Legal Drugs will cut crime

If you want to cut gun crime, first you have to license drugs - Sunday Times - Times Online

Todays link is to a feature by Simon Jenkins in yesterday's Sunday Times (UK) and a truer word has never been said. Going beyond the issue of whether mild herbal intoxicants like Cannabis should be removed from Britain's proscribed drug classification, this article reminds us that a huge underground economy exists purely because the matter is part of the legal system rather than considered as a social issue. Removing all drugs policy from the criminal realm would free up vast amounts of tax-payers money currently being spent on housing so-called "criminals" in prisons and also generate additional tax income from many people who are otherwise caught in a grey area outside the mainstream economy. Such a move would disenfranchise the real criminals behind the trafficing and product tampering, not to mention demystifying the culture surrounding drug use in a way that would allow more effective access to the social and medical problems underlying what has wrongly been preceived as a law and order issue. It would of course help too if the government stopped engaging in foreign policy that is actually encouraging the dependency of countries like Afghanistan on this present "black market" itself.

Many of these so-called "drugs" are actually natural medicines that would have traditionally fallen within the homeopathic arsenal of treatment. What is needed most is a return to quality control of the substances the planet gives us and a curb on the practices of the giant multi-national pharmaceutical companies who dabble, modify and imitate them in an endless quest to provide us with more and more ineffectual consumer products - many of which are turning out to be far more dangerous for us in themselves. Moreover, those who are daunted by the idea of chemical-fueled people running amok in the street should consider that the most common cause of such behaviour is that most sanctioned of dangerous "drugs" - alcohol.

Later