All drugs including alcohol need to be treated as a public health issue and not a criminalised one. The money wasted locking people up could and should be reinvested in helping people. It is literally hundreds of billions worldwide, with the only people benefitting are gangsters.
We know people have always taken drugs, from our earliest days of mad plants that put us into a trance like state, to mad brews of early beer to get that high we all still do today.
To fight to try and stop it, is as futile as hoping you will win the Euro Millions every week for a year. Big Pharma ensured most of the drugs once legal where criminalised by buying politicians to enact laws that ensured they made billions.
Every year we hear of a bad batch of some drug that kills maybe half a dozen people and it’s headline news. Last night’s report that 22 people a week die of problems with alcohol didn’t raise an eyebrow. Now imagine, even in our wee country, if we diverted all the money putting users of drugs in jail and used it to help people with drug problems, and obviously the biggest killer, booze, how many of those 22 people might not have died?
The social costs of alcohol are enormous too as we all know, take a trip into any A+E department and see the consequences of drink. The violence. Then ask yourself when you ever noticed the result of a fight that broke out when people were having a puff?
Or people starting fighting when dancing whilst having an E?
The next time you pass someone who is obviously having drug problems, look at the person there who is suffering from their drug, alcohol and tell me whatvthevdifference is for them. One will be that whilst a person addicted to alcohol he irvshe can go into anywhere to get their fix without fear of getting jailed and the other needs to get involved with dealers.
These addictions cost a Kings ransom to deal with for our NHS, for people addicted to heroin the major cause of hospital visits isn’t the heroin, it’s the infections people contract from the dodgy cutting of the drug by the gangs who control it. People of limited means who have to have their fix resort to stealing, robbing and prostitution to pay for it. Again a social and economic cost. If it was legal and available through health centres as part of a programme to help them beat it that wasn’t corrupted by other chemicals then the associated problems don’t happen.
It won’t work for everybody but at least those that can’t stop are helped to minimise the devastating effects rather than jailing them.
The drug cartels lose their monopoly and access to the billions. We save billions by recognising we are pissing in the wind and the money saved could be invested to help, rather than punish those afflicted.
Weed could be sold and raise millions in taxes. Look at Portugal and see how they have improved every aspect of the problem they had before they decriminalised.
The next time you see a “junkie” and you may be inclined to shake your head in disgust have a wee think about the last time you were drunk, nippy, argumentative or worse and ask yourself, who the fuck am I to look down on somebody for taking a drug? I do it every week. Mine causes more problems, costs more to mop up its impact and kills a hundred times more people than any that poor soul might have taken.
I have had a couple of pals die in the last year through drink before their time. It doesn’t make me want alcohol banned, but I would like to see resources wasted on the war on drugs used to make peace with them. To help those who have a predisposition to become addicted and to have services that help them and their families and in the end us all.
When people are sick we help them. We shouldn’t jail them or drive them into the hands of crime. How many women are forced into sex work through their addiction? How many people are killed or beaten through trying to control the trade? The criminals don’t pay tax. They get rich and grow their empires. Tell me how a system that rewards criminals and criminalises people who have problems. A person who has problems with drugs is an addict. A person who is an alcoholic is an addict too. If we have any compassion we deal with the human cost and help. We need resources to do this and the way we deal with this problem sees us spending far greater amounts in a futile war that was never going to be won for the benefit of special interests, criminal and legit, the victims are a footnote. It’s their fault. They are this or that. It’s a way of dehumanising them to accept their fate. That to me is shameful and not only does it cast them adrift, it cuts part of our own humanity adrift with it. And if we think about it, we know that’s an uncomfortable truth we have probably all participated in. It’s makes it easier to look the other way. I want a country that doesn’t look the other way. That is defined by how we treat those among us that have problems. That helps them. And if we can destroy the criminal gangs, whose tool is violence and intimidation along the way, then that’s fine by me too.
Portugal shows a more compassionate approach can work in reducing the scale if the problem by accepting it’s always going to be with us. The war on drugs doesn’t. It’s futile, innefective, doesn’t deal with the problem, exasserbates it by giving criminals a niche, diverts massive resources that could be better spent and changes absolutely nothing.
What’s that old definition of insanity?
To keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome. We need to ask whose outcomes are being served? The people suffering, or those making a fortune out of their suffering, then tell me again how that is right?
dpoopster
