Re: 14 Brits Killed in Afghanistan this afternoon

Maria wrote:
On 3 Sep 2006 06:04:31 -0700, "Mel Rowing" <mel.rowing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Narcotics are addictive. Is it a good thing to increase the sphere of
such dependency.

Lots of things can be addictive - drugs, food, gambling, playing sport
etc. I question the validity of addictiveness as an argument for
prohibition.

Quite!

Except that we have to eat. It is therefore easy to see a biological
function in food being addictive.

Gambling is a social menace to be sure. A mug's game but a menace for
all that. I doubt very much whether liberalisation of the gambling laws
has done much to curb the excesses of gambling. Quite the contrary I
would have thought. I know of a good business that went to the wall
because of it.

I'm not sure where this is leading us. Are you saying that addictions
of any nature are not a bad thing or at least weaknesses?

Let there be no doubt about it if the sale of drugs were legalised the
use of drugs would multiply as would the attendant problems of
dependency.

I don't know how you can know that, anymore than I can know that it
won't. To reiterate a point I thought I made, drugs are so freely
available now that it's difficult to say. I can get any drug I want,
within a few hours of asking. Most people I know (including myself)
don't go near them because we are not attracted to it, and because the
sight of serious addicts is enough to put us off. It's a fools game. I
like to be compus mentis and so do the majority of people, which is
why even though alcohol is freely available, the majority do not go
about in a constant state of drunkenness.

Drugs are market commodities. Price balances supply and demand. If
prices are so high as conventional wisdom suggests that would indicate
restriction of supply otherwise high profits would draw in further
supply.

Increase of supply to the point of marginal profitability would
minimise price but that could only be done through an increase in
consumption surely?

In fact we've already seen this in relation to alcohol. When I was a
kid, when did we ever have drink in the house? I'll tell you when every
Christmas a dozen bottles of brown ale for my dad and a bottle of port
or sherry. Once they were gone that was it until next year!

In this village I would say that every family (except us) opens a
bottle of wine every evening. Being a gentleman of leisure, I see the
empties being thrown into the dustcart! Indeed some of them are
slurping the stuff if you happen to call during the day. I'm not saying
they are a bunch of drunks. They are not. I am saying that affluence
has benefited the drinks industry as indeed it has every other.

How has the drinks industry responded? They have chased this extra
demand in the quest for profit share through innovative products,
promotions and advertising and increased production thus inevitably
retraining price.

However, as we have both remarked, there is a downside to increased
alcohol consumption. How therefore has government responded to all
this? The answer is they have liberalised the licensing laws. What
somebody does in the privacy of their own home although being just as
physiologically injurious, nonetheless by and large remains private.
However, when folk get tipped out of pubs and clubs and wreak mayhem on
the streets that's a different matter . Upstanding citizens like
ourselves get concerned.

Thus bar hours have been extended in the faint hope that drunks will
remain longer in bars and that their eventual appearance on the streets
will be more staggered (in the temporal sense!) and so more manageable.
In justification of this we were sold the fallacious notion that folk
get drunk through binge drinking rather than over drinking and that
binge drinking is a pathetic attempt to overcome unreasonable
restrictions on drinking hours. It doesn't appear to have occurred to
anybody in authority that getting pissed is part of our cultural
heritage.

So removal of regulation on the sale of alcohol has not addressed the
question of alcohol abuse and its attendant social consequences. Quite
the contrary.

I would suggest to you that removal of restrictions on the supply of
narcotics would follow a similar path. Despite what anybody says, there
weren't the drugs about there are today when I was a teenager say. They
never even featured in conversation.

However, kids didn't have the disposable income then. They do now.
That's been the primary factor in the so called drug epidemic we are
experiencing. Further unlike in the case of the legal alcohol market,
the illegal restricted drug market is unable to move to marginal
profitability in the same way. That's the reason for your high price.

Of course, kids who cannot afford such prices may well turn to crime to
fund their addiction. That's not the point which is if you do act to
reduce prices than this can only be done at the social cost of further
consumption. There is no best of both worlds.


Profits are
increased through promotions and advertising. You know of no commercial
enterprise that doesn't seek to broaden the appeal of its product.

Such things can be outlawed, just as cigarette advertising has been.
It hasn't stopped people from selling or profiting from selling or
manufacturing cigarettes, even when usage has dropped as low as it
has.

You can but only at the expense of strangulating an embryonic industry
right from the start. Who's going to be interested in a commercial
venture like that. Consider British American Tobacco (BAT)

In the days when 80% of adult male Britons smoked cigarettes a habit
that was seen as a social grace, there were numerous cigarette
manufacturing companies W.H & H.O, Wills, John Player, Gallaghers to
name but three that come to mind. All of them have become subsumed
into BAT. The sale of tobacco products accounts for ~20% of company
revenue. If it were not for foreign sales it wouldn't even be that.

The time cannot surely be too distant before BAT renames itself and
sells off its brands to foreign suppliers. Cigarettes have been around
a fair time, the decline in sales has been prolonged over around 40
years. BAT has had time to manage this decline and diversify into
different products.

You are asking an enterprise(s) to do that from the word go even
before it gets off the ground.

2) when people can afford to buy drugs, it is generally not considered
a problem - see middle class cocaine users for example. They earn
enough that they need not commit crime to obtain their kicks and it
doesn't dominate their lives.

Do we not get from time to time reports of celebrities being admitted
into rehab?

That is their business, just as it is the business of people who go to
alcohol clinics.

Well it is in as much as they provide the wherewith all to buy these
expensive treatments. This particular group do of course.

How many more who perhaps enjoy lower celebrity status but
nonetheless wealth and/or status anonymously or quietly enter the less
well known clinics?

How about them? How about the many middle-income people who enjoy drug
use for fun at the weekends and who never need to use a clinic?

I don't know but the private clinics that specialise in this type of
treatment are surely not maintained on a "just in case" basis.

In the days before legalised abortion, there would appear to have been
no demand for such a service by the 'nice' girls who had been to
Roedean or Cheltenham LC.

They didn't go to back street abortionists either.

But everyone knows that they did. What's the point?

They didn't you know!

They had a consultation with a private doctor over a "delicate
gynaecological matter", denied any question (presumably with a wink) of
pregnancy and were admitted to a private clinic for what was termed "a
scrape". Given the miracle of medicine the suffering young lady would
be out of bed in a day or so, cured and home before anybody noticed she
had gone anywhere. Daddy picked up a fat bill and it was never
mentioned again.

If you have money you quite often are in a position to buy your way out
of difficulties. That does not mean that the difficulties don't arise.

It seems on the face of it a rather odd way of going about things. On
the one hand, we encourage and facilitate a particular form of
behaviour yet on the other we seek to discourage it.

It seems odd because we made the mistake (IMHO) of prohibiting it in
the first place. Prohibition does not and has never worked. If the US
can reverse parts of its laws to put right that wrong (attempting to
outlaw alcohol) then I'm sure we can without feeling too silly about it.

In relation to alcohol there was a first place. Alcohol had been used
universally for centuries or millenia before any attempt was made to
prohibit it.

Before somebody jumps down my throat, opiates in particular have a long
history too. I believe the poppy flower is depicted on a pharaoh's tomb
somewhere. However I believe there was a difference in perception.

The fermentation process was first of all a means of rendering drinking
water potable. The orientals achieved the same by boiling the water and
adding azalea leaves to mask the taste and so became tea drinkers. Thus
both types of drink became integrated into the culture and ritual of
the different societies and no doubt the recreational use of both were
appreciated from the very beginning.

Opiates were primarily used as medicines and analgesics in particular.
Perish the thought of having a tooth extracted without anaesthetic. No
doubt long term users would become addicted but would not have been
regarded as such so much as weakness of will or evidence of continued
illness. Laudanum was the best known such medicines. It was the wonder
cure all of the age. Potions based on it were given to small children
and even rubbed on children's gums to ease teething problems or to stop
crying. It was even used in cough mixture.

Recreational use of opiates have history too. I understand that the
Victorian literalists enthused about its virtues. No doubt if all we
had to do in life was write a poem or a piece of prose every time the
mood took us we too could afford such a luxury. However, we live in a
modern world. If I drove a car (which I do) or a bus carrying 70+
people or an aircraft carrying 350+ or a train carrying a 1000+ or took
folks' appendix out etc.etc. then society would have every right to
demand of me greater restraint with regard to may habits and keeping my
wits about me.

Beyond that I cannot emphasise too strongly that in the days yore
addiction would not have been sen in the same light as today (neither
would drunkenness) In fact it took the American Civil War to raise
consciousness of addiction when it was realised that wounded veterans
of the conflict were unable to give up their opiate medications.

Gradually doctors began to realise the downsides of the use and
certainly overuse of opiates. In fact heroin was developed and
introduced by the German company Bayer in the mistaken belief that it
was a non addictive opiate.

What of the argument that prohibition itself is encouragement?


The question that needs to be asked is has the downside of alcohol
consumption been mitigated.

Absolutely not.

On that then we agree so why should it mitigate the downside of drug
use?

We already have it. I don't think some people recognise how widespread
the use of illegal drugs is.

In relative terms yes! However, I doubt whether there are as many
heroin users as tobacco users for instance.

Unlike alcohol and tobacco, illicit narcotics don't travel up and down
motorways by the truck load.

Sorry...can't see your point.

Well it's like this.

If a area/region say Manchester needed 2 or 3 large trucks a day in
order to meet its tobacco/alcohol demand it could have them. Similarly
4,5 6 or as many as you like. No police or enforcement officer would
have any interest in them. However, if the same region needed even one
truck a day in order to meet its narcotics demand then there would be
logistical problems. Such loads would not enjoy unrestricted freedom of
the highways. The more that travels the greater the level of
interception an attendant risk. It's simply not true to say that that
an illegal industry could supply the levels of demand that would be
enjoyed by a legal industry. If it could then narcotics prices would be
a lot lower than they are said to be.

High street prices are good news for the enforcers. A fall in prices
indicate that interception rates are falling. Regulation caps supply.

The old tax argument. Once you start to talk in terms of taxing
anything you create an edge for the illicit trader. Ask yourself why 1
in 5 cigarettes smoked in this country are contraband? Ask why
counterfeit packets exist. Ask why it is profitable to import alcoholic
beverages from the near continent.

Simple Because we are taxing these things to death! A 50 gram pouch
of tobacco in Spain costs £1.50 - here it costs £8! If those taxes
were harmonised, there would be no need for contraband, no benefit in
contraband,

Any level of tax represents unearned income by the government and
easier potential profit for a smuggler.

Poppy farming is only a secondary issue in the war in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was not invaded to frustrate the opium trade. In fact the
Taliban had already all but eliminated it.

And IIRC we had record crime levels at the time.

Depends which type of crime you speak of. It's very difficult to make
such connections.

This is another of those myths that the pro legislation lobby invent
and bandy around.

It doesn't help that that is one of the reasons we keep being told our
troops are there.

We are told AIUI that the troops are there as part of a NATO operation
to protect the local people, authorities and agencies from the Taliban.

The poppies are a side show. They could be most easily dealt with by
spraying from the air with herbicide. Why this doesn't happen is beyond
me.

Sorry but I do not believe that. In my little town, all the drug
dealers (and there are many of them each with a finger in the little
pie) are lads (and a couple of girls) I know, from respectable
two-parent working families. I knew them all when they were dots - no
criminal backgrounds there. The simple fact is that you can make a lot
of money from a few sales - it's easy money - far more than the £5.05
you get working in a factory.
If you want to talk about the bigger fish, traffickers and the like, I
agree with you. They will probably find some other illicit activity.
I am talking about the little fishes, those who burgle or rob to feed
their habit even though they would never have done such a thing
before, small time dealers who sell it to run flashy car and live at
home with their parents or in a modest flat.

I was just quoting my number 1 who earns an honest shilling dealing
with these people. He assures me that with most of them if he weren't
locking them up for dealing he would be locking them up for something
else.


Don't see the the drug dealer as a misunderstood or misguided
businessman another myth that legalisers have invented and bandy about.

I don't. That's what scares me - they are just normal lads who found a
way to make an easy buck. The police don't do anything much about them
here anymore. That's why they deal to schoolkids out of the boot of
their cars at the park. We have children as young as 12 dealing in
this area now. We do not have a hardened criminal element here.

It sounds to me as though you most certainly do!

Perhaps you should jot down the numbers of some of these cars.

LOL. As a person who now feels like a criminal when I smoke in public,
I would argue against the respectable thing. Most people, even
addicts, do not think it is respectable - that's one reason why
addiction leads to a dramatic loss of self-esteem. They might think
it's cool when they start (because it's unlawful), or when they are
city kids hanging around in London bars, but respectable? I don't
think has been for a long time - not since Queen Vicky used it anyway!

But we are discussing it being made perfectly lawful!

Other losers would be anyone who was the victim of accidents caused by
those who are out of their minds on narcotics particularly those who
insist on combining the effect with that of alcohol.

That doesn't already happen?

It might appear so yes. We have reports of blood/urine samples taken as
the result of positive breathalyzer tests increasingly testing positive
for narcotics and other substances. Very disturbing!

I can't see how legalisation is going to improve on this, For reasons
stated, quite the contrary.

Other losers would be those like me, muggins who would have to fork out
to rehabilitate those who seek rehabilitation, detoxing those who
sought detoxification and maintaining those who sought neither.

The tax will pay for that, or at least should if we can actually get a
government who does its job properly.

This tax would appear to be going to pay for an awful lot bearing in
mind that if it is levied at more than a modest level it will give the
illegal operator an edge.

NB I would remind you that nicotine is the most addictive substance
known to man, and yet people do not commit crime to support their
habit and are free to seek assistance to give up as well as having
more than covered potential health treatments with the tax they pay.

As an ex-smoker I'm prepared to accept that.

However, AFAIK smoking does not impair mental performance in addition.

.

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