Another email that I received and from Ben, who gave me permission to print in full.
At last someone who shares my concerns about legalising. And I have to agree totally with the last 2 paragraphs. My sentiments exactly.
Nadia, just a thought based on the last paragraph of Ali's contribution, and some statistics I vaguely remember Oliver Letwin spouting in Bournemouth when he was Shadow Home Sec.
90% or so of acquisitive crime is drug related.
In the UK, at the retail end of the drug supply, we have a nightmarishly bad system. People are locked up, given little help if any, then pushed straight back out onto the same streets.
Talking to those agencies like Focus 12, where Chip Somers will tell you that the key to staying straight is learning how to break that cycle, you can certainly see the argument for legalisation (an argument he was absolutely against when last we spoke).
The argument for legalisation is a sensible one, based on cost/benefit analysis. If you legalise and regulate the use of many of the illegal drugs on the market today, you would be able to raise revenue through duty, and remove a huge amount of the work the police would have to provide, reducing their workload and saving a couple of billion pounds from the Home Office budget.
However. All that saving would go straight onto the NHS budget. Treatment is hard. There is nowhere near enough treatment available. Illegal drugs are illegal based on scientific evidence criteria.
Drugs like Heroin and Crack Cocaine, or Crystal Methamphetamine, are harmful to use. They are highly addictive, and are designed to become more addictive. There are chemists out there working for organised crime who are designing synthetic forms of these drugs to boost the addictive qualities (just like tobacco manufacturers used to do) and the problem is that the need to feed the habit will eventually become all consuming to the user.
I have used recreational drugs in the past. Alcohol and tobacco mainly. I also tried cannabis but it did nothing for me so I didn't bother.
I know others who regularly used recreational drugs and I have seen them destroy their lives.
A maths teacher who smoked cannabis on a regular basis and ended up sounding like Ozzy Osbourne and unable to work a till in a pub because he couldn't add up.
A school friend who smoked just one spliff of cannabis with a high THC content and went on to suffer from panic attacks for the next 10 years.
Another school friend who was so disturbed by his use of cannabis that he hung himself in his bedroom.
An acquaintance from my younger days who tried every drug under the sun and dropped dead at 29 from heart failure.
Another friend whose fiancee dropped dead at 26 whilst asleep, following years of drug abuse.
These drugs kill. Using them will kill you eventually. Or it might not. You might be lucky.
But it really is Russian roulette.
The country needs to spend far more budget on dealing with the organised crime (narco-terrorists) who bring the stuff in, or increasingly produce it here. The cannabis growing trade in Ipswich is controlled by the Vietnamese for instance. Crack and heroin comes up from London as well as across from Liverpool. Ectasy comes from Holland via Harwich and Felixstowe. Cocaine mostly comes up from London or down from Glasgow and Manchester. All of it is easily available. Far too easily available.
Drug pushers are bad people when they are selling drugs to addicts. Whether that be the landlord of the pub serving a known alcoholic, or the doctor who continues to prescribe Vicodin to a patient who is addicted, or the street level dealer pushing to kids on bikes.
We need to have a serious think about how we are going to approach drugs policy in the UK. I can understand the legalisation approach but to me that is abrogating responsibility. We cannot just give up because it is hard. We have to redouble our efforts to tackle supply, whilst simultaneously providing help and support to victims so as to reduce demand.
The same arguments were made five years ago about street prostitution. I remember quite senior people telling me that the strategy wouldn't work, that it would push prostitutes to different areas of town but they'd come back, that it would push it to other towns, etc. To some minor extent there has been some of that, but you won the battle against street prostitution. Why not win the one against drugs as well?
Ben
Wednesday, 14 March 2012
Sunday, 11 March 2012
News about Chantry high School - Stoke Park Ward
From his newsletter, this is Ben Gummer MP's latest news for a new school at
Chantry High, Ipswich
Immediately afterwards I started a similar campaign for Chantry School, which desperately needs new buildings to replace the knackered old blocks that are fifty years old this year. Chantry's rebuilding project was one of the casualties of the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme by the new government in July 2010 - cancelled because the whole scheme had become a scam for consultants, meaning that each school was costing taxpayers two to four times what it should have done.
Whatever the faults with BSF, the decision was bitterly disappointing for Chantry parents, teachers - and for me. I told the government that whilst I understood their reasons, I could not support the decision until a replacement programme, which provided both a new school for Chantry and better value for taxpayers, was in place.
So since then I have been fighting for precisely that: a new school for Chantry - one they have been promised on several occasions and at every turn so far have been let down.
I've camped on ministers' doorsteps, written letters and lobbied the chancellor. When the cabinet visited Ipswich before Christmas the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, visited the school to see for himself what needs to be done. So the government is well aware of what I want - and I will make sure that I keep the pressure on until the right decision is made.
The not so good news is that the decision, which we expected about now, has just been delayed. The upside of this is that I now have more time to lobby for the right outcome.
I can tell you, I intend Chantry to be imprinted on ministers' memory.
Friday, 9 March 2012
War on Drugs - part 3
This is an unedited email from Ali Jackson who gave me permission to print.
I thought it was a thoughtful post and again is on the side of legalising.
I am amazed at how many people have taken the time out to write in length so it deserved to be shown.
Here it is|
Even in Afghanistan, a country occupied by the armies of Europe and the USA for a decade the production of opium has not been stopped. The countries of south and central America have been torn apart by violence and the billions of dollars spent by successive administrations in the USA has failed to stop the production of cocaine, marijuana etc. Why is this? It's for the simple reason that when there is a commodity worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, if there is no legal framework to regulate its supply and distribution then the market is driven into the hands of people who have to use violence and destruction in order to protect and expand their business. They can hardly rely on the law to come to their aid if being intimidated by a rival for example and so an arms race and increasing levels of violence prevail.
The retail end of the market is even more seriously affected by the lack of a legal framework, from the barely existent quality control with substances being cut and the arrival of unknown compounds in the case of so called designer drugs, to the marketing of drugs to young people by retailers who want them as their customers, again totally unregulated.
Think about the ban on advertising junk food during children's tv, an example of a market regulator (ofcom) stepping in to control an aspect of the retailers behaviour because of the perceived potential damage it may cause to public health. On a personal note i think its high time all visual alcohol advertising were banned, it's really not acceptable to advertise an addictive drug on footballers shirts. Try thinking about it this way. The current drug laws are a one size fits all approach, an approach that has been proven not to work in pretty much every aspect of life involving humans because we're all different.
What rounds your day off or gets you looking forward to the weekend will no doubt be different to mine and if you want to jump out of an aeroplane or have a flutter on the horses I won't judge, each to their own. You see, although many would have you believe otherwise the vast majority of people who use drugs use them in the same way as most use alcohol. For pleasure, back to work on Monday, no harm done. Sure, some succumb to the horrors of addiction, we've lost family members to heroin and we've lost family members to alcohol. Deaths that in my view could have been prevented had the resources been available to provide residential care for them along with the appropriate psychological services to deal with their underlying problems. But the money isn't there is it, because it's spent incarcerating people, it's spent on massive police operations and none of the billions of available tax revenue from production and sale is taken by the state. It's simply ploughed into arms, people smuggling and many other criminal enterprises that damage the fabric of our society.
By legalising and regulating the production and supply of narcotic substances, government agencies would be able to exert much greater control over the market simply because the businesses that operate within it, as with any other business would be able to rely on the law to protect them as long as they adhere to the regulations that relate to their business like paying tax, not selling to minors, quality controls etc. I'm certainly not saying that if all drugs were legalised today all our problems would go away.
Commodities that valuable will take time to be wrested from the hands that currently reap the billions in revenue from them. But in a free society it cannot be morally wrong to use a narcotic substance for pleasure, be it alcohol, cannabis, MDMA, cocaine and yes even heroin. Our governments therefore have a duty of care to we citizens, to educate us about the risks associated with using various substances, to protect us by properly regulating the marketplace and help us when we need by being open and honest and none judgemental enough for people to seek help when they need it and by providing the appropriate services for their recovery.
The vast majority of heroin addicts start their journey because of naivety, peer and social pressures and availability. (The addicts that i know certainly did). When the bloke round the corner who got you into it in the first place is available 24/7 then the steep decent into addiction is inevitable. Armed with knowledge gained from honest and truthful information delivered in an open and non judgemental environment, most would consider even trying heroin to be madness and the few that do would be able to seek treatment early, safe in the knowledge that the will not be judged or stigmatised, just helped.
For 40 years the 'Drug Wars' have produced some very wealthy people and an awful lot of dead people and for what. To prevent me from acquiring substances that may harm me? Well give me an hour and a phone and can I buy pretty much anything which, paradoxically will be more harmful than if it where legal due to the lack of quality control regulation.
The spate of deaths in Canada caused by PMMA is a very good and extremely sad example of this. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2012/01/31/calgary-death-ecstasy-pmma-police-warning.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2012/01/30/calgary-ecstasy-death-police-pmma.html
Had these young people bought their party supplies from an authorised merchant they would be alive today, their families and friends would not be grieving and the economy would have not lost some of its future talent to the most sickening of all prohibitionist phrases, collateral damage.
Come on people, the one size fits all law that we currently reside under makes the world a more dangerous place for everyone. Consider the following statement from a highly placed law enforcement officer in the USA who's name escapes me at the moment: There is no other crime, Not domestic violence, Not sexual assault, Not public corruption nor any other violent crime that we pursue with the endless stream of financial and human resources that we commit to fight the use of illegal drugs. That, frankly, is a disgrace!
Regards Ali
I thought it was a thoughtful post and again is on the side of legalising.
I am amazed at how many people have taken the time out to write in length so it deserved to be shown.
Here it is|
Even in Afghanistan, a country occupied by the armies of Europe and the USA for a decade the production of opium has not been stopped. The countries of south and central America have been torn apart by violence and the billions of dollars spent by successive administrations in the USA has failed to stop the production of cocaine, marijuana etc. Why is this? It's for the simple reason that when there is a commodity worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, if there is no legal framework to regulate its supply and distribution then the market is driven into the hands of people who have to use violence and destruction in order to protect and expand their business. They can hardly rely on the law to come to their aid if being intimidated by a rival for example and so an arms race and increasing levels of violence prevail.
The retail end of the market is even more seriously affected by the lack of a legal framework, from the barely existent quality control with substances being cut and the arrival of unknown compounds in the case of so called designer drugs, to the marketing of drugs to young people by retailers who want them as their customers, again totally unregulated.
Think about the ban on advertising junk food during children's tv, an example of a market regulator (ofcom) stepping in to control an aspect of the retailers behaviour because of the perceived potential damage it may cause to public health. On a personal note i think its high time all visual alcohol advertising were banned, it's really not acceptable to advertise an addictive drug on footballers shirts. Try thinking about it this way. The current drug laws are a one size fits all approach, an approach that has been proven not to work in pretty much every aspect of life involving humans because we're all different.
What rounds your day off or gets you looking forward to the weekend will no doubt be different to mine and if you want to jump out of an aeroplane or have a flutter on the horses I won't judge, each to their own. You see, although many would have you believe otherwise the vast majority of people who use drugs use them in the same way as most use alcohol. For pleasure, back to work on Monday, no harm done. Sure, some succumb to the horrors of addiction, we've lost family members to heroin and we've lost family members to alcohol. Deaths that in my view could have been prevented had the resources been available to provide residential care for them along with the appropriate psychological services to deal with their underlying problems. But the money isn't there is it, because it's spent incarcerating people, it's spent on massive police operations and none of the billions of available tax revenue from production and sale is taken by the state. It's simply ploughed into arms, people smuggling and many other criminal enterprises that damage the fabric of our society.
By legalising and regulating the production and supply of narcotic substances, government agencies would be able to exert much greater control over the market simply because the businesses that operate within it, as with any other business would be able to rely on the law to protect them as long as they adhere to the regulations that relate to their business like paying tax, not selling to minors, quality controls etc. I'm certainly not saying that if all drugs were legalised today all our problems would go away.
Commodities that valuable will take time to be wrested from the hands that currently reap the billions in revenue from them. But in a free society it cannot be morally wrong to use a narcotic substance for pleasure, be it alcohol, cannabis, MDMA, cocaine and yes even heroin. Our governments therefore have a duty of care to we citizens, to educate us about the risks associated with using various substances, to protect us by properly regulating the marketplace and help us when we need by being open and honest and none judgemental enough for people to seek help when they need it and by providing the appropriate services for their recovery.
The vast majority of heroin addicts start their journey because of naivety, peer and social pressures and availability. (The addicts that i know certainly did). When the bloke round the corner who got you into it in the first place is available 24/7 then the steep decent into addiction is inevitable. Armed with knowledge gained from honest and truthful information delivered in an open and non judgemental environment, most would consider even trying heroin to be madness and the few that do would be able to seek treatment early, safe in the knowledge that the will not be judged or stigmatised, just helped.
For 40 years the 'Drug Wars' have produced some very wealthy people and an awful lot of dead people and for what. To prevent me from acquiring substances that may harm me? Well give me an hour and a phone and can I buy pretty much anything which, paradoxically will be more harmful than if it where legal due to the lack of quality control regulation.
The spate of deaths in Canada caused by PMMA is a very good and extremely sad example of this. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2012/01/31/calgary-death-ecstasy-pmma-police-warning.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2012/01/30/calgary-ecstasy-death-police-pmma.html
Had these young people bought their party supplies from an authorised merchant they would be alive today, their families and friends would not be grieving and the economy would have not lost some of its future talent to the most sickening of all prohibitionist phrases, collateral damage.
Come on people, the one size fits all law that we currently reside under makes the world a more dangerous place for everyone. Consider the following statement from a highly placed law enforcement officer in the USA who's name escapes me at the moment: There is no other crime, Not domestic violence, Not sexual assault, Not public corruption nor any other violent crime that we pursue with the endless stream of financial and human resources that we commit to fight the use of illegal drugs. That, frankly, is a disgrace!
Regards Ali
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