A ban on 'legal' highs, good!

Drac – Moderator

That was posted back there. <<<<fair do’s must have missed it, interesting take on it all the same.

It is but given all the have to do is make exceptions for research it’s a none issue.

Looks like they have already covered that in S10 of the draft bill:

]Regulations made by the Secretary of State may provide that it is not an offence under this Act for any person, or any person of a specified description, to do an act, or an act of a specified description, in specified circumstances or if specified conditions are met.

Drac – Moderator
It is but given all the have to do is make exceptions for research it’s a none issue.

The point on the ban on psychedelics and the lack of research in to the due to 50 year old legislation, suggests it’s not that simple.

Why do people think that legalising cannabis and ecstacy will mean that we get a safe supply?

Hamburgers have been legal for years and have you seen the dodgy crap that gets put into them? And of course, all the current supply chain from the cartels to the dealers are just going to say “Oh well, that was good while it lasted. Time to get a proper job now”.

That was all down to a lack of regulation which, quite rightly, should have been in place.

I’m not saying it’s a silver bullet but even the worst regulation would be better than no regulation at all.

As for the current chain, where is their market when it’s all above board? The unit cost would have to be so low to make it economically viable to undercut a legit supply that, even after tax, still costs the same or less than their product due to the costs of smuggling and such but with the added bonus of being a known quantity. It won’t wipe them out overnight but they would be forced to either go legit or find another source of income.

Why do people think that legalising cannabis and ecstacy will mean that we get a safe supply?

it seems a fair guess based on the supply of legal, similarish products like aspirin, vodka, sugar and tobacco.

why should I be criminalised just because a small percentage(and it is a very small percentage) can’t do something correctly or in moderation?

I see a lot of young people coming through the YOS. The problem with legal highs is that they are very often more potent than the things they are imitating.
Let’s not forget that methedrone was until quite recently a legal high.

A ban on legal highs isn’t so much a good or bad idea, as largely pointless, IMHO. Legal OR illegal, synthetics will still have advantages and niches that they fill, such as prisons where the lack of ability to detect and the ease of concealment makes them winners.

It is also largely a separate issue to the decriminalisation/legalisation debate, the problem with which is that the logical and sensible argument is completely at odds with the sensationalist, over emotional daily mailesque side of the argument, which has a great deal of traction in the UK unfortunately. This seems to lead to stalemate and the status quo prevails.

Why do people think that legalising cannabis and ecstacy will mean that we get a safe supply?

Well just look at the places where it has been done and there is your answer. Also are you suggesting the alcoholic drinks and over the counter drugs you buy from the shop or pharmacist are not from a safe supply?

At the end of the day, kids are going to want to take drugs, whether they are legal or not, that is just a fact of life. They are also going to successfully source these drugs whether they are legal or not, pretending it is hard for young people to get hold of drugs is a bigger problem than the rest of it put together.

Would you rather they went to a criminal dealer to buy some weed or filthy hash cut with plastic and god knows what else, who will also be more than happy to sell them a range of other far more potentially damaging and fake drugs also cut with poisonous compounds and other random drugs, or would you rather they were able to buy from a regulated safe source with no criminal element?

This is a separate argument from whether it is good for you to take drugs or not, the bottom line is people are going to take drugs whether they are legal or not, and illegal drugs are readily available to any young person anywhere in the UK, often from very nasty people.

Ultimately, there will always be a demand(that is never going to change), that supply will be met with someone. Question is who do you want to be in control of the supply?

So which currently ileagal drugs do we want leagalised.
Weed, ecstasy and LSD.
Speed, coke, crack and heroin.

Who will decide which and how?

I’ll decide. Legalise everything. Lets all get stuck in, and the last one left alive, and with their marbles remotely intact, is the winner, and gets to be the king and emperor of everything. Which in their own addled mind they probably have been all along anyway

And would the people currently dealing in the ones we would like legalised then concentrate their efforts on the ones we don’t.

So which currently ileagal drugs do we want leagalised.
Weed, ecstasy and LSD.
Speed, coke, crack and heroin.

All of them. Make drug addiction a public health issue and not a criminal one. You’ll free up police time, reduce harm caused through people taking drugs of a known quality and not being afraid to tell the hospital what they’ve taken and reap huge tax income. There’ll always be a black market, as there current is for booze and fags, but most wont use it as it’s safer and easier to go through the licensed head shop.

There’s a school of thought that proposes MDMA cured my anxiety and depression.

Hypothetical situations aside, plant food has been **** people up for years because the law insisted on legal alternatives.

As the “understanders” will testify, the “danger” isn’t new. Just how it’s presented. Ive had a worse time avoiding early onset cirrhosis than staring at a full moon dancing to Bloc Party.

Whatever. The debate is older than the problem. Talking, talking, talking….

chip – Member
So which currently ileagal drugs do we want leagalised.
Weed, ecstasy and LSD.
Speed, coke, crack and heroin.

Who will decide which and how?all of the above. As I said, there is a demand that isn’t going to go away, why should the supply be left to the black market?

The level of open availability is up for debate.

chip – Member
And would the people currently dealing in the ones we would like legalised then concentrate their efforts on the ones we don’t.

not if you legalise and regulate those too.

But, if you legalised the main ones, I reckon you’d find the market for others to be negligible to non existent tbh.

Lot of the drugs I would prefer people not to do then again I would prefer people not to gamble or use prostitutes

Sadly my wishes wont make any difference to their behaviour wo we need to do the least harm
I would decriminalise all drugs but the harder ones I would only prescribe under licence with the users having to get “treatment” of some sort in order to get the drug

Prohibitions doe snot make it better.
The legal status of heroin is not what stops me doing it anymore than we all rush out to smoke a fag just because we can.

Junkyard – lazarus

I would decriminalise I think decriminalisation is the worst of both worlds. You are just enabling dealers. Proper legalisation and regulation is the best solution imo.

Buying weed in Amsterdam is much more preferable to asking some dodgy looking guy in the middle of lisbon for some weed.

Yes my error I mean legalise 😳
Sorry

saying that I woulndn’t be against the decriminalisation of cultivating a few weed plants for personal usage. the Spanish have a sensible approach there.

For other drugs, i wouldn’t advocate that though. It’s a world away from growing a plant to getting your chemistry set out.

Just a random thought, how does this move to ban ‘legal high’s’ or psychoactive chemical compositions leave the various NHS sponsored initiatives with regard to substituting heroin with subbutex and methadone? Both of which are vastly inferior and tend to replace one addiction for another.

As a small anecdote, A couple I have known well for a long time, decided a number of years ago when their two teenage girls expressed an interest in recreational chemicals, that it was better for them as parents and for their daughters, to control both supply and location of where their kids took them. Relatively content in the knowledge that they were not scoring from a back street dealer, but through the parents from a known and trusted supplier. This, with education about dosage, quantities and respect for the the substances, predominantly weed, coke, e, whizz and k, worked well for them all. Both girls are now in their twenties, one has a Law degree and the other a very competent business person, neither of them them now partake. There will always be those who find it difficult to self-regulate, fortunately they are in the minority.

Education frst. Reading “close” experiences like this should be enough

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/cannabis-induced-psychosis

I would decriminalise all drugs but the harder ones I would only prescribe under licence with the users having to get “treatment” of some sort in order to get the drug

Nice try, but the problem with that is you’re assuming that everyone who uses Heroin, Cocaine, Meth etc are diseased wrecks who need help. So your everyday guy or girl who just wants to get high and use those drugs responsibly is still gonna have to go through the black market to avoid being hectored by some nazi in a white coat. Not to mention jumping through loads of hoops/having to go on some list that will potentially effect insurance… etc etc ad nauseum…

There’s been pilot schemes where heroin addicts are given high quality heroin, for free, and gradually weened off. There’s conditions attached like non participation in other drug taking etc, but generally they’re able to function from fix to fix and eventually are reintegrated into society without a drug problem. It’s success rate is much higher than the current methadone based methods. Schemes like this would be much easier to operate if heroin were legal or decriminalized and society would be in a much better place.

Education frst. Reading “close” experiences like this should be enough

I agree with the first statement. And knowing what could happen is obviously important, but we can’t bombard people with stories of worst case scenarios all the time as they know it’s just not true. An attitude of, ‘we know some of you will take drugs, here’s how to do it as safely as possible’ is much better than the current fear mongering approach.

teamhurtmore – Member
Education frst. Reading “close” experiences like this should be enough

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/cannabis-induced-psychosisEnough for what?

jambourgie – Member
I would decriminalise all drugs but the harder ones I would only prescribe under licence with the users having to get “treatment” of some sort in order to get the drug
Nice try, but the problem with that is you’re assuming that everyone who uses Heroin, Cocaine, Meth etc are diseased wrecks who need help. So your everyday guy or girl who just wants to get high and use those drugs responsibly is still gonna have to go through the black market to avoid being hectored by some nazi in a white coat. Not to mention jumping through loads of hoops/having to go on some list that will potentially effect insurance… etc etc ad nauseum…

I don’t see why that should be a barrier to legalisation? You are’t going to be able to legislate for every eventuality, but you can seriously curtail black mark profits, which will also probably have a knock on effect for funding for other crime.

I also wouldn’t have people goign to the doctors for a bit of coke. But I would fund voluntary clinic for people that run into problems. (tbh I’d probably do the same for heroin tbh, as I don’t really believe in a mandatoy draconian approach.)

Education frst. Reading “close” experiences like this should be enough

We could do the same with gambling and alcohol use as well but kids are savvy enough to work out that atypical [ though possible] scenarios are largely done to scare them rather than inform them. Its a risk for sure and they need to be made aware of it but they also need to know what the odds of this happening are. Its not the most likely outcome of getting stoned and “reefer madness” fear wont really work.

Nice try, but the problem with that is you’re assuming that everyone who uses Heroin, Cocaine, Meth etc are diseased wrecks who need help.

I am not I am assuming that is easier to get to this state with these drugs than with cannabis or coffee hence I would licence them more strongly. In the same way I would licence explosives more than fireworks.One lot has greater consequences than the other if misused.

So your everyday guy or girl who just wants to get high and use those drugs responsibly is still gonna have to go through the black market to avoid being hectored by some nazi in a white coat

We were ever so close to a rational debate 😕
there may some middle ground between these two extremes

Look at the states in America that have had legal medical weed, their claims of massive drops in crime rates, and the millions of dollars raised in taxes. Has the is been discussed here yet?

not really well not in any detail

Aberdeen legal high shop ordered to close down by police

“Police said they were acting over concerns by local residents about “persistent anti-social behaviour” from customers of the shop.”

So basically nothing to do with what they were selling, it could have been a Greggs that got shut down.

Does no one bother with magic mushrooms these days? I know not everyone has access to a spot where they grow, but they’re legal aren’t they?

They are categorised as a class A scheduled drug, same classification as Cocaine, Heroin etc.

Utterly ridiculous classification, personally I consider them to be one of the most rewarding and affirming ways to spend a night/day.

avidtaylforth – Member
Does no one bother with magic mushrooms these days? I know not everyone has access to a spot where they grow, but they’re legal aren’t they?

They were legal to pick up until early mid 2000s. Best drug out the lot tbh. Hallucinigenics are a strange one, ecky seemed to kill them off in the 90s.

Drugs and their usage are absolutely driven by market forces, which is why banning legal highs won’t make much difference, it’ll just drive people that took them towards the illegal ones again(not a bad thing as it currently stands imo).

But simple fact is that the demand to get **** up ain’t going away. Society can either accept that, or not. In which case with the latter you have to accept that the black market and criminals with control supply, quality and profit. A daft and illogical situation.

Btw, imo that’s the reason why legal highs were born, so to speak. i don’t think it’s any coincidence that they started to appear in the early 2000s around the same time the drug dealers were supplying poorer and poorer quality eckies(so much so that people were taking 5-10 at time to get up there) and flooding the market with cheap really bad soap bar (you can get good soapbar, it’s just the stuff that people call pollen)(Thankfully the market in grass exploded in the mid 2000s! 🙂 )

Have we done this yet?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/heres-what-drug-and-legal-experts-actually-think-of-the-blan#.am38DYlDL

Tom Lloyd, former Cambridgeshire chief constable

“What’s happening here is a continuation of prohibition, a policy which has patently been a hugely costly, harmful, and counterproductive failure over the last 40 or 50 years. Prohibition can have a temporary local impact on the drugs market, and an impact, to an extent, on what is consumed – it can lead to shifts in use from one drug to another. What we won’t see is a fall in problematic drug use overall, as criminals adapt their mode of supply, for example from high-street headshops to internet dealers and street corners, as we’ve seen in Ireland.

“It would be even safer if all drugs were regulated by the government, as the reason that prohibition fails is that people want to get high. If you ban the substance you artificially raise its price, and criminals are highly motivated to take over the supply of that substance. The best option is to regulate all drugs so that you can control access, strength, and purity.

“You’re going to get unintended consequences from this law, and it won’t protect children, because it’s easier for children to buy drugs from illegal dealers than from legal premises, as you can see with tobacco and alcohol.

“From a narrow law-enforcement point of view, this is yet another law for police to enforce; it will create a criminal market, and therefore more work for police. And there’s no evidence that it will reduce harm. But this isn’t about reducing harm through following evidence: It’s about futile posturing to appease ill-informed opinions.”

KABLOW!! 🙂

Good to read there are some pragmatic police officers.

Saw this little snippet on the Beeb site earlier, which further shows how effective the UK’s anti drugs/prohibition laws are working:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33009682 (Cocaine in sewage: London tops league table)

Would have used the hyperlink URL button, but it seems to crash Safari on my iPad when I try to use it.

Just read that ….good to know we are still world beaters at something eh

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33009682 (Cocaine in sewage: London tops league table)

That’ll be all those people who bought it by mistake thinking it was legal. Then when they got home, realised that it was in fact illegal, and promptly flushed it like good citizens/consumers.