Posts Tagged ‘gangsters’
Ireland’s Best Chance Ever for Effective Drugs Policy Reform
As the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use meets for the fourth time (2nd, 3rd September), it is at a crucial point which will determine its usefulness. Either it will move on to examine the broad range of drugs use and wider policy or it will continue to ignore and exclude 90% of its subject from consideration, focusing only on problematic use and treatment services.
Whatever recommendations the the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use makes, it is up to the government to decide on them. Same-sex marriage and abortion rights achieved legislative reform through this route but response to the recent Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss has been very different. The government and our political leaders have failed to implement any its 150 recommendations to protect nature. It was almost certainly a mistake to make so many recommendations and this has given politicians the excuse they need to turn away and fail to act. It could well be the same on the difficult and controversial issue of drugs.
Yet nothing demands more immediate and urgent action. All the violence, disorder and anti social behaviour about which there is so much concern is driven by criminal drugs markets. Demand for drugs comes from within our communities. It is our families, our sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers that are the customers of these criminal gangs. While in 90% of cases their drug use causes no harm to themselves or others, they enrich and empower the gangsters and government has done nothing to regulate these markets to reduce all the harm they cause.
While politicians refuses to acknowledge and provide sensible and safe legal access for drugs, particularly cannabis, all they do is turn the forces of law enforcement against the communities they are supposed to protect and add to the power and wealth of the drugs gangs.
It is the criminal markets that cause so much harm and only a small proportion of drugs users that suffer health harms. Street dealing, violence, child exploitation, debt intimidation, human trafficking, modern slavery, all these evils stem from the criminal markets which bad drugs policy has allowed to proliferate. And the health harms of drugs are maximised when criminals control their production and distribution, when there is no regulation, quality control, age limits or harm reduction infomation and education provided.
This is Ireland’s best chance ever for effective drugs policy reform and huge responsibility now rests on the shoulders of Paul Reid, chair of the Citizens’ Assembly. In the remaining three meetings, will he encompass the broad agenda which the issue demands or will we continue only to hear about one, narrow aspect?
Clearly, problematic drug use has a terrible impact on those involved and their families but we already know that the answer is properly funded treatment services. Also, problematic drug use drives violent and acquisitive crime as users have no option but to access drugs from criminals at high cost. The answer here is also properly funded treatment services but also regulation of markets, so that legal access is possible but in controlled and safe circumstances.
We need properly funded treatment services, safe consumption rooms, decriminalisation of the user, legally regulated access for adults at least to cannabis, MDMA and possibly cocaine, drug testing services, education and harm reduction services.
Such intelligent, evidence-based and progressive drugs policy will drive the gangsters off our streets. It will stop the violence, the mugging, the anti social behaviour of feral youth, It will reduce health harms, overdoses deaths and all sorts of crime. But it requires courage. It needs politicians to take decisions that will attract the fury of the older, reactionary, authoritarian wing of society but unless we takes these steps then Ireland’s drugs problem is only going to get worse. The demand isn’t going away and unless we find a sensible way of meeting it in safe, regulated fashion then the violent gangsters and everything that flows from their activity will continue.
Vancouver’s Experiment with Decriminalisation of all Drugs
Decriminalisation is an extremely dangerous halfway measure that frees up the market while leaving it under control of gangsters. All the dangers of contaminated product, unknown strength, violence and exploitation continue and will probably get worse.
The only effective drugs policy is legal regulation of all substances where access to clean, known-strength product from regulated sources is available but restricted in accordance with their potential for harm. This would mean that alcohol would be more tightly restricted than cannabis. Heroin or meth would only be available under medical supervision.
This won’t eliminate all harm but it will minimise it, instead of prohibition which maximises all harm.
Prohibition never works because demand comes from the communities that law enforcement is duty-bound to protect. So if the authorities try to try to ‘crack down’, as idiotic British governments have for over 50 years, it makes everything worse
Far more intelligent drugs policy is required and while decriminalisation is part of that because criminalising people for drug use achieves nothing and only causes harm, it is not the solution. Governments need to take responsibility rather than abandoning it to gangsters. That means legal regulation.
Our Immigration Policy Costs Lives with Exactly the Same Muddled Thinking As Our Drugs Policy
The parallels are exact. It’s all about supply and demand. Just as there is a huge demand for drugs, there is huge demand to come and live in the UK. Unless legitimate access is provided at reasonable cost and convenience then it is inevitable that criminals will move in to meet that demand.
People are dying because of the way our government enforces these brutal, badly-thought out policies. Preventing these deaths has to be our priority. Prejudice about drug consumers and xenophobia about refugees has to be put aside.
We have the same slow-witted, myopic politicians in charge of both policies and they are incapable of addressing these issues rationally. Don’t think it’s just the Conservatives though, the Labour Party is barely any different. In fact, to listen to the shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, it’s easy to see him being even more hardline on drugs and immigration than Priti Patel.
It’s a truism that all politicians are the same but certainly on these dog whistle issues in Britain, both parties seem to compete to see who can appease Daily Mail readers most effectively and win their support.
Politicians hold delusional and arrogant beliefs that the ‘messages they send’ actually make any difference to people and that when they make laws people are going to obey them without question. When people see that laws are irrational, unfair and work against their interests they don’t want to obey. And when we’re referring to issues of vital importance such as coping with addiction or being able to live decently and in peace with your family, politicians’ pathetic, badly-thought out rules are the last thing that anyone will follow.
You only have to watch these fools of ministers and MPs rolled out in front of the cameras to comment on the latest tragedy, be it the 27 people who drowned in the channel last week, the latest drug deaths figures or the number of young people whose prospects have been ruined because they were caught with a bit of weed, a gram of cocaine or a couple of ecstasy tablets.
“We have to crack down on these vile criminal gangs,” they say. Which is correct, of course, the only long-term solution is to remove the trade in drugs and immigration from the gangsters. But that really isn’t the point, is it? While people are still overloading tiny inflatable dinghies to cross the channel or selling sexual services to be able to inject heroin cut with cement dust into their veins, they are where the focus should be. There’s no purpose trying to divert attention to criminals who don’t care anyway. Government’s responsibility is to protect people, first and foremost.
Applying for refugee status is a right, not a privilege and government has to make this accessible, practical and reasonably convenient. It’s our stupid laws that are making people get into these boats because they can’t apply for asylum until they get here. We should permit people to apply for asylum at any British embassy anywhere in the world. If they can demonstrate to a reasonable standard of proof that they are fleeing war or persecution, we must give them asylum there and then. That is our legal and moral obligation.
Our irresponsible politicians are the cause of these criminal gangs, whether they are supplying the entry to Britain or the access to drugs that people want. If these demands were being satisfactorily met, with appropriate controls, the gangsters would be put out of business.
We need emergency solutions to cope with the disaster that our politicians have created. For refugees that means enabling asylum claims from outside our borders. For drugs it means overdose prevention centres and a return to the very succesful ‘British System’ of the 1960s where addicts were prescribed diamorphine (pharmaceutical grade heroin). Under this system we had about 3,000 registered addicts in the UK. Since we scrapped it in favour of hard line prohibition that figure has grown to 350,000.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of both these problems is that our politicians have got them both wrong, very wrong and they are going to have to admit that in order to implement the solution. Can they? Are they ‘man enough’ to admit their mistakes. Because what is certain, without doubt, is that politicians are the problem.
Politicians’ Negligent Response To The Drugs Debate
Shamefully Slandered
The Independent in its leader today, says “It is depressing how stale and weary have been the responses” to Bob Ainsworth’s initiative on drug policy reform. See here. As with all the media it has failed dismally to point out that he was supported by Peter Lilley, former deputy leader of the Tory party, Tom Brake from the LibDems and Paul Flynn from Labour.
The BBC, with appalling inaccuracy, stated that “all three main parties at Westminster remain opposed to legalisation”. See here. In fact the LibDems’ published policy is “In the longer term, seeking to put the supply of cannabis on a legal, regulated basis”. It matters little though because almost never has any political party been more irrelevant. The LibDems now command less respect than the Monster Raving Loonies.
The Most Dangerous Man In Britain
The responses of our political leaders are not just depressing, they are grossly irresponsible and negligent. James “Broken Britain” Brokenshire is the most dangerous man in Britain and will be responsible for far more death, misery and degradation in our country than any terrorist. As The Independent says, “such is the hysteria about drugs in Britain that there is no political space for a reasoned debate by those in authority.” The evidence that the war on drugs is an expensive failure is overwhelming but politicians prefer to waste money and lives rather than grasp this nettle.
The cowardly hypocrites, Cameron and his poodle, sit back while they allow Brokenshire, a preppy-faced apologist for gangsters to oppress, pillage and brutalise our fellow citizens.
Brokenshire is doing all he can to break Britain and British society.
He is a criminal of the first order.
Peter Reynolds 