Archive for category Irrational Drug Policy

“Morality” prevents needle exchange policy. “Morality”causes drug addicts’ HIV deaths

Junkies don’t want Aids. They want to use clean needles. Clean needles eliminate the Aids problem in injectable drug addicts. So, logically, let’s provide clean needles! A non-brainer. But then comes drug policy, moralistic prejudice, (unconscious) wish to punish the sinners with Aids, police arrest for needle possession. Result: addicts use dirty needles and get HIV.

Compare this legitimate injection kit obtained...

Legitimate Drug Injection Kit (Wikipedia)

Human Irrationality, dogmas, blindness at its best.“People do stupid things. That’s what spreads HIV.”

Needle exchange is an even clearer solution then condom use efforts. Because condoms are unpleasant. Clean needles are not even detracting from drug “pleasure”.

Our “morality” is outdated & immoral. We need updated morality.

Drug War, morality, religion, sexual morality etc prevent needle exchanges, thus cause HIV infection and deaths. Call it insanity. Call it suffering and death caused by false outdated stupid “morality”. Dogma, blindness, self-deception ….. We believe in our 2000year old holy books. They were very good for their times. But no biblical author knew about HIV virus transmission or drug addiction therapy. In later posts I will write about Peter Singer’s utilitarism as a help to guide our morals.

Elisabeth Pisani @ TED

“People do stupid things. That’s what spreads HIV.”  [ . . . ] Now, let’s look at it from a policy maker’s point of view. This is a really easy problem. For once, your incentives are aligned. We’ve got what’s rational for public health. You want people to use clean needles, and junkies want to use clean needles. So we could make this problem go away simply by making clean needles universally available and taking away the fear of arrest.
ted.com/talks/view/id/818

Now, the first person to figure that out and do something about it on a national scale was that well-known, bleeding heart liberal Margaret Thatcher. And she put in the world’s first national needle exchange program and other countries followed suit, Australia, The Netherlands and few others, and in all of those countries, you can see, not more than four percent ever became infected with HIV, of injectors.

In places that didn’t do this, New York City for example, Moscow, Jakarta, we’re talking, at its peak, one in two injectors infected with this fatal disease. Now, Margaret Thatcher didn’t do this because she has any great love for junkies. She did it because she ran a country that had a national health service. So, if she didn’t invest in effective prevention, she was going to have pick up the costs of treatment later on, and obviously those are much higher. So she was making a politically rational decision. Now, if I take out my public health nerd glasses here, and look at these data, it seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it. But in this country, where the government apparently does not feel compelled to provide health care for citizens, we’ve taken a very different approach. So what we’ve been doing in the United States is reviewing the data, endlessly reviewing the data. So these are reviews of hundreds of studies by all the big muckety-mucks of the scientific pantheon in the United States, and these are the studies that show needle programs are effective, quite a lot of them. ted.com/talks/view/id/818

Rational Publich Healty Policy demands
  • allow needle exchange to make addiction less dangerous
  • consider furnishing cleaner, cheaper, less harmful drugs

Of course, if we furnish needles, we should also furnish anti-addiction therapy, public information, etc. Some think one should not spend money to prevent addicts from getting AIDS: these addicts pass on AIDS to non-addicted innocent partners, who then could pass it on to you and me. And once an addict has AIDS, society helps to treat the medical AIDS cases with massive financial investments. Needles are cheaper!

We need morality and public action to reign in disease & death through drugs

We need to try to reduce drug damage by information policy, advertising, influencing public opinion, education, ………

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Decriminalizing and legalizing drugs: a necessity

A Cannabis sativa leaf.

Image via Wikipedia

An important police chief in Britain is calling to decriminalize drugs. Portugal did so 5 years ago, seemingly with no ill effects. In the US, the cost of the drug war and incarceration petty drug crimininals is staggering. Planting 10 Cannabis plants yields enormous prison terms while legalized alcohol cigarettes, and junk food wreak havoc on national health. Mexico’s is being taken over by murderous drug cartels that are a product of US and Mexican drug prohibitions.

Drug cartels in Mexico already won the war on drugs

Has the time finally come in the international campaign against drugs to put down the guns, admit defeat and simply legalize the lot — cocaine, heroin, marijuana, you-name-it?

The Economist magazine says so. The same goes for Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, not to mention University of Toronto Latin America expert Judith Teichman.

“The only way you’re going to reduce the violence and corruption is by legalizing the drugs,” says Teichman. “You can’t conclude anything else if you know what you’re talking about.”

American writer and journalist Charles Bowden agrees. He has recently written a searing account of life and death in Ciudad Juarez. Published last month, Murder City portrays a stricken community of 1.3 million people who witnessed 2,600 mostly drug-related homicides last year alone, a place where killers roam freely and everyone else is afraid.

Bowden calls on Washington to legalize narcotics as the only means of reducing the carnage.

Editors of The Economist have long taken the same view, albeit with heavy hearts, calling legalization “the least bad” of the mainly dismal choices available.

“It’s absurd to declare a war when the drug cartels have already won,” argues Vargas Llosa in an article originally published this past January in the Lima newspaper El Comercio. “(The drug cartels) are here to stay.” thestar.com/news/insight/article/813051

See also: How our casual drug habits helped kill 28,228 Mexicans Or is it our restrictive drug laws helped kill 28000 Mexicans!?

Portugal decriminalized in 2001 with no ill effects

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Czechs may possess 15 g of marijuana, 1 g of cocaine, 1.5 gram of heroin, 4 ecstasy pills, 5 units of LSD, 2 g of amphetamines

Prague – The Czech government today approved the list of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms, including hemp, coca, mescaline cactus and magic mushrooms, and decided that people would be allowed to grow up to five pieces of such plants and keep 40 magic mushrooms at home, a CTK source said.
http://www.ceskenoviny.cz/zpravy/czech-govt-defines-rules-of-hallucinogenic-plants-growing/411010
http://www.radio.cz/en/article/74121
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/0,1518,673127,00.html [german]

The liberal law went into effect in January 2010.

The government’s approval of a table specifying what amounts of drugs are permissible is a vital part of the country’s new penal code that was last year approved by both houses of parliament and in January of this year was signed into law by President Vaclav Klaus. Without the just-approved table of amounts that will be used by Czech police, the January decriminalization of the drug would be difficult to judge by courts and investigators.

The plant still remains illegal, however, though from the new year possession of five or less plants is merely a misdemeanour, and fines for possession will be on par with penalties for parking violations.

The Czech decision is in sync with the country’s liberal, Dutch-like social attitudes and laissez-faire approach to civil liberties.

There is also an interesting lifestyle footnote: Czechs are Europe’s biggest drinkers of hops-infused beer and are also the continent’s leaders in smoking pot.

Czech decriminalization of small amounts of cannabis possession does not, however provide greater clarity to the country’s policy on medical marijuana, an issue which is gaining momentum both in Europe, in North America and elsewhere around the globe.
http://blogs.wsj.com/new-europe/2009/12/08/czech-govt-allows-5-cannabis-plants-for-personal-use-from-2010/

Human-stupidity comments

  • Great that people don’t go to jail for the victimless crime of possessing drugs for their own use. This is a great start. Using certain drugs may be stupid (e.g. too much alcohol), but that should not be a criminal case.
  • “Unfortunately [the law]‘s not bringing anything new on the prevention side, and this is most worrying.” http://www.radio.cz/en/article/123873 Intense government campaigns should make using drugs less “hip” and reduce usage and abuse. Unfortunately alcohol usage is a huge problem world wide, and of course other drugs may become a bigger health problem too.
  • Where should these drugs come from? the delivery guy still is criminalized and thus drug crime still a problem. Except if every user now starts growing his own supply. Everyone engaging in agriculture might be very good but creates other problems (what to do with surplus harvest, or when stocks run out, or before the pot is harvested). What if I don’t like growing plants at home, or mom does not allow it? And where should I get my ecstasy and heroin supply from, legally?

Compare Dutch Drug Laws
By allowing possession and retail sales of cannabis, but not cultivation or wholesale, the government creates numerous problems of crime and public safety, he alleges, and therefore he would like to switch to either legalising and regulating production, or to the full repression

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Germany bans Cola drink for 0.4 micrograms/l cocaine content

Another absurd example of drug policy going haywire. The sugar content and artificial coloring, and the empty calories are deadly menaces to public health. Very minute traces of cocaine are probably totally inefficient, maybe even beneficial according to old South American Indian tradition. Certainly the coffeine is more dangerous. It will be interesting if such traces will be found in other foodstuffs.

The illegal cocaine alkaloid – one of 10 found in coca and representing only 0.8% of the plant’s chemical make-up – is chemically removed before use, as mandated by international anti-narcotics agencies.

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Ecstasy less dangerous then alcohol and cigarettes, British Government Study shows

MDMA (‘ecstasy’): a review of its harms and classification under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 – Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs

Studies ordered by the British government show that Ecstasy is less dangerous then alcohol and cigarettes. Still the penalties for ecstasy will continue as stringent as for heroin.

Extasy study rescinded

A 1992 study published in Science Magazine, showing extreme damage caused by ecstasy consumption had to be rescinded because researches had injected the wrong drug (!)

more details in the german version of this post  %LANG:, : and %.

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