(no subject)
Bob Ainsworth, former defense secretary under Labour and once a junior Home Office minister, came out as saying he thinks all drugs should be decriminalised - and that such a move is only not carried out because the media reaction would be so huge as to bring down a government.
On the one hand, it feels a bit useless for the man they nicknamed "Bob Aintworth" to finally take a principalled stand on something like this.... only after he's not in government. Coupled with the firing of the government's top scientist by Gordon Brown for saying essentially the same thing, it smacks a bit of opportunistic opposition.
Despite that, though, it's something I personally agree with and hope catches on. That can be an unpopular belief because, legally and societally, we grade drugs quite differently - some youthful Bearsden friends of mine who smoked cannabis were quite violently opposed to legalising heroin or cocaine. You may hold all sorts of different opinions of course and... well... that's why I've got this post. :-)
(1) If you were in charge of controlled substance laws, which substances would you criminalise/decriminalise? Would you limit it to specific substances like Cannabis, LSD or Cocaine? Would you make everything legal or illegal? (Possibly consider including alcohol & tobacco in this equation if you think it relevant.)
(2) How would you go about selling controlled substances in your preferred strategy? Would you want them sold like alcohol in licensed premises, only available for consumption at licensed cafes ala Amsterdam, only available to people who have a license and are vetted ala shotguns? Do you want to limit the forms in which they are available, for example pills, drinks, powders, injections?
(3) What do you think the advantages and drawbacks to your preferred strategy would be?
For me personally, I'd be inclined to just make the whole lot fair game. Cannabis, shrooms, ecstacy, crystal meth, whatever. If the goal is to cut down on crime (since organised crime and random street crime is so often connected to drugs) then choosing only "the nice drugs" while leaving cocaine, heroin and crystal meth off the cards just seems bonkers to me - Glasgow in particular has a real heroin problem and making LSD legal would do nothign to solve it. (And if the argument is a health or social problem based one, then I'd say both cigarettes and booze can be pretty demonstrably worse on one or the other count.)
I think selling it like alcohol, in premises which must pay for a special license, is the way to go - and in the fashion of lapdancing clubs, make the license quite hard to get and dependant on local council control. That way, smaller communities and places who want to "opt out" have that choice - and drugs can be purchased in places which the police know about and can police. If you get over the social stigma of drugs (and that might take a generation) I reckon you might even see supermarkets and larger retailers getting in on the deal - because ultimately, money is money.
If you can break the illegal monopoly on drugs then you break the primary income stream of the gangs and, hopefully, take away the need for a whole generation of criminals to break the law. Prostitution, theft, gang violence... it won't become a utopia but if prohibiton has taught us anything it is that it makes criminals out of a surprising number of people. (There may still be cheap illegal drugs but legal drugs, though mroe expensive, will be made of better quality and be safe. Look at cigarettes, in which dodgy imports exist but most people just go to the corner shop)
However, the problem with universal drug use is that you have to deal with an initial surge of people who, now that it's been thrown into the light, will take to excess - imagine what would happen in your local student campus if cannabis was suddenly legal and purchaseable round the corner. In the short term this might actually increase the problems and drug usage rates, which would do nothing to sell it to the Daily Mail crowd.
And then there's the tourist factor - Amsterdam's problem with legalised prostitution was that it became the stag night capital of Europe and tourists came especially to bang hookers and that creates the opposite of the responsible atmosphere you hope to achieve. The UK would become known as Skag Central and that's not what you want. This goes double for EU citizens because once it's legal here, there's no way to stop people from across the EU coming in and doing what our citizens now have the right to do.
On the one hand, it feels a bit useless for the man they nicknamed "Bob Aintworth" to finally take a principalled stand on something like this.... only after he's not in government. Coupled with the firing of the government's top scientist by Gordon Brown for saying essentially the same thing, it smacks a bit of opportunistic opposition.
Despite that, though, it's something I personally agree with and hope catches on. That can be an unpopular belief because, legally and societally, we grade drugs quite differently - some youthful Bearsden friends of mine who smoked cannabis were quite violently opposed to legalising heroin or cocaine. You may hold all sorts of different opinions of course and... well... that's why I've got this post. :-)
(1) If you were in charge of controlled substance laws, which substances would you criminalise/decriminalise? Would you limit it to specific substances like Cannabis, LSD or Cocaine? Would you make everything legal or illegal? (Possibly consider including alcohol & tobacco in this equation if you think it relevant.)
(2) How would you go about selling controlled substances in your preferred strategy? Would you want them sold like alcohol in licensed premises, only available for consumption at licensed cafes ala Amsterdam, only available to people who have a license and are vetted ala shotguns? Do you want to limit the forms in which they are available, for example pills, drinks, powders, injections?
(3) What do you think the advantages and drawbacks to your preferred strategy would be?
For me personally, I'd be inclined to just make the whole lot fair game. Cannabis, shrooms, ecstacy, crystal meth, whatever. If the goal is to cut down on crime (since organised crime and random street crime is so often connected to drugs) then choosing only "the nice drugs" while leaving cocaine, heroin and crystal meth off the cards just seems bonkers to me - Glasgow in particular has a real heroin problem and making LSD legal would do nothign to solve it. (And if the argument is a health or social problem based one, then I'd say both cigarettes and booze can be pretty demonstrably worse on one or the other count.)
I think selling it like alcohol, in premises which must pay for a special license, is the way to go - and in the fashion of lapdancing clubs, make the license quite hard to get and dependant on local council control. That way, smaller communities and places who want to "opt out" have that choice - and drugs can be purchased in places which the police know about and can police. If you get over the social stigma of drugs (and that might take a generation) I reckon you might even see supermarkets and larger retailers getting in on the deal - because ultimately, money is money.
If you can break the illegal monopoly on drugs then you break the primary income stream of the gangs and, hopefully, take away the need for a whole generation of criminals to break the law. Prostitution, theft, gang violence... it won't become a utopia but if prohibiton has taught us anything it is that it makes criminals out of a surprising number of people. (There may still be cheap illegal drugs but legal drugs, though mroe expensive, will be made of better quality and be safe. Look at cigarettes, in which dodgy imports exist but most people just go to the corner shop)
However, the problem with universal drug use is that you have to deal with an initial surge of people who, now that it's been thrown into the light, will take to excess - imagine what would happen in your local student campus if cannabis was suddenly legal and purchaseable round the corner. In the short term this might actually increase the problems and drug usage rates, which would do nothing to sell it to the Daily Mail crowd.
And then there's the tourist factor - Amsterdam's problem with legalised prostitution was that it became the stag night capital of Europe and tourists came especially to bang hookers and that creates the opposite of the responsible atmosphere you hope to achieve. The UK would become known as Skag Central and that's not what you want. This goes double for EU citizens because once it's legal here, there's no way to stop people from across the EU coming in and doing what our citizens now have the right to do.