Dennis Hooper’s face in Blue Velvet is scary, with bloodshot eyes and an unpredictable anger destroying everything in its way, like a derailed train.
Pictures like this jump out from many people’s minds when they hear about the legalisation of illegal substances.
However, views are changing in the United Kingdom and other countries as the debate revolves around the persistence of consumption in spite of prohibition and considerations on how drugs affect health and reason.
Heating the debate
Last October, Chief Constable of North Wales Richard Brunstrom stood for legalising all drugs and making heroin available on the National Health System (NHS).
Mr Brunstrom’s report, supported by members of the North Wales Police Authority, called for a review of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 towards a Misuse of Substances Act to regulate all drugs, including nicotine and alcohol, according a scientifically based hierarchy of harm.
The current classification “is indefensible, both legally and ethically. It is arbitrary and subject to politically-motivated manipulation,” he said.
He also suggested an affiliation with Transform Drug Policy Foundation, committed to change the legal approach to this issue, since prohibition has not been able to “stop a successful criminal market or reduce drug harm to an insignificant level.”
The government and the Association of Chief Police Officers received the report with criticism.
Home Office minister Vernon Coaker stated that
“Total legalization would greatly exacerbate the harm to people. It does not make sense to legitimize dangerous narcotic substances which would then have the potential to ruin even more lives and our neighbourhoods”, said ACPO.
The Chief Constable of North Wales answered back highlighting the evidence.
Three million people are on illegal drugs; 2.5 million are alcoholics and 9.5 million addicted to nicotine in the
“Cocaine addicts committed 56% of crime, while offences related to alcohol consumption cost £12 billion annually,” said Mr Brunstrom and added that criminals should be treated as victims and patients in order not just to punish them but to change their behaviour.
Brunstrom’s paper took information from the Number 10 Strategy Unit Drugs Project, commissioned by Tony Blair in 2003.
Despite recognizing that supply side interventions and seizures have not reduced availability or drug harms, the group recommended to continue these actions and pointed at criminal networks as the main target.
Among all its findings, one is decisive for pro-legalisation lobbies. “There is no causal relationship between availability and incidence; there is no evidence that there would be a surge in HHCUs causing an increase in overall harm.”
Tolerance vs. traffic
According UN, 200 hundred millions people took drugs in the world in 2005, feeding a business of 321 billions US dollars.
Apart from funding criminal networks, those profits finance terrorism and wars in
The European Observatory of Drugs and Toxicomany pointed out the rise of negative trends in 2007, when 23 millions Europeans took cannabis and 4.5 millions consumed cocaine, while more than 7000 drug-related deaths occurred.
About 200 thousands consumers of injectable drugs in the EU are Aids carriers, and more than a million carry Hepatitis C.
The Guardian columnist Nick Davies holds that “all of the side effects which are associated with heroin - disease and death and misery and depravity - are the effects not of the drug itself but of the black market.”
“So, we have dirty heroin polluted with all kinds of dangerous crap; dirty needles which spread hepatitis and HIV; desperate users who can't afford to eat or look after themselves; and a never-ending tidal wave of property crime and prostitution.”
Davies reminds the counterproductive results of prohibitions like Dry Law in US.
“Pure heroin properly used is a benign drug. Its worst physical side effect is constipation. Cannabis and cocaine have some bad side-effects, but no drug becomes safer when its production and distribution are handed over to criminals”, he holds.
In 2007, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce Commission stated: “If drugs cannot be eradicated, then the principal object of public policy should be to reduce the great harms that they may cause.”
UN conventions on drugs, law enforcement, crop dusting and inter-police cooperation have tried to tackle illegal trafficking since the 60s, but new synthetic drugs appeared and consumption grows in
MP Paul Flyn holds that prohibition multiplies drugs, crime and death. “In
Many experts praise
“By supplying their most prolific addicts with clean heroin,
“The average age of addicts in
“The Swiss have had improvements in health, employment, family relations, housing, crime and abstention,” he adds.
The facts
Results of national consultation on drugs are expected after analysis by the Parliament, but Gordon Brown has stated his intention to strengthen the control over cannabis, which was categorized as drug type C in 2002.
The facts are that in
Drug-motivated crime rose over the last 7 years, the supply increased in spite of the prohibition and drugs’ prices are not as high as to deter consumption but not as low as to deter heavy users from committing offences to get money they need for their addiction.
THE SCIENTIFIC RANKING OF DRUGS (THE LANCET -MARCH 2007) FROM THE MOST TO THE LEAST DANGEROUS:
1. Heroin
2. Cocaine
3. Barbiturates
4. Street Methadone
5. Alcohol
6. Ketamine
7. Benzodiazepines
8. Amphetamines
9. Tobacco
10. Buprenorphine.
11. Cannabis -
12. Solvents
13. 4-MTA
14. LSD
15. Methylphenidate Ritalin.
16. Anabolic steroids
17. GHB - short for Gamma hydroxybutyrate,
18. Ecstasy
19. Alkyl nitrates
20. Khat
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