The "war" on drugs

[JPreston]

Could you tell me how a drug, cannabis in particular, that could be grown in your own home (in enough quantities for you to be happy with), could every be taxed?

And lets face it, that's why it isn't legal.
...

Agreed, and agreed

Although, I'm led to believe that growing good quality cannabis is goddamn hard (not that I would try). So in this respect it isn't a million miles from other things, how can we manage to tax alcohol when people can simply brew their own at home (brew enough and you are supposed to pay duty on it), how come Tesco sells basil and what-have-you when people can grow their own. People pay for convenience - the price of rolling tobacco is almost neglible whereas cigarettes are very costly, for example.

At the moment, you can go to a club, and you have to guess whom the right people to talk to are to get some supply. What if they sold it alongside Vodka Redbulls, and didn't eject you from the club for being found with such substances? You really don't think consumption of drugs would spike massively?

That's pretty much exactly what I think they should start doing with MDMA, immediately . It's way safer than getting extremely drunk for a night, and the revenues would even pay for medical staff to be on hand for advice and to catch the (extremely infrequent) cases of people getting into difficulty. Which often are inexperienced users taking substances in ignorance and then panicking when they think are dehydrating, etc. Anyway, in my youth anyway it was trivial to buy such things even in unfamiliar clubs, faster then getting served at the bar.

To answer your question - no, I don't think MDMA usage would increase all that much, though I do think that is largely down to fashion and had it been legal in the 90's usage would have been higher. Although it was pretty damn high back then as it was. And come to think of it, I can't think of any downside in allowing adults the choice whether or not to consume pharmaceutical-grade regulated MDMA with medical assistance on hand - can you? Remember, the alternative is for them to drink until they fall over/vomit/attack someone.

That I'd agree with as long as the pattern of use after decriminalisation mirrors that of Portugal. How about we just compromise on decriminalisation, instead of on legalisation?

Deal .

As it happens I'd support immediate legalisation for cannabis, MDMA and the mushrooms that I can't prevent from growing in my lawn which if I pick them become class A drugs and suddenly I'm looking at seven years (). In principle (the principle being safeguarding free choice by informed adults not affecting anyone else by their behaviour), I support full legalisation of ALL drugs although since I can't for the life of me imagine how that would ever work for crystal meth and heroin I don't think that's worth talking about - prohibition in principle is both stupid and wrong but of course a complete free-for-all would not be any better.

The benefit of legalisation (eg for soft and cuddly drugs) over decriminalisation is obviously that the economy benefits massively as well as society, and users get assured-quality stuff - but I'd welcome decriminalisation first as we'd still benefit through not wasting police and judicial resources.

There, everyone pretty much agrees on what should be done in the short-term. And indeed a clear majority of the country are in favour of decriminalisation - two thirds according to a 2006 poll conducted for the Torygraph of all papers. So why doesn't any serious political party have this as policy? The LibDems used to have decriminalisation of cannabis (only) in their manifesto, but dropped it quietly....

[Susurs]

The late Mo Mowlam once gave a speech underlining the government's tough drug stance in the run-up to the 2001 election. The story goes that having delivered her speech, and having sat down to rapturous applause, she turned to one of her co-speakers and said, "Sorry about that nonsense.".