Wednesday 26 August 2009

Legal Highs


Here we go again – the Daily Mail Tendency want substances that give legal highs banned.

Designer drugs, GBL and BZP, have been linked to a number of deaths. That usually translates to less than 10. Alcohol kills thousands every year and causes untold misery for millions, but is freely available. When will the hypocrites give up?

Banning the soft drugs, like cannabis, leads the young to legal alternatives, which can be many times more harmful than cannabis. No-one has ever died of a cannabis overdose. Banning one drug after another is like chasing your tail or the end of the rainbow – it will never cease, diverting police from real crime.

America showed that prohibition was useless; why do legislators never learn?


8 comments:

The Irascible Fairy said...

In fact the law cannot keep up with technology (we see the same in the attempts to stop file sharing!)and always lags a couple of years behind. As soon as the present and popular "legal Highs" are banned along will come others! And of course some of them are common herbs and spices used in cooking and folk medicine - how do you ban them?

What we should be doing is legalising ALL drugs - so called "soft" drugs to be packaged, taxed and sold in tobacconists. Hard drugs to be available on prescription from either your doctor or "Drug Centres". At a blow this would stop the vast and obscene drugs trade and also stop drug related crime.

On the other hand the British Government could - to avoid accusations of hypocrisy - also ban all tobacco and alcohol products.

Louise | Italy said...

Irascible Fairy : You have my vote!

Mark Sanderson said...

Yes, that's the problem with banning things. They become illegal, but they don't go away.

Anonymous said...

Everything we like is either, illegal, immoral or fattening...

I have posted on the futility of the American prohibition before on Tomus Arcanum.

AV

Kabbalah Rookie said...

I agree that prohibition doesn't work and have a big issue with the drinking culture in the UK. I also strongly believe that banning these 'legal high' drugs will just push the black market 'chemists' to find new compounds to push.
But I have to confess to being more annoyed that the Global Pharma's are trying to license vitamin pills and natural remedies. Want to buy 1000Mg of vitamin C? Forget it.

Chairman Bill said...

Kabbalah: Why on earth would you want 1000Mg of vitamin C? Eat an orange and you have more than enough vit C for the day.

It's nothing to do with pharma, but licensing, like when you buy paracetamol. You can get as much vitamin C as you want, but not in one go from one outlet.

Mind you, you can buy what you want on the internet.

The Girl With The Mousy Hair said...

Since when did anything being illegal stop anyone from doing anything. Imoral, now that might slow me down a bit.

The Irascible Fairy said...

Kerrie - that indeed is the problem in a nutshell - we spend a great deal of money to try and police the ever increasing drugs trade and crime related to the drugs trade.

By taking drugs out of the hands of criminals and legalising and legitimising we save huge vast amount of money.

Look at Portugal where that has been done (partly).

Richard x x x