The failure of drug policy has been plain to see for anyone with half a brain in their head for decades. Prohibition does nothing to reduce harm. It increases harm, criminalising users forced to buy impure substances on the street at inflated prices that often forces them down a criminal route to pay for their habits, financing gangsters and putting guns on the street in this country, even more guns on the streets in the countries that produce them. Prohibition simply does not work.
The research chemical / legal highs trade is proving this in spades, driving a coach and horses through the legislation. For every substance they ban half a dozen more pop up with only minor tweaks to make them legal. Case in point with the Methoxetamine ( a Ketamine analogue ) ban under a Temporary Class Drug Order in April. Within weeks of the ban RC vendors were offering other Arylcyclohexylamines to replace it, mostly PCP analogues. Newer analogues have come to market since. The same is true for just about any other drug of abuse out there: Opioids, Cannabinoids, Tryptamines, Phenylethylamines, Benzopiazepines, you name it, take your pick, all freely available on the internet. Are these substances more harmful than those they're intended to mimic? Who knows. Noone can say, they don't have a long enough history of use, but potentially much more harmful. It's very likely according to the little research that's been done on these newer drugs that certain combinations of them at least will prove to be dangerously neurotoxic. Much more so than the Ecstasy high users are trying to replicate with some of them for instance, a substance with a long history of use and reasonably well understood dangers. There are designer opioids out there that are to Heroin what Heroin is to Codeine, a 100 times more powerful than Morphine FFS. I don't see how this trade can be stopped. You could bring in broad, sweeping analogue laws like they have in the US, and just like in the US ways will be found around them. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.
Further idiotic conequences of prohibition would be the difficulty legitimate researchers have studying the therapeutic applications of some of these substances. out just recently on how even a single dose of Ketamine can prove of immense benefit for some sufferers of depressive type illnesses. Not even new news, largely repeating the findings of a previous in 2007. Believe there are other studies going back still further, and the potential therapeutic applications of LSD and MDMA for instance are perhaps even better known. That researchers should have to jump through hoops because of prohibition to be even allowed to conduct even small scale, tightly controlled research into applications that may be of enormous benefit to mankind truly defies all logic.
There are stirrings at last of a sensible debate on the fringes of power but I don't hold out much hope for reform any time soon. The David Nutt Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs debacle shows Govt will cling to their failed policy against all evidence and rational advice for some time yet at least. What's really interesting at the moment is that David Nutt and colleagues have set up their own as a direct challenge to the ACMD he was sacked from for speaking the truth. Be interesting to see how the ISCD and ACMD are gonna square up to each other in the coming months. A few bruised egos, noses out of joint and professional reputations riding on this in both camps, and no mistake. The cynic in me can't help worrying that it's all a bit preaching to the (mainly) converted so something of an irrelevant side-show to the whole sorry mess really, that won't have all that much of an impact at all straight off, but some on the fringes of Govt some are finally starting to suggest that there must be better alternatives out there to what we've got and we should maybe at least explore them. Hopefully the ISCD will legitimise the attempts of some in Govt to move sensibly in that direction and foster more of it, in time.
You can't, not without reverting to a limited free membership that lets you put an ad and profile together but has no access rights to the forum, chatroom and private messaging system. There are some full members who don't have to pay, because they were already registered members of the site before the takeover in 2005 that saw the site go commercial. They have lifetime free membership. All accounts registered post-takeover are either basic, limited free accounts, or full paid for accounts. That's your options unfortunately.
Album Title Goes here? How have I missed that he's got another album out? Thought 4x4=12 was a big improvement over For Lack of a Better Name but he doesn't try hard enough for me. Too content to let the same pattern just repeat and repeat with no attempt to build on it, or break it down, or get all clever with the production so a simple pattern suddenly has layer on layer of added complexity in the way sounds are shaped or made percussive with detailed little self-contained rhythms of their own. Downloading as we speak, will pass verdict on it in a bit.
OMG! :shock: I did didn't I? Well that's it, I blame you for snapping me out of my dozing amidst Dawnie's ample bosom with the shock, horror of it all. You're instead of your? Please, I never do that. Schoolboy error. Must have been quite distracted by something at the time, not properly concentrating on me correct grammar!
I blame Dawnie for me coming over all in need of a soft, warm place to lay my weary head all of a sudden. You're fault Dawnie for providing me with the perfect mental image of just such a comfy spot to nuzzle down into. :twisted:
Jags was a very long standing member, one of the first, and one of the first moderators on the forum. Really lovely in PM but a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Never got to meet her and sorry about that. One of the guys here made that :jagsatwork: emote for her, that Jags could only be a teacher pretty obvious when you thought about it. Could be a stern mistress, oh yes! ;)
Give over Cubes. You don't really need me to translate do you? Bear in mind I'm of Scottish descent so the sentiment is even more keenly felt! ;)
Right now mostly Simon Posford's stuff: Shpongle, Infinity Project, Younger Brother, all served up with a sprinkling of Radiohead. Works for me.
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
As true now as it was 150 odd years ago. Any nation that still executes its own citizens as a matter of course, regardless of the severity of the original crime being punished fails the civilisation test, and absolutely fails it in my view as soon as simple political expediency and 'popular opinion' trump the duty of care properly owed by the State to the very least of its citizens, even the very worst of them. The death penalty exists to absolve the State of its moral obligation to the citizen it's sworn to protect and defend when it suits, before we even get to the individual facts of individual cases, and that's what makes cold-blooded State execution morally wrong in all circumstances, regardless of the specifics IMO.
On this I'd argue that the reason we elect this Govt or that in the first place is to take the decisions we're not fully qualified to make for ourselves where our darkest, most visceral emotional reactions to the actions of another human being are concerned. It's easy to dress up blood-lust and vengeance as morally just retribution for some crimes, but the darker motives at the heart of capital punishment remain, and taint the soul of the nation. So much so that we've gone so far as a nation as to sign away the right to reintroduce the death penalty come what may domestically with the 2002 signing of Protocol 13 of the ECHR that forbids it, binding us so powerfully to a treaty only the UK's withdrawal from the Council of Europe altogether can unmake. Guess that makes the whole question of a referendum somewhat moot Flower?
;)
:worship: :worship: All hail the bard of Salford, the punk-poet maestro of the flat vowel! 
