Cannabis Now Worse Than The Nazis

[Agent]

Here's an article I read on the BBC site a couple of months ago

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6474053.stm

Some professionals actually talking sense about drugs and drug law.

Shame about the completely pig-ignorant comment made by the Home Office Minister.

I remember this article - Very good read

The new ranking system places alcohol and tobacco in the upper half of the league table, ahead of cannabis and several Class A drugs such as ecstasy

I have never understood why ecstasy is a class A drug, in the same league as heroin?

It assesses drugs on the harm they do to the individual, to society and whether or not they induce dependence.

Almost perfect IMO.

[Rave]

I was going to go on a massive quoting and answering binge through this thread but given that I've been fairly heavily using my drug of choice for the last few hours- alcohol- that could end up being a mess. So I'll just try and remember the pertinent points and make a few of my own. Great posts BTW Knox.

For a start then- MDMA. In the UK it's been a class A drug under the Misude Of Drugs Act (1971) since 1977. So it had been illegal for 10 years before the 'second summer of love'. When I first took an interest in this in the late 90s, I'm pretty sure that the total number of deaths since records began attributable in any way to Ecstasy was below 50- and many- probably most, possibly all- of those were people who'd died from a related cause like drinking too much (like Leah Betts) or too little water while their body's regulatory functions were impaired. In the late 90s, it was generally agreed that at least 250,000 people a week were taking ecstasy. So- 250,000 a week taking the drug, as a worst case scenario 20 people a year dying- the death rate is 1 in 12,500 dying.

Compare that to Alcohol. Say half the population- 30,000,000 a week- indulge. 30,000 a year die. Death rate therefore is one in 1000. In both cases I have taken the estimates that make E look bad and alcohol good- and yet alcohol is still 12.5 times more dangerous. As a random aside, Sandra Gidley, the Lib-Dem challenger for the Romsey by-election in 2000, turned up at my house one day asking for my vote. She was a pharmacist so I put these figures to her. She declined to comment. I still decided to vote for her and she won, and remains the MP for Romsey to this day. So at least one MP knows the truth.

O.K., so, Heroin. Contrary to all the propaganda and general lies, opiates, including heroin, are about the safest narcotics there are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#...on-medical_use

So there are the risks. Heroin doesn't give you lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, brain damage, or, basically, any long term problems. So- the simple fact is- Heroin doesn't screw you up. The negative effects of heroin- and all the health risks- are due entirely to the fact that it's illegal. Heroin users risk HIV (and other infections like Hepatitis) from sharing needles. They risk overdoses- and poisoning from adulterants- simply because their suppliers can never gurarantee the purity of their product. If the government legalised heroin tomorrow nearly all of these problems would go away. People can function as normal members of society as heroin addicts- far better, at least, than they would as alcoholics.

It would be so damned easy to either give every doctor the right to prescribe pharmaceutical heroin to any patient who presented themselves- or to simply legalize it outright and pull the carpet out from under the black market. That would, at a stroke, massively reduce the level of crime in this country.

Instead, the government are desperately trying to borrow the money in sh1te PFI deals to build more prisons, so that addicts can take more heroin basically uninterrupted at the taxpayer's expense. The whole situation makes me absulutely furious. I'd sell a kidney to get Gordon Brown in a room with me and try and scream some ****ing sense into him, were it not for the fact that he's a politician, and, IMO, an idiot sociopath.

Look at the USA in the 20s to see how the prohibition of alcohol worked out- massive organised crime, ill-health from badly distilled moonshine with copious amounts of methanol in it etc. The prohibition of drugs has exactly the same effect- it does nothing to reduce consumption while massively exacerbating the ill-effects.

To me, this is so bloody obvious- and yet there's not a single mainsteam politician I can vote for who reflects my views. PR in this country can't come too soon, IMO. I'd be the very first to stand as an independent.