gun crime

Jock on drugs...

Jock — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:32:07 +0100

...but if some of you arrived here because of a scurrilous Labour leaflet trying to discredit me because of my opinion on drugs issues, I wanted to settle your minds, I hope, with a synopsis of my position...

I am indeed in principle in favour of legalizing the vast majority of recreational drugs - for adults. Once legalized, their supply should be regulated, controlled through a licensing system, and taxed - which can help fund more treatment instead of prison cells. It is not the state's job to prevent adults in particular choosing to put something into their own body, or indeed, like dangerous sports and so on, what they do with their own body, if others are not harmed by that. Such laws actually remove the ability of the individual to be morally responsible for what they themselves do.

That is not to say that I want to see an increase in drugs use. Just that I believe that it is the current approach, the "war on drugs", that creates and sustains an illegal underground market that encourages people into multiple addictions and puts people into the hands of criminal suppliers who could not care less about the health of their customers so long as the money rolls in. It was recently suggested that the international trade in illicit narcotics is now the world's third largest trading sector, after I think it was financial services and energy. When heroin was legal in this country we had 18 registered addicts in the country - despite it being used in common, over the counter, drugs such as cough syrups. Make it illegal and we have seen the level of addition soar exponentially.

This is a long considered and pragmatic position, that agrees with many professionals in the fields both of law enforcement and drug treatment. Basically, that the current system, based on criminal enforcement, puts far more people in danger from drugs - it makes it easier to peddle to children, because the peddlars are unseen and uncontrolled (and sometimes children in the schoolyard themselves). It creates the core of gang and gun culture. It makes it harder to seek help when, in doing so, you have to out yourself as a criminal.

From Colombia to Croxteth, Afghanistan to the Aylesbury Estate, more people die because of the criminal networks engaged in the drugs trade than from the drugs themselves. Our politicians know this and continue to pursue the obviously failed "war on drugs" strategy because it is a populist one that's sure to get some people huffing and puffing and voting for them - don't fall for it - they are nothing short of accessories to murder! We need a mature debate about these immoral laws (any law that actually colludes in and creates the environment that breeds killings in our communities is an immoral law).

Nonetheless, as the desperate Labour party scaremongers know, my theoretical position on drugs is not one that has much relevance in the role of a city councillor, which is why we Lib Dems have decided not to rise to this astonishing personal attack, marring as it does what has been a reasonably well conducted campaign so far, and concentrate on the positive things we wish to do within the remit of the city council. I do not want any more people, and predominantly younger people as many of the victims of the current drugs system are, dying because of a populist and immoral set of laws that create more problems than they fix.

Now, perhaps you will stick around a bit and read up on my positive ideas for the pressing problems on which Oxford City Council could have an influence, such as affordable housing, and partnership working to bring a bit of business sense and community ownership into the management and development of community owned assets - in the process, I hope, giving more opportunities to people to do something fruitful with their lives and leisure time and not get onto drugs in the first place! read more »

Jonathan Matondo, 16: More young blood on the hands of the prohibitionists

Jock — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:31:39 +0100

I don't suppose young Jonathan Matondo will make as much of a national stir in death as the even younger Rhys Jones a couple of months ago, but it appears the "thoroughly repugnant moralistic stance" on drugs prohibition to quote from Richard Brunstrom, Chief Constable of North Wales, last week, has claimed yet another innocent victim.

Sheffield boy, 16, shot dead in play area - Times Online:

Local resident Douglas Johnson, an advice worker, said everybody in the area thought the death was related to drug dealing.

“This is what happens when drug dealing activity goes on. Kids get involved and start playing with guns,” he said. “It’s a very sad case. It’s very shocking. It’s quite a good area really. It’s had its bad reputation, and obviously something like this does not help, but it’s really not typical.”

You have one more day to help put an end to this murder directly caused by the approach the world's governments take on the failed "war on drugs" in the Home Office consultation on their review of the drugs laws here. Please, do the right thing to prevent more young lives lost and ruined, of users, innocent kids, poverty stricken "mules". All these deaths can be traced right back to the steps of the Home Office and the populist, moralising, interfering politicians, accessories to murder all of them, who occupy it.

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.

How government policy killed Rhys Jones just as surely as any Croxteth "gangland" scrote.

Jock — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 14:49:53 +0100

Everyone seems to be trying to analyze what caused the death of Rhys James, and what can be done about it. More police, punishment or reward for parents taking more responsibility, compulsory community service, blah, blah, blah. I can categorically state that none of this matters. Rhys was killed by government policy, particularly on drugs, that creates an ideal environment in which organized crime can flourish and drag into its sphere of influence vulnerable youngsters...

In the Independent today Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company provides some insight gleaned from her eleven years of working with dislocated children:

This is not what David Cameron refers to as anarchy; it is nihilism. It is an absence of values in which the notion of society, community and responsibility has been eradicated by violence. Every encounter with adults for these children has been toxic. Instead, the lives of these children and young people are about survival. They are, in their own words, "lone soldiers" who come into contact with those who will facilitate violence.

She goes on to describe how the lack of services and support is filled...

Who steps into this void? Imagine three concentric circles. In the first stands the drug dealer and gangster, a remote-control businessman who leads a criminal network. In the second stand our lone children. They are recruited by the dealer, initially by riding around on their bicycles providing information. In the third circle are children who imitate the violence.

And I might add, when a family has already been tainted with drug use and abuse and parental contact with authority is as a result become something to fear, lest one's relatively innocent personal habits turn one into a criminal, what reference point do these children have? I leave the solution up to you to discover. Take out the inner of those concentric circles Camilla talks about and the whole structure of criminal influence collapses...

To me, Rhys Jones died because of government and international policy which is not only failing to stop addiction (even if that were a valid aim of public policy - see "On LIberty"), but encouraging and subsidizing organized crime. Legalize now to stop these government sponsored deaths. Does any party have the true grit to deal with this, or are we going to be forced to accept intrusions like this horror or total breakdown like this in the vain attempt to fight a war that cannot be won?