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I do talk a good fight
 
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John,
Yeah, this is it -- and right now, it's a fairly rare combination, rare enough that you remark on it. If you could buy cocaine in your local pharmacist, without any kind of license or permit -- or worse, if you could just buy it from the bar -- that kind of scenario would be cropping up every Friday or Saturday night, in every pub and club and city street in the country.
http://www.hyboriantales.com
PD: Ghostdance ("The most irritating curse I've ever encountered" -- NPC played by H.)
Riftworld: Rossar Kuug ("Clearly mad, because he thinks he's a Com-Trow Skirmisher" - Aela)
Hyborian Tales: Crew, cook, dogsbody, general labourer, toilet cleaner ("Dangerously overoptimistic ref" -- Tom Nowell)
Otherwise usually crew ("Quite spry & fit, & willing to wear a big costume & run around a lot" -- various event organisers)
"My other oversized foam weapon is THE LORD" -- Questionable Content
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Champion
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the mixed message i saw with cannabis came from the other angle - they declassified it, rather than decriminalised it. Sort of a "You can do it, but its still illegal, and we will still arrest you but we wont bother to chase you in helicopters about it".
It was a decriminalisation, that left the production and market control in the hands of the criminals while telling the consumers it was (vaguely) permitted.
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)
the mixed message i saw with cannabis came from the other angle - they declassified it, rather than decriminalised it. Sort of a "You can do it, but its still illegal, and we will still arrest you but we wont bother to chase you in helicopters about it".
It was a decriminalisation, that left the production and market control in the hands of the criminals while telling the consumers it was (vaguely) permitted.
Ok. That makes a lot of sense.
So my other question, in what way did it not help? I think it helped a lot...
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Wag
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Ian Sturrock (2/6/2008)
work towards decriminalisation over a long time-period, rather than take the Capitalist Dream approach (legalise it overnight, tax it, let the market regulate itself by the Invisible Hand, etc.).
You categorically cannot allow the free market to regulate drug consumption, that would be a terrible mistake. A key goal of market capitalism is drive up consumption and I don't believe anyone would want to see that. A massive billboard with a picture of a junkie in a Glassgow highrise saying "Welcome to Heroin Country" is not what we need. A free market would mean free promotions of cocaine at youth centres... Lets not go there.
More-over you do need to distinguish between different drugs. Personally I would not like to see even a limited market in the most addictive drugs, but I think cocaine, heroin and tobacco should be available on prescription from your doctor for registered addicts. Other drugs could be sold through licensed outlets, just the way that alcohol sales are controlled now.
All of which needs to be combined with better and more thorough education policies, preferably based on truth, rather than scare tactics. "TAKE ECSTASY AND DIE" is not an effective message for society to communicate to it's members, because thirty seconds after you come into contact with the drug you discover it isn't true. And when that happens you tend to assume that everything you were told by that source of information is similarly flawed. Credibility is important.
We also need much more economic support for programs for people trying to break addiction. That would be trivially easy to fund given the money we'd save not chasing drugs round our streets. Criminalization strategies are horribly expensive and very damaging to all involved, education is much cheaper and more effective at helping people to break drug dependency where they choose it.
Those programs need to be in place before you legalize recreational drugs, you definitely can't do it three years later as an afterthought after usage levels have shot up. Cultural mores are critical in controlling drug use, more important than laws. Most drugs have the potential to do enormous harm to a community if they aren't carefully controlled, look at the damage alcohol does to aboriginal communities. But it's self-control that is needed, not a gun in the hands of the home secretary pointed at our head.
Governments are always banging on and on and on about the many benefits of devolving power from the centre back to the regions and to local people. It's long over-due for the ultimate act of devolution, people must make their own choices about what drugs they consume. Government's role is to ensure that those choices are well informed and supported.
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 think we're mostly in agreement, then. I'd love to see society work towards legalising all or most drugs, but it would need to be part of a carefully considered policy, rather than the kind of haphazard approach most commonly practised by politicians (and armchair politicians).
I wouldn't like to see cocaine, heroin, or even speed much more widely available than they already are, because I've had enough of my friends fuck themselves up on one or more of the above. I don't think those drugs have redeeming qualities, other than perhaps for some limited medical uses.
http://www.hyboriantales.com
PD: Ghostdance ("The most irritating curse I've ever encountered" -- NPC played by H.)
Riftworld: Rossar Kuug ("Clearly mad, because he thinks he's a Com-Trow Skirmisher" - Aela)
Hyborian Tales: Crew, cook, dogsbody, general labourer, toilet cleaner ("Dangerously overoptimistic ref" -- Tom Nowell)
Otherwise usually crew ("Quite spry & fit, & willing to wear a big costume & run around a lot" -- various event organisers)
"My other oversized foam weapon is THE LORD" -- Questionable Content
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Initiate
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Coops (2/6/2008)
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.
Works with heroin, probably. There's a whole crack shaped problem there though- crack simply isn't possible to deal with medically in that way. Because it's an instant, but short lived, high, you'd need to give addicts enough crack to take it whenever they wanted.
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Wag
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Ian Sturrock (2/6/2008)
I wouldn't like to see cocaine, heroin, or even speed much more widely available than they already are, because I've had enough of my friends fuck themselves up on one or more of the above. I don't think those drugs have redeeming qualities, other than perhaps for some limited medical uses.
It's important to bear in mind that alcohol and tobacco do far more damage than every other recreational drug put together. The proportion of damaged individuals as a percentage of the number of users is generally much lower I'll grant you, but if you lived in an Australian or New Zealand aboriginal community I suspect you'd feel exactly that way about alcohol. But alcoholism is a very significant social problem that fucks people up very badly if they become addicted.
If you legalize drugs a proportion of society will use them and kill themselves using them. We accept this with alcohol and tobacco which kills thousands of people a year. It's worth accepting this outcome with other recreational drugs, because the outcomes the current alternative produces are even worse.
I don't want people to take hard drugs, but I do respect their right to choose to do so if they wish. I think they're fucking idiots, I wouldn't touch the stuff, but that's the whole point about respecting people's right to choose. They get to do things you do want them to do and you don't get to stop them.
There is a great bit at the start of Trainspotting where the main character talks about the key redeeming feature of heroin - namely the extraordinary high you get from it. Fundamentally "pleasure" is at the root of why recreational drugs are taken. Everything else is just down to how much or how little damage the drug does. I'm not convinced any recreational drug has any redeeming qualities.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Initiate
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Matt Pennington (2/6/2008)
It's important to bear in mind that alcohol and tobacco do far more damage than every other recreational drug put together. The proportion of damaged individuals as a percentage of the number of users is generally much lower I'll grant you, but if you lived in an Australian or New Zealand aboriginal community I suspect you'd feel exactly that way about alcohol. But alcoholism is a very significant social problem that fucks people up very badly if they become addicted.
I think the Matrix of Harm would be a good starting point for a workable drugs policy- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/03/23/nalcohol123.xml Not that it's likely to be taken up. But it actually looks at the harm individual drugs do, as opposed to being heavily influenced by social factors like the currrent policy.
I don't want people to take hard drugs, but I do respect their right to choose to do so if they wish. I think they're fucking idiots, I wouldn't touch the stuff, but that's the whole point about respecting people's right to choose. They get to do things you do want them to do and you don't get to stop them.
Quite frankly, as a sometimes drug user myself, that's pretty much the best I hope for from most people. People have a perfect right to think drugs are stupid, although I tend to be less dismissive of those who argue that and don't drink. Heavy drinkers thinking that they're somehow not drug abusers amuses me.
Your position sound similar to mine view on the Operation Spanner case (some blokes being both fined and sent to jail for consensual BDSM acts). I'll admit, the idea of people nailing each other's foreskins to tables makes me squick somewhat. But my squickiness is not grounds for something being illegal, and I think the same principle applies to drugs.
There is a great bit at the start of Trainspotting where the main character talks about the key redeeming feature of heroin - namely the extraordinary high you get from it. Fundamentally "pleasure" is at the root of why recreational drugs are taken. Everything else is just down to how much or how little damage the drug does.
Absolutely. I have very little time for the 'expanding my mind' stuff that people sometimes come out with. People take drugs because they like the effect they has, nothing more, nothing less. Obviously, some people now take drugs because they're addicted, but that wasn't why they started. And I'd hazard a guess that the vast majority of drug users in this country aren't actually addicted, with the possible exception of tobacco where most smokers probably are.
I'm not convinced any recreational drug has any redeeming qualities.
Leaving aside the question of medicinal use (because they aren't really recreational any more in that case), how are you defining "redeeming"? Because the high itself could be seen as such, as you touch on above. Equally, there can be a social element to people getting high together. Now you can make a good argument that those factors aren't worth using drugs for. But I think that's still slightly different.
There's also the question of whether drugs can sometimes aid creativity, but that's a debate in itself- there's evidence on both sides.
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