legalize now

[piggy]

HOW TO CURE NATIONAL AND WORLD ECONOMIC CRISES AND SOCIAL/CRIME AND HEALTH SERVICE PROBLEMS.

Impossible i hear you cry, but actually it would be quite simple but no political party would entertain doing it for fear of middle Britain outrage.
Three small steps would be all that it takes, i will list them and then explain how it would work.
1.Legalize all drugs
2.Open government controlled shops to sell drugs [except cannabis ]
3.Legalize brothels

Did i hear a deep intake of breath and a few shouts of idiot? Please let me explain, by doing these 3 things street robberies and burglaries would decrease by around 65%, organized crime would crumble, unemployment would drop, burden on NHS would decrease, you would stabilize some south American/Asian and African countries and increase tax income.

Lets get cannabis out of the way as it's the easiest, allow everybody over the age of 18[ive gone for 18 as its the same as alcohol] to grow a maximum of 10 plants per stage of growth which there are 3 seedling, vegative and flower. You should be cropping about every 4-5 weeks so thats more than enough for anyones personal use, so if you want a smoke you have to grow your own.
Consequences: sales of greenhouses,poly tunnels, indoor lighting systems, bulbs , hydroponics and grow bags soar.
This creates more jobs
This increases tax income
On the other side anyone caught selling to under age gets a mandatory life sentence.
You don't have to go to a drug dealer to get cannabis with the inherent risk of moving on to other drugs.
Yes it is that easy and with decent bud selling for up to £160 per ounce you can legally grow your own and save a fortune.[crime would decrease as people do rob to buy cannabis]

Now the next easy one brothels, prostitution the oldest profession in the world, there has always been prostitutes and there always will be so lets legalize it and take the trade out of the hands of criminals and give the girls decent health care and protection. It of course also means that the girls would have to start paying N.I. And income tax which would raise significant revenue. It could also be argued that it would ease the burden on the NHS.

Now lets get down to the nitty gritty all other drugs. We will start with chemist made drugs such as LSD,ecstasy and amphetamine as these are the main 3, all can be produced in labs very cheaply and sold legally for a fraction of street prices and still make a healthy profit.
As my example i will use heroin but the scenario for cocaine is very similar, buy raw opium from countries such as Colombia and Afghanistan paying the farmers a fair price say £25 a kilo it takes 10 kilo's of raw opium to make 1 kilo of heroin then double the price to cover the cost of production so thats 50 pence a gram for pure heroin, you could give it away at that price and the social consequences would be tremendous, crime would drop about 65% , organized crime would disintegrate, due to uniform purity overdoses would drop dramatically, no more cutting with rubbish and poisons, pressure on NHS reduced,attached stigma would reduce, gang violence would reduce and gangs would gradually decline, police resources freed up to tackle all other crimes.
But even if it is sold at a profit all these thing would still happen, so set up shops like off licenses around the country [increasing employment and tax revenue] you could even introduce ID cards by the back door if you wanted to by insisting you had to have one to use these shops.

People have always used drugs and will continue to use them whether legal or not despite how many times you tell them they are bad for you, look at the legal drugs alcohol and cigarettes they are bad for us but we still use them, so why not legalize and reap the benefits, as i said at the beginning no political party would ever dare to, this is not just my idea many people argue in a similar vein this just my way of seeing it feel free to disagree but please use some logical arguments.

[bigcumba]

I couldn't agree more Piggy.. I mentioned before that the Welsh Tories once invited Lemmy to speak to them at some conference a few years back because he was very anti-heroin having lost friends to that drug... so they expected him to be very hot on clamping down on the dealers and users.. instead he told them to legalize it.. for pretty much the same reasons you said.. cue much gasping and choking among the blue rinse brigade and Lemmy being shuffled off stage quicker than expected! It'll never happen though...

[Win2Win]

If I was the government I'd give the drugs away for free.... keep the voters in a zombie like state :biggrin:

[MattR]

I agree in principle Piggy and legalising drugs and having the profit go into the government for use makes sense.

But my questions would be what would happen to the people controlling the drugs now, suddenly their income has disappeared, what would they do? Turn to other crime? The drug gang members - are they going to get proper jobs - I'd think not?

Also do we really want stuff like heroin to be 50p a gram and readily available for people to try who may not have before? That one may be a moot point because maybe it's something you're going to try or not regardless of the cost. Would it stop crime though because people could afford drugs but would making them cheaper just mean people taking more and then still needing to find cash for them as they do now?

As for the brothels it makes perfect sense for health, safety and for people who live near red light districts in that it stops the street trade.

[Godspot]

Gets my: :thumbs

Have u seen American Drug War?

What about that BBC News doc about the situation in Mexico recently where some 80,00 people have been killed - it featured some guy who admitted to dissolving some 2-300 bodies in tubs of acid?

[Win2Win]

.... it featured some guy who admitted to dissolving some 2-300 bodies in tubs of acid?
Amazing how well they build baths these days :laughitupsmilie:

[piggy]

article by john gray

The case for legalising all drugs is unanswerableThe extreme profits to be made from narcotics – a direct result of prohibition – fuel war and terrorism. Legalisation is urgent

John Gray The Observer, Sunday 13 September 2009 Article historyThe war on drugs is a failed policy that has injured far more people than it has protected. Around 14,000 people have died in Mexico's drug wars since the end of 2006, more than 1,000 of them in the first three months of this year. Beyond the overflowing morgues in Mexican border towns, there are uncounted numbers who have been maimed, traumatised or displaced. From Liverpool to Moscow, Tokyo to Detroit, a punitive regime of prohibition has turned streets into battlefields, while drug use has remained embedded in the way we live. The anti-drug crusade will go down as among the greatest follies of modern times.

A decade or so ago, it could be argued that the evidence was not yet in on drugs. No one has ever believed illegal drug use could be eliminated, but there was a defensible view that prohibition could prevent more harm than it caused. Drug use is not a private act without consequences for others; even when legal, it incurs medical and other costs to society. A society that adopted an attitude of laissez-faire towards the drug habits of its citizens could find itself with higher numbers of users. There could be a risk of social abandonment, with those in poor communities being left to their fates.

These dangers have not disappeared, but the fact is that the costs of drug prohibition now far outweigh any possible benefits the policy may bring. It is time for a radical shift in policy. Full-scale legalisation, with the state intervening chiefly to regulate quality and provide education on the risks of drug use and care for those who have problems with the drugs they use, should now shape the agenda of drug law reform.

In rich societies like Britain, the US and continental Europe, the drug war has inflicted multiple harms. Since the inevitable result is to raise the price of a serious drug habit beyond what many can afford, penalising use drives otherwise law-abiding people into the criminal economy. As well as criminalising users, prohibition exposes them to major health risks. Illegal drugs can't easily be tested for quality and toxicity and overdosing are constant risks. Where the drugs are injected, there is the danger of hepatitis and HIV being transmitted. Again, criminalising some drugs while allowing a free market in others distracts attention from those that are legal and harmful, such as alcohol.

While it is certainly possible that legalisation could see more people take drugs, a drug user's life would be much safer and healthier than at present. There is no room for speculation here, for we know that a great many users lived highly productive lives before drugs were banned. Until the First World War, when they were introduced under the banner of national security, there were few controls on drugs in the UK or America. Cocaine, morphine and heroin could be bought at the local chemist. Many were users, including William Gladstone, who liked to take a drop of laudanum (an alcoholic tincture of opium) in his coffee before making speeches. Some users had problems, but none had to contend with the inflated prices, health risks and threat of jail faced by users today.

Though politicians like to pretend they embody a moral consensus, there is none on the morality of drug use. Barack Obama has admitted to taking cocaine, while David Cameron refuses to answer the question. Neither has suffered any significant political fall-out. Everyone knows drug use was commonplace in the generation from which these politicians come and no one is fussed. What is more bothersome is that the tacit admission by these leaders that drug use is a normal part of life goes with unwavering support for the failed policy of prohibition.

Producing and distributing illegal drugs is a highly organised business, whose effects are felt throughout society. The extreme profits that are reaped corrupt institutions and wreck lives. Dealing drugs can seem a glamorous career to young people in desolate inner cities, even as it socialises them into a gang culture in which violence is normal. The Hobbesian environment of anarchic street gangs, crooked politicians and put-upon, occasionally corrupt cops portrayed in The Wire may not be immediately recognisable in most European countries. But it is not all that far away.

It is in the world's poorer societies that drug prohibition is having its most catastrophic effects. Mexico is only one of several Latin American countries where the anti-drug crusade has escalated into something like low-intensity warfare, while elsewhere in the world some states have been more or less wholly captured by drug money. Narco-states are one of the drug war's worst side-effects, with small countries like Guinea-Bissau in West Africa being hijacked (as Ed Vulliamy and Grant Ferrett reported in these pages in March of last year) to serve as distribution points for Latin American cocaine. Narco-capitalism is one of the less advertised features of globalisation, but it may well emerge strengthened from the recent dislocation in global markets.

Not only in Afghanistan but throughout the world, the extreme profits of the drug trade have a well-documented role in funding terrorist networks and so threaten advanced countries. No doubt terrorism will remain a threat whatever drug regime is in place, but the collapse in prices that would follow legalisation would make a big dent in the resources it can command. It is hard to see how the countries where most drug users live can be secure while counter-terrorist operations are mixed up with the ritual combat of the anti-drugs crusade.

What is required is not a libertarian utopia in which the state retreats from any concern about personal conduct, but a coolly utilitarian assessment of the costs and benefits of different methods of intervention. The scale of the problem suggests that decriminalising personal use is not enough. The whole chain of production and distribution needs to be brought out of the shadows and regulated. Different drugs may need different types of regulation and legalisation may work best if it operated somewhat differently in different countries. At this point, these details are not of overriding importance.

The urgent need is for a shift in thinking. There are hopeful signs of this happening in some of the emerging countries, such as Argentina, Mexico and Brazil (whose former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso last week argued forcefully in this newspaper that the war on drugs has failed). There is no reason why these countries, which bear much of the brunt of the drug wars, should wait for an outbreak of reason among politicians in rich countries. They should abandon prohibition as soon as they can.

It remains the case that without a change of mind in the leaders of rich countries, above all in the United States, the futile global crusade will continue. The likelihood that the American political classes will call a halt any time soon must be close to zero. Yet it is pleasant to dream that President Obama, in the midst of all the other dilemmas he is facing, may one day ask himself whether America or the world can any longer afford the absurd war on drugs.

[Godspot]

American.Drug.War.The.Last.White.Hope.

The War on Drugs has become the longest and most costly war in American history, the question has become, how much more can the country endure?


http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-8231634812734884936#