Ecstacy, class A- are politicians mad?

[Cyclone 10]

They are very stupid so we need to keep telling them and, like a bad puppy, rub their noses in the poo they create.

 

Or murder them, you seem quite pleased about that.

 

Maybe you can explain how killing people is a 'good thing'?

 

And then you can go back around your points of how drug use is bad whilst not seeing that you keep making points about why prohibition is bad.

[green 10]

And another excellant Economist piece, for the articulate members on here :-

 

Failed states and failed policies

How to stop the drug wars

 

Mar 5th 2009

From The Economist print edition

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

 

 

 

A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

 

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

 

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

 

“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of failure

 

Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

 

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

 

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

 

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Al Capone, but on a global scale

 

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

 

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.

 

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

 

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

 

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

 

There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.

 

What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.

 

By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.

A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?

 

This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

 

[*_ash_* 88]

An excellent read ^^^^^^

 

-

 

 

Interesting results so far on another thread...

 

click here

 

92% Still wouldn't try anything.

 

I know that the question is a broad one as it just says 'drugs'. I bet the figure would be much higher than 92% if it was more specific to the drug on this thread.

[upinwath 10]

Or murder them, you seem quite pleased about that.

 

Maybe you can explain how killing people is a 'good thing'?

 

And then you can go back around your points of how drug use is bad whilst not seeing that you keep making points about why prohibition is bad.

 

Murder who?

Ah, you mean people who feel able to make money at the expense of ruining the lives of the people who use their 'product' and maybe killing them.

Yep, no problem getting rid of the rubbish.

 

How is killing a good thing? Good question. Perhaps the drug dealers who sell death in a tablet can answer you.

 

Why would I argue against keeping killer drugs off the street and keeping death and misery away from people? That's before you consider the detrimental effects on society in general.

Those who use drugs or want them to be legal are a combination of stup, selfish and/or very near sighted as to the effects of their 'fun'.

 

Take any combination of the above you like but it still boils down to drugs being a menace.

[Halibut 12]

Murder who?

Ah, you mean people who feel able to make money at the expense of ruining the lives of the people who use their 'product' and maybe killing them.

Yep, no problem getting rid of the rubbish.

 

How is killing a good thing? Good question. Perhaps the drug dealers who sell death in a tablet can answer you.

 

Extraordinary. We've got to page whatever we're on and you're still making absurd and unsubstantiated claims about how deadly this relatively safe drug is.

 

Why would I argue against keeping killer drugs off the street and keeping death and misery away from people?

 

Because you might (but clearly don't) hold human life and personal freedom freedom dear.

That's before you consider the detrimental effects on society in general.

 

Please explain, Upinwath, what you think the detrimental effects of ecstacy on society in general are.

 

Those who use drugs or want them to be legal are a combination of stup, selfish and/or very near sighted as to the effects of their 'fun'.

 

Take any combination of the above you like but it still boils down to drugs being a menace.

 

I can only speak for myself (as a homeowner, parent, worker and taxpayer) when I say that I'm neither stupid, nor particularly selfish and that I weigh up the pros and cons before using any substance, illegal or legal.

 

I can speak for a lot more people and a significant amount of research in saying that the illegality of ecstacy is a major factor in any harm that the drug brings with it.

Edited March 27, 2009 by Halibut

[green 10]

Murder who?

Ah, you mean people who feel able to make money at the expense of ruining the lives of the people who use their 'product' and maybe killing them.

Yep, no problem getting rid of the rubbish.

 

How is killing a good thing? Good question. Perhaps the drug dealers who sell death in a tablet can answer you.

 

Why would I argue against keeping killer drugs off the street and keeping death and misery away from people? That's before you consider the detrimental effects on society in general.

Those who use drugs or want them to be legal are a combination of stup, selfish and/or very near sighted as to the effects of their 'fun'.

 

Take any combination of the above you like but it still boils down to drugs being a menace.

 

 

Upinwath - Could you give your comments on the Economist piece above? With some well structured arguments for your points to continue the farce of prohibition?

[Halibut 12]

Upinwath - a challenge for you. Read every word of the piece from the Economist that Green posted above and we'll have a discussion based around it. Go on, I dare you.

[Cyclone 10]

Murder who?

Ah, you mean people who feel able to make money at the expense of ruining the lives of the people who use their 'product' and maybe killing them.

Yep, no problem getting rid of the rubbish.

Yes, I mean murder the person who was caught bringing the tablets into your country. The one you were so pleased about.

 

How is killing a good thing? Good question. Perhaps the drug dealers who sell death in a tablet can answer you.

Perhaps if ecstasy were at all dangerous it would be a relevant question. Since it isn't, the only one who's doing any killing is your government on behalf of people like you.

 

Why would I argue against keeping killer drugs off the street and keeping death and misery away from people? That's before you consider the detrimental effects on society in general.

Ignoring how incorrect you are about death and misery, what effects on society do you believe it has?

Those who use drugs or want them to be legal are a combination of stup, selfish and/or very near sighted as to the effects of their 'fun'.

Maybe it's unfair, but I suspect that several of the people arguing against you are more intelligent, not selfish and better able to predict the effects of legalisation than you, particularly since your so emotional and irrational about the whole subject.

 

Take any combination of the above you like but it still boils down to drugs being a menace.

Yes, look at the killer aspirin being sold by the dealer Tesco, or Nescafe, those villains.

Specific drug present specific problems, you're generalisation is unhelpful at best and counter productive in reality.

[Mercenary 10]

And another excellant Economist piece, for the articulate members on here :-

 

Failed states and failed policies

How to stop the drug wars

 

Mar 5th 2009

From The Economist print edition

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

 

 

 

A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

 

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

 

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

 

“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of failure

 

Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

 

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

 

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

 

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Al Capone, but on a global scale

 

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

 

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.

 

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

 

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

 

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

 

There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.

 

What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.

 

By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.

A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?

 

This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

 

 

A great piece thanks for posting it.

[TeaFan 10]

Lets just have another quick look at supply.

 

 

Of course I'm sure it's wrong as I've been informed that terrorist groups have never been involved in the E trade.

 

http://www.acronym.org.uk/dd/dd52/52trial.htm

 

 

Again old but it shows how nice the E trade is.

 

http://www.wiki-north-east.co.uk/article.aspx?id=1659075

 

 

Can't be bothered to go on.

 

How about the drug lovers.

 

Can you admit this proves a link between violence and the E trade now please?

 

I think those articles are the most useful that you've linked to in the whole thread. Although several of the ones you've linked to are largely irrelevant, the ones about the drug gang in South Shields and the mafia gang in Australia do need to be taken into consideration. Personally, I wouldn't want my money going to some horrible, violent gangster, and as I said way back in the thread, I think that the "ethical consumer" argument is the strongest one against buying certain drugs. I don't think it makes ecstasy as dangerous as heroin or cocaine, as the government wants us to believe, but in general (not just with drugs) people need to think about who they're giving their money to.

[Phanerothyme 12]

I think those articles are the most useful that you've linked to in the whole thread. Although several of the ones you've linked to are largely irrelevant, the ones about the drug gang in South Shields and the mafia gang in Australia do need to be taken into consideration. Personally, I wouldn't want my money going to some horrible, violent gangster, and as I said way back in the thread, I think that the "ethical consumer" argument is the strongest one against buying certain drugs. I don't think it makes ecstasy as dangerous as heroin or cocaine, as the government wants us to believe, but in general (not just with drugs) people need to think about who they're giving their money to.

 

The question is, does the drug cause the problems with gang violence?

 

Do you get shoot out between Boots & Lloyds? They certainly both deal in drugs, some very powerful ones too.

 

Drug gang violence and associated crime is a perfect example of what is wrong with prohibition.

[chem1st 10]

The question is, does the drug cause the problems with gang violence?

 

Do you get shoot out between Boots & Lloyds? They certainly both deal in drugs, some very powerful ones too.

 

Drug gang violence and associated crime is a perfect example of what is wrong with prohibition.

 

I bought some earlier without a problem.

 

Always buy of a reputable dealer