So another member of the body set up to advise the government on drugs has resigned.
Good. Now would be a good time to be shutting down pointless and unnecessary quangos - let's start with this one.
Showing posts with label Drugs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Drugs. Show all posts
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
So much for that idea
As the government prepares to ban the "legal high" mephedrone at least there is some good that has come out of the whole sorry saga.
It puts an end to the fallacy that legalising drugs will make them safe.
It puts an end to the fallacy that legalising drugs will make them safe.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Drug Nutt
The government have sacked their chief advisor on drugs after he went beyond his remit and started trying to rail road the government into accepting his policies by promoting his views on television.
And now he's been sacked he is doing the rounds on television playing the victim.
Who cares? Well apart from the BBC and the rest of the drug soaked media, very few people. This is the lead news on BBC television this morning - as if any of us care one bit if the government's advisor on drugs has been sacked. It's not important - though if you watch the BBC you could be forgiven for thinking it is.
Professor Nutt is claiming that some of his colleagues may quit in sympathy. Good! I think they should all be sacked. We don't need them, they don't serve any purpose and if they believe that they have the right to set government policy they should stand for election.
And now he's been sacked he is doing the rounds on television playing the victim.
Who cares? Well apart from the BBC and the rest of the drug soaked media, very few people. This is the lead news on BBC television this morning - as if any of us care one bit if the government's advisor on drugs has been sacked. It's not important - though if you watch the BBC you could be forgiven for thinking it is.
Professor Nutt is claiming that some of his colleagues may quit in sympathy. Good! I think they should all be sacked. We don't need them, they don't serve any purpose and if they believe that they have the right to set government policy they should stand for election.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
State sponsored deceit
According to The Telegraph, the government's (currently the biggest advertiser on television) anti-smoking ads are to be screened only after 7:30PM.
More than 60 people complained that the Government's "Scared" campaign on TV and radio would cause children stress or worry by suggesting their parents could die imminently if they smoked.
I've seen the ads and thought they were particularly daft - not least because they showed children of around 11-13 saying they weren't scare of this and that, but were scared of their beloved parent dying from smoking - then cut to the parent involved who looks to be around 30. Yep, lad - your dad's going to die .... in about forty or fifty years time.
Alternatively he could quit smoking and extend his life by ten years to become a dribbling, incontinent wreck shunted into an old folks home that you maybe see twice a year when you can be bothered to take a break from your busy life to travel the hundred miles to visit him from the town you moved away to when you were thirty yourself.
The Department of Health defended the advert thus.
Research also showed that children had a "real emotional fear" of their parents' smoking and that many smokers failed to realise the emotional and mental consequences their habit might have on their loved ones, the Department of Health said.
Yeah - they have a "real emotional fear" thanks to this sort of advertising and the general anti-smoking message that goes out from the government and various organisations - but that doesn't mean the fear is justified. Both my parents smoked - my mum still does - and I never had a "real emotional fear" that my parents would be killed by it. That fear comes from this sort of advertising which - if it were for anything else - would be deemed misleading and inaccurate.
My dad died in his mid-seventies from something completely unrelated to his 40 a day 60 year habit (even though the doctors were keen to attribute it to smoking - it was only because of another incident on the ward forced the hospital to perform an autopsy that the real cause of death was discovered). My mum quit smoking for two years on the advice of the doctor, piled on two stone in weight and became lethargic and inactive. Back to ten a day she is now a stone lighter and thinks nothing about walking the couple of miles to my house and back - she's nearly 80.
I've known hundreds - if not thousands - of smokers over the years and none have died particularly young as a result of smoking. All the people I know that did die young died as a result of something else - mostly car and motorcycle accidents, a few from AIDS (all gay, all dead before they were 50), two from cancer (not related to smoking) and a dozen or so from using drugs.
If the government and their associated agencies put as much effort into anti-drugs advertising as they do anti-smoking then I doubt we'd have half the problem we do have with drugs. Instead they waffle on about "harm-reduction" and getting the "facts" across. Of course, by the time the kids start to take any notice of this they are a couple of years older than those targeted by the anti-smoking ads, are starting to rationalise things, noticed that their parents aren't dead and come to the conclusion that the government are a bunch of lying hypocrites.
All of this is by the by as these adverts cross a boundary that nobody should allow in as much as they are actually designed to flagrantly undermine parental authority and replace it with the authority of the state. That alone is cause to have these sort of "pester power" advertisements taken off the air for good.
More than 60 people complained that the Government's "Scared" campaign on TV and radio would cause children stress or worry by suggesting their parents could die imminently if they smoked.
I've seen the ads and thought they were particularly daft - not least because they showed children of around 11-13 saying they weren't scare of this and that, but were scared of their beloved parent dying from smoking - then cut to the parent involved who looks to be around 30. Yep, lad - your dad's going to die .... in about forty or fifty years time.
Alternatively he could quit smoking and extend his life by ten years to become a dribbling, incontinent wreck shunted into an old folks home that you maybe see twice a year when you can be bothered to take a break from your busy life to travel the hundred miles to visit him from the town you moved away to when you were thirty yourself.
The Department of Health defended the advert thus.
Research also showed that children had a "real emotional fear" of their parents' smoking and that many smokers failed to realise the emotional and mental consequences their habit might have on their loved ones, the Department of Health said.
Yeah - they have a "real emotional fear" thanks to this sort of advertising and the general anti-smoking message that goes out from the government and various organisations - but that doesn't mean the fear is justified. Both my parents smoked - my mum still does - and I never had a "real emotional fear" that my parents would be killed by it. That fear comes from this sort of advertising which - if it were for anything else - would be deemed misleading and inaccurate.
My dad died in his mid-seventies from something completely unrelated to his 40 a day 60 year habit (even though the doctors were keen to attribute it to smoking - it was only because of another incident on the ward forced the hospital to perform an autopsy that the real cause of death was discovered). My mum quit smoking for two years on the advice of the doctor, piled on two stone in weight and became lethargic and inactive. Back to ten a day she is now a stone lighter and thinks nothing about walking the couple of miles to my house and back - she's nearly 80.
I've known hundreds - if not thousands - of smokers over the years and none have died particularly young as a result of smoking. All the people I know that did die young died as a result of something else - mostly car and motorcycle accidents, a few from AIDS (all gay, all dead before they were 50), two from cancer (not related to smoking) and a dozen or so from using drugs.
If the government and their associated agencies put as much effort into anti-drugs advertising as they do anti-smoking then I doubt we'd have half the problem we do have with drugs. Instead they waffle on about "harm-reduction" and getting the "facts" across. Of course, by the time the kids start to take any notice of this they are a couple of years older than those targeted by the anti-smoking ads, are starting to rationalise things, noticed that their parents aren't dead and come to the conclusion that the government are a bunch of lying hypocrites.
All of this is by the by as these adverts cross a boundary that nobody should allow in as much as they are actually designed to flagrantly undermine parental authority and replace it with the authority of the state. That alone is cause to have these sort of "pester power" advertisements taken off the air for good.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Cuckoo to you
On the Times Online again, I came across this woeful piece by Roger Boyes.
The British have always been beastly about the Swiss. Oscar Wilde thought the Alpine republic was inhabited solely by theologians and waiters; Sydney Smith argued that it was an inferior version of Scotland. The consensus seems to be that the Swiss did not deserve their extravagantly beautiful landscape. Ethnocentric claptrap, of course. We just resent that you can prosper by avoiding wars; wimps win.
Actually, it's been widely acknowledged that you can prosper by avoiding wars. Many Canadians got rich during the US Civil War by buying stuff from one side and selling it to the other and it is well known that Swiss banks did very nicely out of Nazi Germany thank you very much. Unfortunately, that did little to help the Jews. Wimps don't win, but they can get very wealthy by avoiding moral decisions.
Anyway, the purpose of Boyes article is to promote the legalisation of drug use.
Heidi can now collect her heroin on prescription, collect her needle from an injection parlour and take a warm shower after shooting up. And a good thing too. Although I admit only to an addiction to Toblerone, it is clear the Swiss do more than cuckoo clocks. They do extraordinary social experiments, putting into place ambitious legislation from which we have been shrinking for decades.
Well good for Heidi. Does that actually solve the problem? Do Heidi's parents feel better now that their once beautiful and now drug ravaged daughter is able to shoot up for free? Will it stop Heidi getting together with her mates to poison themselves in some filthy drug den? Of course not. Boyes uses another ages old and equally discredited argument to promote his own cause.
“Around 600,000 Swiss citizens demonstrate that you can go to work, live a decent life and pay taxes and still consume cannabis,” said Beat Aegler, a businessman who has been lobbying for a “yes” vote.
Yeah, yeah - and Operation Ore demonstrates that thousands of British subjects can go to work, live a "decent" life, pay taxes and still consume child pornography - should we legalise that too?
I often find it strange that people who support drug use frequently refer to how other nations deal with the issue - as long as that nation doesn't actually deal with the issue. Their favourite example used to be Holland - until it was revealed that Holland has suffered an explosion in organised crime that can be specifically linked to their relaxation of the drug laws. Not only that, but the relaxation never actually solved the problem anyway - it just allowed people to do it openly and for more people to be swallowed up by it.
They never use Singapore as an example, do they? Singapore has a tiny drug problem in comparison to western nations. Ever wondered why? Could it be that, rather than adopt "social experiments" they chose to use severe punitive measures on users as much as suppliers. As I keep trying to tell people, the drug war will be won not by attacking supply but by curtailing demand. If no one wants to buy the crap, no one will supply it.
If we must look at Switzerland then perhaps we could look at some of the other "social experiments" they use. How they handle immigration for example? Or gun laws? They have the highest per capita level of gun ownership in the world - but very little gun crime and bugger all burglary (I wonder why).
Boyes arguments have more holes in them than Swiss cheese. More cuckoo than a million Swiss clocks.
The British have always been beastly about the Swiss. Oscar Wilde thought the Alpine republic was inhabited solely by theologians and waiters; Sydney Smith argued that it was an inferior version of Scotland. The consensus seems to be that the Swiss did not deserve their extravagantly beautiful landscape. Ethnocentric claptrap, of course. We just resent that you can prosper by avoiding wars; wimps win.
Actually, it's been widely acknowledged that you can prosper by avoiding wars. Many Canadians got rich during the US Civil War by buying stuff from one side and selling it to the other and it is well known that Swiss banks did very nicely out of Nazi Germany thank you very much. Unfortunately, that did little to help the Jews. Wimps don't win, but they can get very wealthy by avoiding moral decisions.
Anyway, the purpose of Boyes article is to promote the legalisation of drug use.
Heidi can now collect her heroin on prescription, collect her needle from an injection parlour and take a warm shower after shooting up. And a good thing too. Although I admit only to an addiction to Toblerone, it is clear the Swiss do more than cuckoo clocks. They do extraordinary social experiments, putting into place ambitious legislation from which we have been shrinking for decades.
Well good for Heidi. Does that actually solve the problem? Do Heidi's parents feel better now that their once beautiful and now drug ravaged daughter is able to shoot up for free? Will it stop Heidi getting together with her mates to poison themselves in some filthy drug den? Of course not. Boyes uses another ages old and equally discredited argument to promote his own cause.
“Around 600,000 Swiss citizens demonstrate that you can go to work, live a decent life and pay taxes and still consume cannabis,” said Beat Aegler, a businessman who has been lobbying for a “yes” vote.
Yeah, yeah - and Operation Ore demonstrates that thousands of British subjects can go to work, live a "decent" life, pay taxes and still consume child pornography - should we legalise that too?
I often find it strange that people who support drug use frequently refer to how other nations deal with the issue - as long as that nation doesn't actually deal with the issue. Their favourite example used to be Holland - until it was revealed that Holland has suffered an explosion in organised crime that can be specifically linked to their relaxation of the drug laws. Not only that, but the relaxation never actually solved the problem anyway - it just allowed people to do it openly and for more people to be swallowed up by it.
They never use Singapore as an example, do they? Singapore has a tiny drug problem in comparison to western nations. Ever wondered why? Could it be that, rather than adopt "social experiments" they chose to use severe punitive measures on users as much as suppliers. As I keep trying to tell people, the drug war will be won not by attacking supply but by curtailing demand. If no one wants to buy the crap, no one will supply it.
If we must look at Switzerland then perhaps we could look at some of the other "social experiments" they use. How they handle immigration for example? Or gun laws? They have the highest per capita level of gun ownership in the world - but very little gun crime and bugger all burglary (I wonder why).
Boyes arguments have more holes in them than Swiss cheese. More cuckoo than a million Swiss clocks.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Judges who can't see the wood for the trees
A judge was shocked to find that a teenage rapist had been hooked on cannabis since ten and was snorting cocaine at 14, according to the Mail.
Sentencing the teenager at Leeds Crown Court, the judge said: 'When I see that from the age of 10 you have been taking cannabis on a regular basis and even at 14 you were taking cocaine and ecstasy, any right-thinking person is going to think there has got to be something wrong in our society.
Jordan Webster, 15, who has a shocking catalogue of 63 previous convictions and 38 court appearances, was just 14 when he attacked the woman while holding a knife to her throat.
His actions prompted a judge to ask: 'What on earth are we coming to in this world when a boy of 14 can not only acquire that record but then go on to do what you did that day?'
The clue is in the sentence, m'lud.
The judge said Webster, of Normanton, must serve at least five years before he is eligible for parole.
Another junkie rapist on the loose by the time he is twenty and the judge wonders what went wrong?
Sentencing the teenager at Leeds Crown Court, the judge said: 'When I see that from the age of 10 you have been taking cannabis on a regular basis and even at 14 you were taking cocaine and ecstasy, any right-thinking person is going to think there has got to be something wrong in our society.
Jordan Webster, 15, who has a shocking catalogue of 63 previous convictions and 38 court appearances, was just 14 when he attacked the woman while holding a knife to her throat.
His actions prompted a judge to ask: 'What on earth are we coming to in this world when a boy of 14 can not only acquire that record but then go on to do what you did that day?'
The clue is in the sentence, m'lud.
The judge said Webster, of Normanton, must serve at least five years before he is eligible for parole.
Another junkie rapist on the loose by the time he is twenty and the judge wonders what went wrong?
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
If you want to win the war against illegal drugs - take a tip from the law of markets
At last, someone has seen sense on the fight against drug use. Over on The Times of all places, Ross Clark is critical of the way drug users are seen as victims rather than offenders.
With stolen goods, illegal weapons and child pornography, the law is clear: the user is as guilty as the supplier. The police didn't let Gary Glitter off with a little rap on the knuckles and the rest of us didn't shake our heads and say: “Poor Gary, how sad that he has fallen victim to these evil porn dealers.”
Quite right. Drug users are not victims - they are criminals - but for some reason their crimes are often ignored by the authorities or treated as trivial. What we forget, though, is that illegal drugs are a "product" - and just like any other product, they are subject to the laws of supply and demand.
"Supply and demand" is actually slightly misleading as it implies that supply creates demand, but it is the other way around. Demand creates a market and markets need supply. The supply of illegal drugs reacts to demand for illegal drugs - not vice versa - but the fight against illegal drugs focuses entirely on the supplier. Huge amounts of money are expended tackling cocaine manufacturers in Colombia or opium poppy growers in Afghanistan - but all of that is wasted money if the people who create the market for those products are repeatedly let off. The users.
It is time governments woke up to this simple fact. If you kill off the demand for drugs the supply will stop.
That's it. It is that simple.
As long as the fight against drugs remains targeted at the supply side it will never be won. As soon as the fight is switched to the demand side we will be on our way to a largely drug free society. That means a zero tolerance approach to ALL users.
They are not victims - they are criminals. They are not being criminalised - they criminalise themselves. Anyone caught in possession or found under the influence of illegal drugs should face a spell in prison. Fines don't work.
Personally, I'd go even further. The government should randomly test businesses and any business - whether it be a pub or a publishing house - which is found to have traces of drug use should be shut down for a minimum period of one month, the owners fined and the business named and shamed.
Of course, that would result in the virtual overnight closure of most of our media and the BBC would cease to exist. Whether that is a good thing or not I'll leave it for you to decide.
With stolen goods, illegal weapons and child pornography, the law is clear: the user is as guilty as the supplier. The police didn't let Gary Glitter off with a little rap on the knuckles and the rest of us didn't shake our heads and say: “Poor Gary, how sad that he has fallen victim to these evil porn dealers.”
Quite right. Drug users are not victims - they are criminals - but for some reason their crimes are often ignored by the authorities or treated as trivial. What we forget, though, is that illegal drugs are a "product" - and just like any other product, they are subject to the laws of supply and demand.
"Supply and demand" is actually slightly misleading as it implies that supply creates demand, but it is the other way around. Demand creates a market and markets need supply. The supply of illegal drugs reacts to demand for illegal drugs - not vice versa - but the fight against illegal drugs focuses entirely on the supplier. Huge amounts of money are expended tackling cocaine manufacturers in Colombia or opium poppy growers in Afghanistan - but all of that is wasted money if the people who create the market for those products are repeatedly let off. The users.
It is time governments woke up to this simple fact. If you kill off the demand for drugs the supply will stop.
That's it. It is that simple.
As long as the fight against drugs remains targeted at the supply side it will never be won. As soon as the fight is switched to the demand side we will be on our way to a largely drug free society. That means a zero tolerance approach to ALL users.
They are not victims - they are criminals. They are not being criminalised - they criminalise themselves. Anyone caught in possession or found under the influence of illegal drugs should face a spell in prison. Fines don't work.
Personally, I'd go even further. The government should randomly test businesses and any business - whether it be a pub or a publishing house - which is found to have traces of drug use should be shut down for a minimum period of one month, the owners fined and the business named and shamed.
Of course, that would result in the virtual overnight closure of most of our media and the BBC would cease to exist. Whether that is a good thing or not I'll leave it for you to decide.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
The law of supply and demand
A new report says that British police are losing the fight against drugs - this is usually a preamble to someone else calling for illegal drugs to be legalised as criminal penalties clearly aren't working.
The Commission suggests that traditional crime-fighting tactics are simply not working and that the £5.3bn British drugs market is "too fluid" for law enforcement agencies to deal with.
The trouble with the fight against illegal drug use is that it concentrates on the supply rather than the demand. The argument that you can not defeat it by enforcement so you may as well legalise is trite nonsense and proof of that is the way that drink-driving was tackled.
Drink-driving was once as socially acceptable as drug use is today. The difference between how that was tackled as opposed to the fight against drugs is that the police and courts were tough on the users, not the suppliers, and through intense media pressure drink-driving went from being socially acceptable to being shameful - and selfish - behaviour. This pressure on the "end user" rather than the supplier is what led to drink-driving becoming far less prevalent than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
But the fight against drugs focuses almost entirely on the supply rather than demand. Drug use is considered socially acceptable - even "cool" - and that has to be the first target of the fight against illegal drug use, but with illegal drugs in commonplace use by media luvvies this is unlikely to happen without a sea change in that industry. Of course, that sea change could easily take place if the government were to enforce it - but they appear to lack the will or courage to do that.
So when you see things like this you'll understand why the police are losing the fight against drugs. If the demand is there the supply will follow. The police and courts should not just be tough on those who supply drugs, but equally tough on those who use them - especially tough on those in high-profile positions. Repeatedly letting the likes of Kate Moss, Pete Doherty, Amy Winehouse and the Tetra-Pak billionaires off with cautions is exactly the wrong thing to do.
We'll never eradicate drug use, but we could easily reduce it to significantly lower levels. Kill the demand and the supply will stop. It's simple.
The Commission suggests that traditional crime-fighting tactics are simply not working and that the £5.3bn British drugs market is "too fluid" for law enforcement agencies to deal with.
The trouble with the fight against illegal drug use is that it concentrates on the supply rather than the demand. The argument that you can not defeat it by enforcement so you may as well legalise is trite nonsense and proof of that is the way that drink-driving was tackled.
Drink-driving was once as socially acceptable as drug use is today. The difference between how that was tackled as opposed to the fight against drugs is that the police and courts were tough on the users, not the suppliers, and through intense media pressure drink-driving went from being socially acceptable to being shameful - and selfish - behaviour. This pressure on the "end user" rather than the supplier is what led to drink-driving becoming far less prevalent than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
But the fight against drugs focuses almost entirely on the supply rather than demand. Drug use is considered socially acceptable - even "cool" - and that has to be the first target of the fight against illegal drug use, but with illegal drugs in commonplace use by media luvvies this is unlikely to happen without a sea change in that industry. Of course, that sea change could easily take place if the government were to enforce it - but they appear to lack the will or courage to do that.
So when you see things like this you'll understand why the police are losing the fight against drugs. If the demand is there the supply will follow. The police and courts should not just be tough on those who supply drugs, but equally tough on those who use them - especially tough on those in high-profile positions. Repeatedly letting the likes of Kate Moss, Pete Doherty, Amy Winehouse and the Tetra-Pak billionaires off with cautions is exactly the wrong thing to do.
We'll never eradicate drug use, but we could easily reduce it to significantly lower levels. Kill the demand and the supply will stop. It's simple.
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