drugs

So there could possibly not have been a better week in which to have launched the new party group "Lib Dems for Drug Policy Reform". Please, if you want your anger channeled into a useful cause, go have a look, sign up, and ensure that the Lib Dems are the party of the "big three" who dare to take this debate forward in a responsible way.

Challenging the existing "war on drugs" mentality of drugs policy does not mean supporting or promoting drug use. It simply means dealing with it in some other way than treating everyone involved as criminals. Joining LDDPR does not mean you want to see the streets full of doped up multi-substance abusing drop outs. It simply means we want to see a sensible and responsible debate about other approaches. Especially in the light of evidence from other countries - such as Portugal - that have recently shown that a less criminal policy approach and a more health policy approach can both reduce harm and overall consumption quite significantly.

Expert body after expert body over the past decade has challenged the prevailing classification and criminalization based policy, both those produced by government appointed advisors and external groups such as the RSA. All have been comprehensively ignored or even ignobly trashed by government. This is a complete dereliction of duty on the part of government. Either drugs, or the current system of dealing with them (whichever side of the fence you sit on) cause great harm, including serious illness and death, and the "war on drugs" contributes to misery and death in communities around the world, including here.

For the government to have ignored suggestions that might mitigate these appalling effects of the drug trade and the way we police it, is for them to say "we're putting public opinion before lives". Or "we are happy that some people die so long as we look macho". It is an utterly immoral stance. If this is indeed a "war" on drugs, then those who make such immoral decisions, as government ministers consistently have, are the "war criminals" in this war, and must face justice for their actions.

Earlier this month Margaret Godden and I steered a motion through South Central regional conference to call on Federal Policy Committee to ensure that drugs policy is amongst the first things to be reviewed in a new round of policy work. We did not wish to disrupt preparations for a General Election with what can be a contentious issue. Following Johnson's disgraceful behaviour however, for which I assume the entire cabinet has some collective responsibility (at least nobody has demurred so far), I think we should be taking a much more forthright line immediately. This immoral government has handed the last shreds of so called "evidence based policy making" to us on a plate for all the public to see.

If you excuse the pun, Johnson and his ilk need a good "nutting" and the sooner the better.

You can access a registration form for the event at the ACMD's website at the Home Office. Closing date for applications for a ticket (free) is 5th November so you only have a few days to get your dibs on a seat at what promises to be an interesting meeting.

I suggest that you go along and call for all of the remaining 30 members of the Council to step down en masse. They cannot have confidence that the Home Office respects their views or pays them any more than the lip service they are statutorily bound to pay them under the Misuse of Drugs Act which obliges the Home Secretary to consult, but not to heed the advice of this statutory body of experts, before any legislation or orders are made under the Act.

By coincidence, I notice that today Kevin Carson has a post up about the State's role as a drug baron itself at the Centre for a Stateless Society, and that the UK now has a branch of "Students for a Sensible Drug Policy" (SSDP) which I have been supporting in the US for some time.  Maybe someone could establish an Oxford Brookes Chapter?

Over the past few years we have had a series of recommendations to change the way we deal with drugs, from scholars, scientists, even top policemen, as well as people whom the government has hired specifically to look into the issues. Blakemore, Birt, and now Nutt (and whatever you think of Chief Constable Richard Brunstrom of North Wales police him too) have all concluded, after reasoned study and argument that our current system is not fit for purpose and does more harm than good.

Not a single one of these people is remotely what you could call "pro-drugs".  Not one of them has any kind of vested interest in the outcome.

Yet every single time their recommendations have been trashed by the rank amateurs we supposedly hire to "represent" us, with an interest in the votes of the Daily Mail and Express readership and so on.

So, since there's bound to be an election in the next sixteen months, remember this: Prohibition is killing people, the world over. Politicians who vote for prohibition are sanctioning these deaths. And every single bloody one of you who votes for a politician that supports prohibition is guilty of aiding and abetting these state sanctioned murders and executions.

And there can be no more important issue than a policy that kills. The law is supposed to be about protecting us, not making the dangers immeasurably worse. 

There are so many tragedies in life for which government is not responsible and on which people then call for action - fair play. But these are tragedies the blame for which sits squarely and I would say almost invariably at the door of number 10 and St Stephen's entrance. They are disgusting and immoral. Whatever you think of drugs themselves and the people who use them.

Now - it's Saturday - why don't you all toddle off down the pub and drink yourself senseless. Murdering Morons! Yes, you people of Redditch especially!

UPDATE:  It seems as if the Pro-Death Alliance and their gang of thugs at the tabloids and scary news vendors might have hounded Prof David Nutt into resigning from ACMD

Professor David Nutt, who happens to chair the government's advisory council on drugs has apparently written that the risks associated with taking Ecstasy are no worse than those of riding a horse:

Ecstasy 'not worse than riding' The panel will review the latest evidence before making its decision Taking the drug ecstasy is no more dangerous than riding a horse, a senior advisor has suggested. Professor David Nutt, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), outlined his view in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. The council, which advises the government, is expected next week to recommend that ecstasy is downgraded from a class A drug to a class B one. [From BBC NEWS | UK | Ecstasy 'not worse than riding']

Of course some of his prohibitionist colleagues are outraged and suggest, obnoxiously, that he should "consider his position" as head of ACMD. Something similar happens to me recently on our local "eDemocracy forum":

I have to say that Jock is confused in his position on drugs, and considering what he does for a living I find his attitude totally irresponsible and maybe he ought to consider his position, and I hope Rex Knight finds out what Jock thinks on the subject. Headington and Marston Neighbourhood Forum

So you know, I am amongst other things a hall warden, responsible for the safety and discipline of 550 first year undergraduates in halls of residence, whom I know perfectly well (but can do little about), go out at night made more unsafe by prohibition, lack of knowledge and so on. Rex Knight is the deputy vice-chancellor - and in that piece was presumably expected to sack and evict me for my views according to the odious author.

It appears that most of the very small number of deaths (30 each year out of an estimated half million users per weekend) are caused by lack of information about what you should do about the side-effects - like Leah Betts, they hear that they need to take lots of water when they get hot and so flood their brains and other organs. Most of these deaths are probably in the age group I look after, who, perhaps first time users, have not the experience to challenge the "street wisdom".

Without prohibition, with quality controlled drugs (the other biggest danger is that the drugs are tainted - often even not containing any MDMA at all in fact), with appropriate warnings and proper instructions most if not all of these victims would be alive today. Prohibition has killed them and anyone, everyone who supports prohibition is complicit in their manslaughter.

I remember in the seventies there were scare stories that kippers, lots of black coffee, and burnt toast were all carcinogenic. They might have turned out that way, but didn't. Did we, as the government does now about Ecstasy, stick our collective fingers in ours ears and say "there is no safe kipper" as an excuse for banning them? There are all sorts of things that can be found, after decades or centuries of consumption, to have potentially serious adverse effects.

Further, while the government does interfere and  these young people die of ignorance and criminal adulteration, we know that in the US for example, they consider there to be a safe enough dose to be testing the use of MDMA amongst patients experiencing traumas they dare not talk about (and previously it has also been tested as a weight loss drug and a truth drug I understand). So either the US government or the UK government must be wrong!

Anyway - we also know, don't we, how to make a horse safe! Which is class C by the way - go figure!

...and one kills, so why not ban it, just like this:

A 15-year-old boy may have battered a man to death because his personality was changed by an antidepressant drug, a specialist doctor has told a court. The boy killed Gary Belben, 59, with a hammer and attempted to kill his wife, Tanya, in Essex after being prescribed Prozac, Chelmsford Crown Court heard. [From BBC NEWS | England | Essex | Drug 'could have led boy to kill']

...is what I call "social services"!

To the casual observer, Robert Holding seemed a kindly milkman who was attentive to his elderly customers as he delivered their daily pints. To the less casual observer – specifically, a surveillance team from Lancashire police – Holding, 72, turned out to be a drug dealer who was supplying cannabis from his milk float to an elderly clientele. His customers, who smoked the resin to relieve their aches and pains, would leave notes with their empty milk bottles to say how much of the drug they required. His reputation as a drug dealer spread rapidly among 17 of his customers in Burnley, Lancashire. [From Pint of gold top and an eighth of hash – milkman who also delivered drugs]

Poor Michael Phelps. I hope tabloid photo-journalists won't mind losing their jobs one day after their coke-parties and drinking games have been uncovered. However, whilst it's not very nice being dumped, who would want to work for Kellogg anyway.

This is a firm whose family founders were rather bonkers. Whilst it was his brother, W K Kellogg, that founded the company, the actual cornflake inventor (whose only creditworthiness seems to have been that he wanted his recipe to be "open source" rather than patented - which is where his brother and he parted company), was John Harvey Kellogg who, amongst other things...

Was into yoghurt enemas - believing that they would replace the "good bacteria" in the colon that he had had his patients wash out with water enemas via his patent enema machine.

Didn't do sex - adopted six(?) kids but never, it seems, had so much as a canoodle with his wife and throughout their marriage slept in separate bedrooms.

Campaigned against masturbation, claiming it led to all sorts of physical and mental ailments. He advocated, therefore, unanaesythetised circumcision for boys so that the pain discouraged them from ever touching their mutilated little wee-wees and putting carbolic acid on the clitoris to do similar for females. Also binding up boys hands to stop them fiddling with themselves and making them wear wire cages over their genitals (that he did patent!) - all the way up to electric shock treatment for persistent wankers.

The only possible sensible connection with Michael Phelps I can come across is his habit of chucking patients from his sanatorium off the end of the jetty into the nearby freezing lake.

Apart from the money - he is well rid I'd say. Now, maybe he can persuade Speedo to endorse a new campaign on amphetamines....;)

Horizon last night did a reasonably balanced program looking at the various claims for and against cannabis, the world's most popular illicit drug. You can watch it again on iPlayer if you missed it.

They looked into its history - that it is likely that it has been used by humans for around 3,000 years at least. Into claims that it is a "gateway drug" that encouraged users to move onto harder drugs which showed in trials with rats that this was unlikely. And into claims that it damaged young brains which in trials with mice seemed to suggest that it did indeed create long term memory degradation when given to/used by young adolescents (defined as below around 15 years of age).

They also seemed to be confirming that, assuming one's brain was properly developed before using cannabis regularly, the potential longer term side effects are nonetheless relatively rare.

They looked into some of the claims made for its medicinal properties, talking to a doctor in California who, under their medical marijuana rules seems to prescribe it for all sorts of things from chronic pain to slight anxiety or even, as the presenter suggested, "writers block". And in the one UK licensed pharmaceutical grade production facility was astonished to find that many strains also contain an anti-psychotic substance (which to me reinforced the idea that somehow people in danger of developing mental illnesses may actively seek it out as self-medication).

So, what does it all suggest about the predominant public policy of prohibition? The presenter, "addiction specialist Dr John Marsden" (he looks after patients with addictions to "harder" drugs like cocaine and heroin), concluded the program by saying that the real "problem" with cannabis was the waste of potential it causes - presumably he felt, as an addiction specialist, that all the other [possible problems are relatively low risk enough to make a blanket policy unwarranted.

But even here I think he's quite wrong to infer that such a "waste" of potential is good enough reason for legal prohibition - after all, one user's "waste" of life "sitting around smoking dope all day and doing nothing useful" as Marsden put it I think, is another user's occasional recreation. Set aside any debate as to whether George Washington managed to found the greatest nation on earth whilst toking on the stuff! Exactly the same claims could be made of alcohol, and the evidence is available in far greater numbers - that it can cause psychoses, all sorts of physical and mental illnesses, sitting around drinking all day is a waste of potential, it can also have medicinal benefits. Yet Churchill won the war on the stuff!

Yet we license one for sale and prohibit the other with criminal sanctions that themselves do as much to destroy lives as the substance itself (witness in the USA the scheme where anyone convicted of a possession charge would be denied university funding for example). We know that prohibition drives the supply into the hands of criminal gangs who have no compunction about selling it to those even proponents of legalization would want to protect - the youngsters whose developmental processes can be damaged by access to it too young - and further whose business model tends to encourage them to try to sell other, potentially more dangerous drugs, to their existing customers to maximize profits. We have seen how, after downgrading, the consumption in this country actually dropped. It will be interesting to see whether the uprating to category B will increase consumption again and thus prove utterly counter productive.

As with alcohol, a legalized weed, as shown in the images of medical marijuana dispensaries in California, and also the cafe culture in the Netherlands and the more free attitude in Switzerland, would give people more choice about methods of taking the drug - reducing, probably, the predominance of smoking it (it is at its most potentially harmful when smoked with tobacco). And it would increase awareness of the different strengths and their effects as decent shops would sell a range, rather than, at present, having to take what you can get wherever you can get it.

The law, as usual with drugs laws, is counter-productive. The resultant criminal culture surrounding it makes society less safe not more. It is not based on the evidence. It is not consistent with attitudes to other drugs such as alcohol where even the drunk is more capable it seems of exercising their own judgement most of the time and is also freer to get help because it is legal and not so much of a taboo subject. The recent reclassification defies belief frankly and is simply another reason to oppose all government interference in our lives as ill informed and nannying.

Our legislators should be ashamed of themselves.

What a jolly wheeze - I seem to have had the honour (I think) of being nominated for the position of Minister for Drugs (Legalization, Regulation and Taxation thereof) in Mark Wadsworth's Bloggers Cabinet. It's been a while since I wrote anything substantial on the subject of drugs, probably but uncharacteristically cowed by my opponents' disgraceful use of my previous writings on the subject in May's local elections.

Anyway, it's an interesting coincidence that I've just had a bit of a spat with someone on our local Headington & Marston Neighbourhood Forum about this very subject. Someone whose naive response to the "drugs problem" is to get tougher, to wage the "war on drugs" ever more fiercely and adopt a "zero tolerance" approach to dealers, traffickers and users alike. Whose entire argument appears to be based on the insane rantings of the likes of Anthony Daniels and Nicholas O'Kane.

So anyway, I just wanted to share with you the core principle on which I would develop Mark's commission, were it for real and as I explained to my correspondent on the local forum (who had gone so far as to hope, in a public forum, that I should lose my job for holding this opinion):

"No legislator has, in my opinion, a moral or natural right (and therefore cannot have one created for him by democratic mandate however strong) to implement or support laws which demonstrably kill or harm more people than the problem they are supposed to solve. Such laws are morally repugnant. And those who support them are just as bad. Some do so out of ignorance and don't think much about it - they are perhaps forgivable, but others think they have considered the issues and come to a reasonable conclusion which they promulgate with gusto. They are worse than the politicians and laws they support, for they give them the succour of public opinion. They are tantamount to promoting murder as a weapon of the law."

Whatever you think of drugs and the people who use them or even abuse them, it is not the aim of legalization to promote their use; indeed as a policy whose aim was to reduce drug use and the harms which can arise from their misuse, prohibition has spectacularly failed with more drugs on our streets supplied by a now immense industry controlled by organized crime.

For prohibitionists everywhere, I urge you to recall Einstein's definition of "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

PS: Watch out I hope in January for a new Lib Dem group - "Liberal Democrats Against Prohibition". Not just about drugs of course, but the isue will figure highly, obviously.

A recently discovered, by me at least, Lib Dem blogger, Jamie Saddler, comments on the apparent decision by government not to press for a lower blood alcohol limit:

Epolitix are reporting that the government have decided against lowering the drink-drive limit from 80mg to 50 mg... This is all well and good, but they are the ones who would do this regardless of the limit, and need to be the exception. It needs to be spelt out to people that if you are driving, even one drink is unacceptable. [From Jamie Saddler: Government Gets It Wrong on Drink Drive Limit]

I wonder. I do have an interest here - I was done for driving under the influence and banned for a year, sixteen years ago now. In my case, it was a timely reminder, even though it led to years of bad times for me - losing my job and so on. Had I been caught a few years earlier while I was working in Glasgow I think I would probably have done time and I am probably truly lucky not to have had an accident in that time.

Nonetheless, when I was stopped, I will always remember the first words the officer said to me: "Good evening, sir, you haven't done anything wrong, but we were following you for a while and we felt you took that last roundabout a little carelessly so we wanted to stop you and have a word; first, I'd like you to provide a sample of breath to testing for alcohol content."

They had been following me for some time, on otherwise empty roads mid-evening in Birmingham and approaching an empty roundabout I had taken a straighter line - inside-outside-inside - that someone a little more perfect would have done perhaps. I had done nothing wrong. They said.

Nothwithstanding all this though, I still wonder if drink limits are the right, or at least the most liberal, way of dealing with this nasty social problem of people who drink, drive and then injure or kill others or property. And I certainly question the common message that Jamie repeats that "even one drink is unacceptable". I rarely drink at all nowadays. I have a good relationship with alcohol. I regard it as one of the worst drugs available, even though legal, and take it generally with caution (okay, I had a few large whiskies on Saturday night but was taking a taxi, but was perfectly lucid).

But recently I was out in the car meeting someone and had two pints and drove home. They were nice pints and next time I visit I will take the bus because I would have enjoyed more. But over three and a half hours I drank two pints of ale, and "the alcohol in one pint of ordinary strength lager will take two hours to pass out of your body" [Bupa guidance]. So I'm probably right in saying that there may have been the equivalent of less than half a pint in my system when I drove away.

The problem with having a law that specifies a uniform amount for everyone and above that is a crime regardless of whether you are behaving dangerously or not, or even using a mobile phone, or driving whilst exhausted, or smoking, or eating, at the wheel, or on drugs, and so on is that you just have to keep adding extra clauses, extra laws to deal with new situations.

The problem with having a more general law of "dangerous driving" is that it appears to introduce some subjectiveness into the legal process. You are no longer asking whether a person was simply, objectively, over a certain limit, but whether the "man on the Clapham omnibus" would consider that you were acting dangerously.

The former also, almost by definition, involves trawling for offenders and in the process interfering with the perfectly legal comings and goings of law abiding citizens. And it really doesn't respect a notion of causing danger. Just breaching a numerical limit. Whilst the latter is how we expect for British law to be dealt with more generally - involving intention, capacity, culpability, danger and the subjective decisions of a jury or bench.

Now, that's not to say that I want to see more people drink driving, or a rise in death and injury as a result. As a libertarian minded person though I do want people to have to take responsibility for their own actions. And therefore consider for themselves whether what they are thinking of doing may be dangerous to themselves or others. The arbitrary, numerical limit takes away that responsibility in a way.

In the case Jamie mentioned:

I do not understand why this is dealt with under "causing death through dangerous driving" and not manslaughter. Manslaughter of course allows for a life sentence. A few life sentences and people would start thinking a bit more about whether it's worth testing their alcohol fuelled infallibility. If people are prevented from drink driving simply for fear of breaking a limit that will result in the loss of their license if they are unlucky enough to get caught by police, how much more so by the possibility that their journey might end in a prison cell for life if they take a gamble and lose?

I have no problem with using any of the impairment inducing activities - taking drugs, eating, phoning someone, smoking, driving too tired and so on - as aggravating the culpability and pushing more towards higher sentences. But is this not a case where "tough liberalism" punishing the consequences and not creating arbitrary laws that simply apply to everyone, dangerous or not, could once again reduce the burden of legislation and the arbitrariness of laws to deal with different substances and activities, whilst focussing peoples' minds on the real consequences of their actions?

Around 7.5% only of "KSIs" (killed and seriously injured) in road traffic accidents are causally linked to alcohol, and I believe this figure includes when the drunk is the pedestrian that staggers out in front of a perfectly legal driver and is killed or injured.  Which suggests to me that the greater rewards will now be found dealing with other forms of anti-social driving.  I nominate middle-lane-itis and misuse of the acceleration lane for starters.