a causal link between ANYTHING and schizophrenia. What you might come across is a scientist saying that using cannabis increases the probability of someone developing schizophrenia if they are predisposed to it. How do you tell if someone is 'predisposed' to schizophrenia? You can't - you have to wait until someone shows the symptoms and then say, 'Aha, they must have had a predisposition'. What you can do is look at the percentage of people with schizophrenia who used cannabis before developing symptoms, compare that to the percentage of the general population who use cannabis, add the number you first thought of, um, divide by a hundred, er ... Is there a statistician in the house?
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Wag
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John Newton (2/5/2008)
I believe that the time issue arises when small amounts of cannabis are discovered during a search and they then have to spend time filling in paperwork. I have heard of police officers finding a small lump wrapped in foil choosing not to unwrap it, as otherwise they know the person is in possession and would then have to make an arrest. *nods vigorously* Oh that happens. Thats when they excercise that choice they claim not to have. I notice however they never complained about it before. Which is odd because they did EXACTLY the same when the drug was a class higher... and perversely far easier to acquire. Oh and any police officer who says you HAVE to arrest someone for carrying a small amount is a liar. Complete falsehood. They give you a street warning, its not even a caution. They didnt have that option before, they do now.... surely thats easier than a caution or full arrest?
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Heroic Knight
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Andy Rimmer (2/5/2008)Experience of working with adolescents who use, says if you take loads of drugs instead of getting on with growing up andhaving a life you're probably going to fuck yourself up and using drugs to hide from how shitty things are tends to fuck you up even more (but that is just a personal observation based on 25 years of being a youth worker).
Ah, the voice of experiance, reason and common sense..... it'll never catch on you know
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Wag
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It appears most folk here are in agreement on the issue. Sadly on this issue I don't think our voices are going to get heard. Ignorant corrupt authoritarian politicians in a ignorant corrupt authoritarian government. 
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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I do talk a good fight
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I put the "legalise it all to take away the criminal element" argument to my sister, who is very experienced in drugs work & manages whole departments who do that kind of thing in London.
She had a few convincing arguments against that, though -- basically as far as she can see, combining the (even easier than we already have) ready availability of hard drugs with the laddish binge drinking culture would mean adding to a whole load of existing social problems. At the moment, hard drugs are available for anyone who really wants to look for them -- but they're not as easily available as alchohol, not quite. Complete legalisation could mean they are.
Personally I think that the reduction in the rate of burglaries & street robberies caused by taking away the criminal element would make it worthwhile, though as she pointed out, making drugs easily available to genuine addicts (but not the general public) could do the same.
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Champion
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The thing is that you dont do one action in a vaccum. Heroin decriminalisation for instance would involve getting rid of shitty morphine sulphate and putting addicts on Nhs Heroin. Yes, it sounds utterly ridiculous to cure an addict by giving them the thing that they actually want for free. But the way I see it, we'd save money rather than waste it. The Morphine sulphate market for the pharmaceutical industry is worth millions, and its largely ineffective at its job. If we give addicts heroin, but get them to have therapy at the same time - we'd get a lot further for less cost. I may be wrong here, but polyabusing addicts are generally that way due to seriously screwed up mental health issues stemming from their background.
At the same time, you aggressively target the potential market for drugs with better education/therapy.
Cannabis being classified to C didnt really help the cannabis problem. Because it was a half assed and contradictory message.
By contrast the adverts about skunk being brain damaging actually work. If we let people make the choices that they want to, and then treat the self harming choices as a medical rather than criminal issue I think we'd do better with a lot of these problems.
I'd largely agree with your Sis's opinion, but to be honest with regards to cannabis at least - there are three places within a mile of my house I can walk up, pay a stranger a tenner and go away with drugs. I think that the Lad culture already has more than enough access. Its harder to get decent whisky.
But if you really *want* to bug Me and are still trying because I didnt put the damm contact field in properly....Thegamefinisher@yahoo.co.uk
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Wag
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Coops (2/6/2008)
Yes, it sounds utterly ridiculous to cure an addict by giving them the thing that they actually want for free.
One of the things that irritates me about the drug debate and that has systematically held back all attempts to provide clean avenues of drug delivery to prevent endemic criminalization is the overwhelming focus on "curing". As someone who has never knowingly taken a single recreational drug in my life I have never been able to identify any clear difference between alcohol, cannabis, tobacco, ecstasy, viagra and heroin. They all appear to me to be recreational drugs, just some you are legally allowed to take and some you aren't. I can see no other consistent difference.
"What the fuck is government for?" is a very fair question to ask in my opinion. If someone is harming no-one but themselves then why the hell shouldn't they take heroin, ecstasy or cannabis? Of course I would rather people didn't do these drugs, but I respect their rights to make choices for themselves. I want laws that protect drug users from criminal gangs, from criminalization and imprisonment and from the medical effects of impure drugs. It's the job of the government to advise, inform and protect, it's not their job to tell us what we can and cannot do, where those choices don't harm other members of society. Unfortunately every time pilot schemes are tried in which illegal drugs are supplied on prescription they are always cancelled on the basis that although they provide an overwhelming improvement for everyone concerned (drug users, their families and communities) they have a very poor record at getting people off drugs. So they get scrapped. And people go back to stealing to feed their habit. Another win for stupidity, but it happens because people are blinded by the perceived need to reduce drug use at ANY cost.
Everyone accepts that people have a right to take alcohol, tobacco and viagra even if society prefers that they don't take at least one of those drugs. When we start accepting that the same rights apply to illegal drugs as well and stop couching the debate in terms of what responses reduce drug taking we'll be able to actually get somewhere in tackling the damage drugs do.
Cannabis being classified to C didnt really help the cannabis problem. Because it was a half assed and contradictory message.
In what way exactly was it contradictory? In what way did it not help? Everybody spouts this utter bullshit that the message was contradictory and it didn't help, but actually the message was "taking cannabis is your choice and frankly we really don't care that bloody much, it's not worth putting you in prison for". That might not have been what was actually said, but that was the message and I don't see anything contradictory about that at all. It seems sensible, intelligent, appropriate and straightforward.
In what way didn't it help? We might expect that cannabis use would rise because it is now *effectively* virtually legal. I certainly expected that and the brain-donor league certainly lined up to shout that from the roof tops. Because of the tired old fallacy that any policy that doesn't lead to a reduction in drug use must be wrong. Somewhat ironically the policy does appear to have coincided with a reduction in cannabis use .
If that's true then Gordon Brown's new decision to criminilize drug use certainly does send out a contradictory message. It says "we are going to criminilize this, because we apparently don't care how many people take it". Now that's a contradictory message.
I don't care if cannabis use goes up or down. I do care that hundreds of thousands of British people are not currently being criminalized for an activity that fundamentally harms no-one but themselves. That police time is not being wasted harassing people. The policy to declassify cannabis has been a big help, and buying into the brain-donor bullshit that "it hasn't helped" just lets the Daily Mail win the debate before it gets started.
I'd largely agree with your Sis's opinion, but to be honest with regards to cannabis at least - there are three places within a mile of my house I can walk up, pay a stranger a tenner and go away with drugs. I think that the Lad culture already has more than enough access. Its harder to get decent whisky.
I don't agree with Ian's sister at all. Different classes of drugs produce very different impacts on the human body and the social cultures that spring up around them are very different as a direct result. People don't go to raves and dance all night on heroin do they? I'm not aware of problems with thousands of youths on the streets of our towns and cities vomiting, causing damage, getting into fights and trouble with the police at 11:30pm while off their face on ecstasy, even though tens of thousands of people take the drug every weekend. Drugs have very different impacts on the human body and the idea that legalizing them will cause the emergence of some super culture with all the worst elements of all of them, gangsters with guns, Trainspotting drop outs and men behaving badly on E really doesn't seem to stand up to me.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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I do talk a good fight
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It's unlikely that combinations such as ecstasy & lager will make street crime any worse, but combinations such as lager, crack, and skunk certainly can.
Cocaine & booze as a combo makes a person utterly egotistical, paranoid, without thought for the consequences of their actions, and though not invulnerable to pain, certainly indifferent to it. From a self-defence perspective, they're almost impossible to knock out, too -- tougher than a drunk person (brain rotation from a fist to the jaw just doesn't cut it). So they're definitely higher-level muggers (in D&D terms) than just random drunk people or junkies. They also get that speedball-style effect -- combining a stimulant with a depressant means that they get the resilience of booze but don't lose a lot in reaction time.
Yes, cannabis is easily available (and I made the same argument to my sister). You don't even have to KNOW places to buy it from -- you could knock on doors entirely at random, and have a better than even chance that the unknown person inside would be able to sell you drugs than that they'd call the police on you. But harder drugs aren't easily available, yet, outside of certain areas in the bigger cities (areas where most typical binge drinker types don't go), or the existing drugs scene (yes, if you're already smoking large amounts of cannabis, you probably know someone who can put you in touch with someone who can sell you | | | |