You probably know someone who has a glass of wine or a pint of beer every night, and who has been doing so for many years. Imagine if they had been skinning up instead. There you are, then. Point made.
I am not denying that alcohol does damage. But the doing of that damage is not its only possible recreational use, as is the case with those drugs which are rightly proscribed under the criminal law.
We need a single class of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on. Within a context in which each offence carries a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or of 15 years for life.
Work is resuming in the right circles on an old idea to do a David Nutt and set up our own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. It will be exactly as "politically neutral" as his. Or anyone else's. Inevitably. Watch this space.
The Nutter Generation has done enormous damage under its puppet Governments since 1997, with only a brief interlude under Gordon Brown. In my day at school and university, it was very definitely abnormal to take illegal drugs, thank goodness. It went on, but even so. Whereas now, it is well on the way to being mainstream again. Just as the likes of David Nutt have always wanted.
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All drugs should be legalised for people over the age of 18. My body my choice. The war on drugs is an attack on working class people, especially on non-whites. The war on drugs puts a lucrative trade in the hands of criminals to the detriment of working people & gives the permanent war economy a steady source of work.
ReplyDeleteI know a good number of working taxpayers who use cannabis, ecstacy & cocaine on a regular basis. Shame on anyone who supports persecuting these decent people.
The absence of any war on drugs, since no such thing has ever been fought, for the benefit of the well-off and of their offspring: that is what amounts to persecution of what was once the working class and of ethnic minorities, by condemning their communities to the control of organised crime.
ReplyDeleteNo David. People like getting off their heads & that is their concern. Somone will try to meet this demand. Even doubling the resources spent enforcing prohibition wouldn't work. Legalise the stuff & the syndicates will have to move onto something else. Prohibition keeps the gangs in business.
ReplyDeleteIt is not a matter of spending, but of spending on what.
ReplyDeleteThere is little or no attempt to enforce the drug laws in this country. As with, for example, the non-enforcement of the age of consent from about 13 or 14 upwards, ask yourself why not.
We need to revisit the Radical Liberals, Fabians, and Christian Socailists of old. Both in order to make the case, and in order to make the effort.
"We need to revisit the Radical Liberals, Fabians, and Christian Socailists of old. Both in order to make the case, and in order to make the effort."
ReplyDeleteOr, indeed, to give some intelligent sounding rationalisation to a conclusion you'd already reached on the basis of emotion.
I have?
ReplyDelete