Why do we ever pay attention to politicians? They are total failures, drawn disproportionally from noxious groupings in our society like the rich, lawyers and so on. Very few scientists can be bothered, hardly surprising as “argument” is a bout piss and wind rhetoric, not evidence. Parliament is as perverse as the Athenian Democracy, and as fair as bastards like Solon, who told all his mates to buy land and then abolished the debts they incurred in buying it by decree. My own MP is a shifty, unintelligent shite, who when needed turned out to be a lying bully of dire proportion, living in a mansion provided by a pretence of being Labour. Even the good ones turn vile once in government – look at Vinny Cable and Lynne Featherstone. Lynne is more than marginally better looking! Ambush Predator (http://thylacosmilus.blogspot.com/) should set upon this woman, who once scolded the Home Office for not taking her question about a non-existent date-rape drug seriously and would ban Page 3 from the Sun. One wonders which of the two creatures below is more dangerous! AP does far better prose, and seems much less likely to be sufficiently not with it to ban Page 3 – crap as it is. I can only hope one of those forensic over-lappers does not show these two ladies one and the same!
These are not the best people we could get. They are survivors of a boring, arse-licker-manipulator system that resembles a septic tank – the really big chunks float to the top. Parliament does no good and a great deal of harm. It’s no good looking back and wishing the heroic Guy Fawkes (actually an anti-Scottish bastard) had succeeded, but we can look forward and wonder if we would ever build this institution again if some mad terrorists did flatten it.
Take a look at the law on drugs and how politicians speak in public about the problems. To a man and woman they are tossers. Jesus! One of them even used being queer as an excuse for abusing expenses recently! Before paying attention to the political buffoons, maybe you should do a little reading yourself? You might be just as stupid as them, after all?
Anyone really interested could start with the following, all available free , as long as you register at The Lancet, a respectable journal for medicine, rather than some drug-lord offshoot. If you aren’t used to DOI – most non-scientists haven’t yet heard of this – then go to The Lancet and register. Search for “Nutt” and plenty of papers will surface, including the following.
Vienna Declaration: a call for evidence-based drug policies: July 20, 2010 – DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60958-0
Drug crime and criminalisation threaten progress on MDGs – The Lancet, Volume 376, Issue 9747, Pages 1131 – 1132, 2 October 2010 – doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61521-8
These papers should give you some idea that “Miami Vice” policies have failed and keep on failing. Drug enforcement agencies are doing more harm than good – massively so. The arguments are not conclusive, but then good argument isn’t (you are just an uneducated nerk if you think this – where things are that clear cut, we don’t need argument).
The Grauniad is trailing Nutt and co’s latest paper in the next issue of Lancet. You can find this on http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/nov/01/alcohol-more-harmful-than-heroin-crack
– this is the main crack. Today’s study offers a more complex analysis that seeks to address the 2007 criticisms. It examines nine categories of harm that drugs can do to the individual “from death to damage to mental functioning and loss of relationships” and seven types of harm to others. The maximum possible harm score was 100 and the minimum zero. Overall, alcohol scored 72 – against 55 for heroin and 54 for crack. The most dangerous drugs to their individual users were ranked as heroin, crack and then crystal meth. The most harmful to others were alcohol, heroin and crack in that order. Nutt told the Guardian the drug classification system needed radical change. “The Misuse of Drugs Act is past its sell-by date and needs to be redone,” he said. “We need to rethink how we deal with drugs in the light of these new findings.” For overall harm, the other drugs examined ranked as follows: crystal meth (33), cocaine (27), tobacco (26), amphetamine/speed (23), cannabis (20), GHB (18), benzodiazepines (15), ketamine (15), methadone (13), butane (10), qat (9), ecstasy (9), anabolic steroids (9), LSD (7), buprenorphine (6) and magic mushrooms (5). The authors write: “Our findings lend support to previous work in the UK and the Netherlands, confirming that the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm. They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol harm is a valid and necessary public health strategy.” Nutt told the Lancet a new classification system “would depend on what set of harms ‘to self or others’ you are trying to reduce”. He added: “But if you take overall harm, then alcohol, heroin and crack are clearly more harmful than all others, so perhaps drugs with a score of 40 or more could be class A; 39 to 20 class B; 19-10 class C and 10 or under class D.” This would result in tobacco being labelled a class B drug alongside cocaine. Cannabis would also just make class B, rather than class C. Ecstasy and LSD would end up in the lowest drug category, D. He was not suggesting classification was unnecessary: “We do need a classification system – we do need to regulate the ones that are very harmful to individuals like heroin and crack cocaine.” But he thought the UK could learn from the Portuguese and Dutch: “They have innovative policies which could reduce criminalisation.” Representatives of both countries will be at a summit in London today, called drug science and drug policy: building a consensus, where the study will be presented.
I don’t know if these guys are right, and I can see some potential holes in their argument. They want the drugs thing made a health issue, which is fine up to a point – we would need back up to deal with any new set of non-criminal abusers, and police and local authority action is already inadequate. We could decriminalise drug use, but ramp up “nuisance and being a twat” action that harms others, including children and party-wall sharers. I can’t see scientists seeking to exclude the evidence from victims of users, and, indeed, they have introduced a ‘harm to others’ rating in the new work.
There are various pointers in this argument on drugs to work demonstrating that the ‘war on drugs’ is a massive failure and actually leads to profits for organised crime. Crockett and Tubbs may as well be working for the very people they despise. ‘Soldiers’ in drug-baron armies get paid in drugs and so must create people to sell them to – Chinese bureaucrats were once paid in heroin, and catching on, various western powers went into the Opium Wars. This ain’t new.
Many questions are not asked by these scientists, perhaps because many seem like dead-ends before we start. Why do we ever want to get pissed or drugged up? One suspects life is hard for many. I hardly drink other than in pubs (which I don’t like, and this is what makes me drink!) and don’t do drugs other than medicine (though I’m beginning to hurt enough to want more than on offer from my GP). It costs about £40 to get sloshed in a pub, a sum around that of the weekly benefit for some. We need answers at this end of matters, partly because much of the harm done by drugs and booze is economic and amounts to self-abuse. Booze is the worst drug overall and ranks with heroin and crack in personal damage.
There are big questions about putting an end to thieving scumbaggery associated with drugs, poverty and scrotes. One not aired much concerns where our alternatives to pubs, clubs and pissed-up Fridays are. Why is it we can’t smoke in a pub but can drink when booze is by far the worst of the two?
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Mostly, we need to look at our pathetic selves and why we enter “argument” on the very lines politicians want us to – as ignorant jerks they can rip off with rhetoric. We should be asking them, ‘what have you ever done?’ (answer so fuck all it will include getting litter moved from Acacia Avenue) and saying ‘that is piss-poor populism and has already failed, so fuck off and let someone else have a go’. What we get are those turds like Dimbleby slimeing up to them. Politeness is not what it seems – it is a big component of censorship and kow-tow.
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Dealing with the drug problem is not a simple matter – so the first conclusion must be we can’t leave it to politicians – they are already in the populism drug – and the next is we can’t leave it to people who don’t read, whose opinions are made up from television and who never see reality until it smacks them in the teeth. If we aren’t careful, we end up relying on ‘Adolf’.
I want drugs decriminalised, but in a manner that has a chance of working. I suspect drugs are illegal in order to make profits for certain sources of power, and may now be linked to business in ways we are yet to expose. The extent to which our politicians, who forever promise on crime and always fail, are in corrupt relationships rather than just dumb on such matters, is difficult. They never admit to being dumb until we get them in court. I’d probably like to buy opium with my groceries. But I also want noisy, violent scum stopped, whatever they are doing.
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If we stopped the dealers by making legal supply regulated (giving it to Tesco), what would they try and turn their hands to then? Is there a criminal currency like drugs we don’t know of?
What we need is genuine education by people like David Nutt. For most of us, learning about drugs would start in learning how much crap we have soaked-up. I suspect we could transfer these lessons to why it is we don’t just dismiss our politicians as a load of crap and insist on something better, and ways to get better people into Parliament and town halls instead of the current scum.
We are so unfree we don’t really have argument – we just have varieties of COWDUNG (Waddington’s term – conventional wisdoms of dominant groups) being hectored at us in a panoply of sexed-up dross. If we unpick the Opium Wars, we find a detective story of bent politicians and regimes, entrepreneurs prepared to kill children through opium addiction, drugs as currency and the same dire military bullying (UK, France, Germany, Russia, Japan) continued under the American Empire. I only hint on this blog, but if you want to be able to make meaningful decisions and live in the world with your eyes open, you need to accept your limitations. I can’t imagine doing any research without accepting my own, and the thought I’m about to find some more!
Some have it you won’t need drugs because you are already “tranced”. I don’t do that kind of arse. We all might know a damned lot more about drugs if we followed a trail of migrant workers being paid in opium and heroin to their homes where they spread the dependency to kids, or into a crap house in the UK where “parents” do the same, only without the work element. All manner of social work spivs will be about, and they will be failing in every element not connected to their sinecure. It is our lack of the history of failure and mistakes in our public reasoning that makes me think they are “drugging the water”.
The Opium Monopoly by Ellen Newbold La Motte and
A VINDICATION OF ENGLAND’S POLICY WITH REGARD TO THE OPIUM TRADE by C. R. HAINES can both be found free at Project Gutenberg.
The Opium Monopoly was Britain’s, though other countries were involved in distribution. Have a read – Gutenberg is free and these are only two examples.
More recently, the UN estimates drugs as 1% of world GDP (2003) – over $320 billion. As with all figures not stated in beer vouchers, this won’t hit home. Farming is only 4% of world GDP. Cider is 2.8 pence a pint at the factory gate, but over 100 times more expensive to swill down the gullet at my local. Enough balls of black opium in Afghanistan for a year’s use by me about £50 – bought here around £7,000. The mark-ups are similar! I’ll leave with the thought that 1% of World GDP would be enough to control the world, in the right hands. With the money from drugs in your hands you could control businesses. Now think oil; now oil and drugs. …
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