Tescos putting their order in from Afghanistan and Columbia would be interesting.
The biggest problem I see with legalising it would be the cost because the government would make it so expensive to buy that the local scrote would still have to burgle you or sell his wife for sex to pay for it.
When legal highs were "Legal" it was scary just how many people you saw in the city center off their tits and vulnerable, just staring into space. Imagine the scene of heroin addicts openly using decorated in their own vomit whilst begging outside Greggs?
Tough one, I don't use and have never used but I don't see it being viable. If the only aim is to free police resources it's not a good enough reason IMO, what we should be investing in is better help for addicts and stronger penal tariffs for the people who prey on them.
Perfectly valid fears given the way we see drug users today but I have an alternative view.
if , for example, heroin was legalised society would eventually (it wouldn’t happen overnight) go back to where it was before the late 60s. What used to happen then was that a heroin addict would go to his doctor and be prescribed heroin along with a safe place to take it on the condition that he or she also undertook counselling to come off the drug (studies over the years in every country that has done them have consistently shown that heroin addicts in particular are self medicating to overcome trauma, often from childhood, and often of a sexual or violent nature). Counselling can and did help them come off the drug.
They wouldn’t have to steal or commit any crime at all I’m order to receive their fix and could instead spend their energy making themselves better. They also wouldn’t have to recruit new addicts in order to gain more customers for heroin (very many addicts are user dealers, dealing the drug to make money to buy their own.) hence the explosion in heroin addict numbers from around 3000 in 1960 to many hundreds of thousands today.
With this system, crime against property would reduce by an unimaginable amount. It would statistically disappear almost. (Studies have also shown that the vast majority of crime against property (burglary etc) is as a result of the drugs trade. If you’re an addict with no job what do you do to make money to buy heroin? You steal and/or you sell heroin to new customers).
Addicts wouldn’t be searching out new customers, burgling your house, mugging you or committing any one of a number of other crimes in order to get their drug. They’d be taking safe, medical grade heroin, at a safe health centre, and undergoing counselling with the aim of ending their addiction. No problematic heroin addict wants to be a heroin addict. At the moment they just have no other choice in order to get through their day.
Thats just heroin.
if we legalise Cocaine, and sell it openly from, for the want of a better expression, “drug stores” (chemists), again we would be selling safer coke, without as many additives (laxatives are the least harmful. Arsenic,rat poison etc are the most harmful) and offering advice on how to take it.
We do that now with cigarettes. And booze.
if you are a young lad or girl who fancies a line or two on your night out which would you rather buy? Regulated, safer cocaine from a Shop, or rat poison from a guy who either carrries a gun or works for someone that carries a gun?
Again, you would reduce the take from organised crime to the tune of billions a pounds a
year and raise tax revenue for the country. Certainly at first there would still be street dealers , as there are now for illicit cigs and booze, but they simply wouldn’t be able to compete with safe, regulated product that is readily available.
People think legalisation would lead to an explosion of drugs use (I used to be one of these people) but I no longer think it would. We have educated our kids away from cigarettes (I’m 50, when I was 14 over half my mates smoked. Now cigs use in teenagers is reduced massively. You hardly see kids smoking these days. When is was a young un loads did.
All it would lead to would be safer drugs, less hospital admissions, vastly reduced levels of crime and increased tax revenue.
Not to mention hugely reduced claims against insurance companies, and gigantic reductions in policing workload.
Theres a reason in the 60s and before there was “a Bobby on every street corner”. Part of that reason is that police weren’t dealing with an army of organised drug gangs carrying automatic weapons in every single town, village, and city in the country. Every day. So they were able to police by presence alone. They didn’t have to drive around in armoured cars in huge numbers. They could and did police their own beat And they knew their communities. It might never get back to those halcyon days but if violent crime (almost always linked to the drug trade) is significantly reduced, policing will change. And it will change for the better for all concerned.
And lastly, and most depressingly, studies show that when a copper arrests a career burglar, burglaries in his area reduce (burglars don’t need to recruit other burglars in order to survive etc). When the police arrest a drug dealer (almost always a low level drug dealer as the higher ups are too well protected by the fear of extreme violence to anyone who “grasses” to ever be arrested, or even known about) studies prove that the supply of drugs does not reduce by a single ounce. it just gets ever more violent (to further “protect” against being grassed up and to instil extreme fear in one’s customers).
As mad as it will sound, every drugs bust increases the level of violence in that community, and makes the violence even more extreme.
Our current system provides over 7bn a year to thugs, murders and gangsters.
If we chose to, we can turn off that tap of illicit money overnight and instead reap the benefits of reduced crime, reduced drug users, reduced insurance premiums, and increased police resources to deal with other crimes.
Its time we did exactly that.
www.telegraph.co.uk
