blonde poker forum

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8175550.stm

"It also suggests trial schemes in Britain to offer low-level dealers treatment and support as an alternative to prosecution could be extended."

Also suggestions of not prosecuting dealers if they agree to stop killing each other.

Looks like they might have realised the war's a bit of a waste of time. Cops chase dealers and get them banged up, at HUGE expense, someone else moves in to fill their place, causing bloodshed in doing so, repeat.

Time to just decriminalise all drugs and make the government the dealer?

Not stuff like Heroin or Crack obv.

Why not?
You will never stop it.
Safer, less deaths etc..

this doesent make any sense, might've done 15 years ago but now drug dealing is too far intractably linked with with street gangs, people serving up on the corners of estates all over london, it's a gang thing now, even the 14 year olds that arnt doing it would stab you to death for looking at them and you just cant separate the two.

It's not white families who are well known and serious serving up from their houses anymore, it's school kids on the corners doing it mostly because it's a side affect of the new street gang culture(in London anyway) good luck trying to stop them killing eachother, it's not even about the drugs with them boys.

wonder where they got that idea from..

(http://www.hboasia.com/images/posters/378x195/the_wire_29_hamsterdam.jpg)

how can you have such lethal substances legal?

I'm not just talking about the physical damage to the individual, i'm talking about substances that are so addictive once hooked you cant get out of bed and are so ill you cant function to the point where you no longer care how you get your next bit of stuff, you need it not for a buzz but just to feel normal, craving so bad and unparallelled you'll happily go out and rob any old dear or break into the first gaff you find, can never be condoned.

Paracetamol is legal? Pretty lethal in the right doses. Sorry if that sounds facetious but there are calls to decriminalise heroin and concentrate on treatment, it's possible to have a long-term heroin habit and remain pretty safe. A lot of the dangers for such people would not be knowing the strength of what you're getting, getting contaminated gear, and having to fund the habit by crime. The habit is only expensive because heroin is illegal, it's otherwise cheap, now that we control half of Afghanistan.

Er because legalising them and having the government as the dealer would make them less lethal?

if people were getting it for £2 a go instead of £10 or whatever and it was legal people would be taking loads more, they wouldnt stick their daily amount if it was a fraction of the price and a whole load of new people would start taking it, and what about crack?

I wrote 1 paragraph about them being lethal and 3 on the addictiveness of them and everyones focusing on the former.

forget about them being lethal then, that was just a side note.

you CANNOT stop crack being as addictive as it is, i dont care how or where you sell it you just cant.

this whole thing is just not pragmatically possible, it just wouldnt work.

What about halfway measures, at least decriminalise the possession of crack and heroin. What are you achieving by banging up an addict?

I sort of dont disagree with that but it seems a bit too ambiguous, where the lines would be drawn between dealing/possession, once it's legal to carry it i think it could be open to too much abuse.

crack and herion are such serious drugs, i just dont see it working.

Bolty....be a good chap and read your signature ;)

Everything is lethal in the right doses, including orange juice.

I would like to see the situation get better of course, i cant see in any form this helping, with most other drugs i think theres room for it if done correctly but not the top two, i dont think i can be dissuaded from the idea that so powerfull and addictive are these drugs that removing the criminal element from the equation would help with the overall sociological impact of the drugs.

It's not America, the street gangs here will fight and kill eachother if they fancy it but at the moment their arnt any huge drug wars on the ground level with the new generation of street dealers, theyre just kids and will kick off for any reason, all the crime is being commited by the users and that wont change.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/basicfax5.htm

BENOWITZ RATINGS

Substance   Withdrawal   Reinforcement   Tolerance   Dependence  Intoxication

Nicotine        3*                 4                         4           1            6

Heroin           2                     2                      2           2            2

Cocaine         3*                        1                   1           3            3

Alcohol          1                     3                       4           4            1

Caffeine         4                           5                  3           5            5

Marijuana        5                          6                  5           6            4

?????????? you sure

It all depends on how you measure addictiveness. The site I linked it also shows another completely different set of results.

Send in the hypnotists.

Is dependence the same as addictiveness?

In this context i would say absolutely yes

Disputes over quantifying the addictive nature of drugs is probably a mute point in the context of this discussion.

It's only one factor when assesing the overall harm of a drug. Gatso/bolts home office list is probably the most relevant.

Of course it's not, my point is that the original reason for these proposals was to stop the organised crime element operating and more importantly the violence it produces, the point i think ive made is that the way the organised crime element has evolved the violence will be there regardless and aside from that crime related to drugs is born almost uniquely out of necessity, the potency of the drug wouldn't change if it were legalized would it and therefore the ground level crime that herion and crack addiction would still remain.

Ok, but also looks to me like you could draw a nice 45 degree best fit line passing through the origin on that graph > the more addictive it is, the more harm it does, pretty much.

This doesn't prove that addictiveness causes the harm but I'd guess there are underlying neurological causitive links in some cases. 

I don't buy into that graph at all - there was a study on Vietnam vets, all of whom had been herion users in Vietnam. 80% chucked it after a bout of 'jungle fever' - of the 20% still addicted the vast majority had underlying trauma, mainly from childhood that made the sheer forgetfullness of heroin so addictive. The report didn't agree with the government line & so was sidelined.

*%ages from memory.

I don't think we can be drawing those sorts of conclusions.

They don't plug in an addicto-meter and take a reading, then plug in a harmo-meter and take another reading. The numbers are based on a whole host of observations and collated in an arbitary way (pulled out of their arse would be one way of putting it, but to be fair a lot of studies do a good job in trying to quantify the unquantifiable)

Of course addiction is a big factor in how dangerous a substance is (with exceptions obv) but the reason I said it was a mute point is that we're unlikely to get any kind of consenus as to the schemantics of the words addiction and dependance. Crack and Heroin are addictive and dangerous. If something else may or may not be more addictive it's a bit of an irrelevance is it not?

That is to say, is it not pretty evident that Crack and Heroin are the most dangerous and destructive drugs in terms of the affect they have on the users life as well as their family and neighbours. Why do we need charts and tables for this?

because without the charts and tables someone comes up with the idea to legalize all drugs and everyone just says: "yeah sure why not".

moot

drugs is bad innit.

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DduAbLpZDHg

Perfume's worse:

http://is.gd/1UypI

i agree. theres no one answer to the problem ,wishful thinking but no buyers ,end of problem,education and a society which cares how young people live would improve things ,mining villages in wales where lads left school and got a job never had any problems now its rife as lads have no job with nothing to do and drift into drugs,
we cant have an attitude of never arresting drug dealers just because it would start turf wars,laws have to be upheld ,what message does it send to generations to come, drug dealers sell death but we cant do nothing because it will start trouble,if you cause enough trouble you are above the law.
cant see society that will ever be willing to pay the cost to dramatically cut drugs down,stiffer penalties would cost and very harsh punishment would cause uproar, just hope one day technology will make it easy to stop it getting in.

Some good points there, well put.

You could always kill them, la

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/world/intensive-war-on-drugs-by-malaysia-and-singapore-shows-mixed-results.html

Maybe by then technology will have developed drugs for regular consumption that give opiate-like highs but which are perfectly safe to use. Some authors reckon it's the way forward, I think the following are among them.

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lwh/drugs/

/\ Was kind of a really well-respected Bible of psychopharmacology

be incredible if they could find a potent Heroin substitute without all the side effects ,i think the body makes you pay eventually for anything you take which has a powerful effect  but the problem is to big to just dismiss this as long shot ,a new approach does have to be found no matter how many years it takes to develop.there was a TV program months back showing how they have found a way to synthetically produce parts of marijuana plant without all the effects of marijuana ,this would ease pain for the people who smoke marajuana to ease pain, taken as a nasal spray,it dosent give anyone a buzz,maybe that's something that could be researched as well.
Killing Drug dealers, we are far to civilised for that,well so everyone keeps telling me :D

The view in Malaysia is as harsh, if less polite. ''We hang anyone convicted who exhausts their appeals,'' said Tey Boon Hwa, assistant director of the Anti-Narcotics Task Force. ''We also hang old ladies, even if we don't normally publicize it. If you get caught, you face the music.''

At least they have properly got the idea of deterrents. We could learn a thing or two.

when you think of the damage Heroin has caused in this country ,so many young lives lost,many lives ruined by addiction. familes destroyed,violance and crime to fund addiction.gang warfare with kids carrying guns,,IMO its niaeve to belive we dont have to introduce drastic measures .