Jacqui Smith: how many have you condemned to death today?

Jock — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:00:49 +0000

Yeah, okay, it's a bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but I simply cannot fathom why someone who is presumably deemed bright enough by her colleagues to manage law and order in this country cannot understand how drugs prohibition worsens the problem and leads to deaths, from violent street crime in the gangs that fight over patches where they sell drugs, via the dangers of adulterated or unknown strength products, to ignorance of what to do in reaction to symptoms of drugs and the inability to admit you have a problem because it marks you out as a criminal.

And our lawmakers are directly responsible for all these deaths. They could begin to take the supply chain out of the hands of the real criminals, disarming the streets. They could regulate and control the quality of substances so that people know what it is they are getting and taking. They could make it so much easier for people to access treatment where they develop a problem, and remember not all drugs users do develop a problem, simply by removing the stigma of criminalization, freeing up people to admit to friends and family, to stop hiding until it's too late.

Channel Four News has just run a package talking to teenagers who started various drugs in their early to mid teens. This is a problem, but it is far more difficult a problem to tackle while the whole supply chain is criminal, hiding from the law not operating within it and subject to proper scrutiny like alcohol and tobacco sales. And I'll bet you that in any community in the country there are more drugs dealers hiding, especially if you include 'social suppliers' who just sell to a close circle of friends, than there are outlets for the legal drugs of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. How are you supposed to police that. How are you supposed to police the international trade in heroin when you realize that a month's supply for an individual addict can be concentrated enough to fit under the postage stamp on a letter?

And now, in addition to all the deaths and misery that prohibition causes, the government wants to overturn a central tenet of nearly all legal systems - that one is innocent until proven guilty - by seizing assets when someone is arrested on suspicion of supplying drugs rather than on conviction. We have truly entered a police state.

Jacqui Smith...I hope you are prepared, just as the Defense Secretary should do to returning coffins of our service personnel from theatres of operations, to attend every funeral of a drug related death of someone's son, someone's daughter, someone's husband or wife, look their relatives in the eye and tell them you're doing everything possible. Because you're not. You're exacerbating the problem and making rich some very nasty people. Prohibition kills, just as surely as if you strapped them to a chair and plugged them into the national grid, and you are perpetuating those deaths.

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Jacqui Smith: how many have you condemned to death today?