Jock's Place - Finally! plain speaking on drugs and gangs in the MSM - Comments

Howard didn't keep quiet over Bulger

Mountjoy — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:56:18 +0100

The Rhys Jones murder has been compared by some in the press, media and blogosphere to the murder of James Bulger. I recall at the time that both Howard and Bliar were very vocal. But this time Brown and Jacqui Smith have both kept very quiet, while Cameron and Davis, for example, have made major statements. Today's Ipsos MORI opinion poll in the Sun shows that fear of crime has increased by 18 percentage points since last month. The Government needs to speak up and come up with some deliverable policy on this issue, rather than just keeping quiet.

I hadn't noticed, probably

Jock — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 18:02:09 +0100

I hadn't noticed, probably because I haven't noticed any politician saying anything terribly revelatory about all this. But now you mention it, it has been quiet from that quarter. Straw has popped his head up though I think hasn't he?

Personally though, I just have this horrible feeling that most if not all the main political parties are currently in a rut where policy making is centred on "managing decline" with no great visions, paticularly liberal visions, of how things could be different. So why say anything if all you're going to do is join he knee-jerking jig...:)

Why has Jacqui Smith been so

Mountjoy (The Wilted Rose) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:55:28 +0100

Why has Jacqui Smith been so quiet about the issue of gun crime etc? Is it shame?

Of course those are valid

Jock — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:32:10 +0100

Of course those are valid issues Laura. But I do happen to believe that the chaotic living currently a mark of heavy drug/alcohol use is partly down to the criminal supply mechanisms as well. If you can buy your hits in, for example, packets of twenty down the off-license, you are much less likely to spend your days chaotically searching for the next hit. Poly-drug users even call it "doing the business" - and all their days can be filled with worrying about where their next hit is going to come from and how to pay the inflated prices the black market is able to charge for it.

As to how various substances should be supplied in a legalized market I'm not sure that the NHS is the best way to dispense recreational substances. Except perhaps when it is in the process of treatment to get people off. As to dosoages and so on, a lot of mostly informal work is done at the moment about dosages often by drug users for other drug users. But any harm minimization possible by such information is then destroyed by not knowing strengths and so on of what one is sold in the black market. One of the marks of legalization must be some kind of regulation in the form of quality control.

You're not likely to be able to sue the pusher on the street corner, but companies manufacturing such substances for a mass market will themselves want to be wary that they're not peddling stuff that is knowingly unsafe.

I would be interested to see any research along the lines of the Nutt scale of relative harms (the one that says alcohol and tobacco are the fifth and seventh most harmful drugs IIRC) based on a legalized and quality controlled market. Clearly people have previously lived pretty functional lives with opium addictions for example, so whether people would gravitate back to those sort of drugs rather than heroin injections or whether completely new products would appear that provided safer delivery and dosage mechanisms would also be interesting.

When are drug users going to take any responsibility?

The Poet Laura-eate — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 17:40:17 +0100

I think that whatever the solution is to the problem of drug-related crime and sociopathy, it would be ideal if we could make it THEIR problem rather than ours. I was unfortunate enough to experience two nightmare drug/alco housemates in a row and I *so* resented clearing up after their messes even in a domestic situation and hated them for their unasked for-impact on my whole life and mental health while circumstances obliged us to share a roof. Let's not forget these people by and large CHOOSE to take drugs of their own volition. Why should we keep pandering to people who have chosen to make their own lives hell and then moved on to those of everyone around them/rest of society? It's not like they can claim they didn't know the risks. When are they going to take any kind of responsibility for their own lives and choices/consequences of? And to say that they can't is surely to deny them their humanity (if they didn't do such a good job of that all by themselves). Sorry, I get a bit emotional about this issue! Anyway, if street drugs *were* legalised, presumably you are not suggesting drug users should be able to obtain them on the NHS Jock? And who would decide doseages? And wouldn't doctors compromise the hippocratic oath by prescribing if it's not in the name of healing, but rather indulgence? I'm afraid I'm only a fair weather liberal myself (ie everything's only cool as long as it doesn't hurt or impact unduly on anyone else)

For what its worth, I agree

Tristan Mills — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:54:58 +0100

For what its worth, I agree entirely.

I don't want to take drugs myself (if I did, I would anyway), but from both a philosophical point of view (who am I to say what you put in your body?) and a practical point of view (as you have highlighted here) I am utterly opposed to the War on Drugs.

Finally! plain speaking on drugs and gangs in the MSM

Jock — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 02:46:57 +0100

...but will the politicians listen? Somehow, I doubt it!

Since I wrote my piece on gangs and drugs on Saturday I've seen a steady trickle of hits from Google searches about Rhys Jones and I've kept an eye on the search terms and found I was pretty well alone in voicing the opinion that drugs policy plays the biggest part in the gang gun deaths that stalk some of our estates. So it is with some relief that I find Johann Hari is another voice of sanity in today's Independent:

Johann Hari: Tragic victims of a self-defeating policy:

This is the story of two victims of a war that cannot be won and should not be fought. You have heard of the first: Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old in Liverpool who was shot in the neck as he played on his bike. You have not heard of the second: Andres Sauzo, a 24-year-old Mexican man who had his arms, legs and head chain-sawed from his body, and was found rotting in five bin bags scattered across his home town of Zihyatanejo. They are casualties - either direct or indirect - in a war that kills tens of thousands of people a year, and could end tomorrow, if we chose to.

Rhys and Andres were killed because of a political decision by the US government to wage a global "war on drugs", and demand other governments fall into line. When you criminalise a massive and growing industry – some 5 per cent of the world's entire economic activity – it does not go away. It is handed to armed criminal gangs, who flood the streets with guns to secure a slice of the riches.

Aside from also citing Milton Friedman, he goes on rightly to criticize the British political reaction to the events of the past week. I hope some of them are listening, and can hear over the noise of their knees jerking and their bandwagons' creaking...

The scattered proposals tossed out this week to deal with drug gangs are elaborate evasions of the real issue. Banning gang videos on YouTube is barely even a sticking plaster, while the Cameroonian idea that gangs are the rancid afterbirth squeezed out by single parents simply doesn't match with the facts. Denmark has the highest rate of single parenthood in Europe – but it has virtually no gangs, except among recent immigrant communities, who overwhelmingly consist of stable two-parent families.

No: if we want to stop gang culture, we need to take back the industry that makes gangs rich, and give it once again to doctors, pharmacists and off-licenses. Legalizing drugs rips the spine out of gangs. Of course they will try to move into other industries – protection rackets, cigarette smuggling and so on – but these have far lower profit margins. In a legalised economy, the gangs would no longer be the richest kids on the estate, and could barely afford firepower, so the core of their glamour would melt away.

We should be outraged. In my opinion our governments, acting in our name, are knowingly complicit in the suffering and the deaths that all this causes, for little benefit and certainly with no liberal philosophical justification. We should be demanding action now, not only to save future Rhys Joneses, but to save what is estimated at £18bn a year in domestic policing and criminal justice costs alone.