Snort coke, shaft the environment, say boffins

@ Graham Jordan.

I see those years of drug abuse have totally destroyed your ability to spell. A cracking advert for drug use.

@ImaGnuber

I too am an older person. I too went through the '60s. I didn't 'do' any drugs. As I was in the RN the mind altering substances of choice for matelows were beer & fags. I partook of these in quantity. :)

Now I don't smoke. Anyone else wants to smoke - go ahead, you know the risks & it's your life.

I still drink. You want a drink, find; touch my pint & you suffer :)

People have the right to make their own mistakes, it's called learning. you do not and should not have the right to tell me what I can and cannot do. That is a dictatorship.

The American experiment with prohibition showed the foolishness of trying to ban something that was wanted by a large portion of the population. Similarly, when these 'recreational' drugs are legalised then the situation will improve. It will never be perfect, people aren't perfect. Someone will always screw up and abuse anything that is enjoyed peaceably by millions (just look at Phorm).

With legalisation though the problems will be more exposed. treatments can become easier to obtain as they should be the tax revenue to support them.

A lot of damage to health from drugs is caused by the substances used to cut the original drug, and by the varying quality / strength of the drug itself. having pharmaceutical companies produce these drugs will give a reliable product at a reasonable price. The price hikes will be due to the greedy politicians over taxing them.

All in all there are too many benefits for legalising drugs and not enough for maintaining their illegal status. They will be legalised, it is just a matter of when.

R A Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson is (/was :( ) awesome

I don't think anything should be illegal because someone may get psychologically addicted to it, as someone could get psychologically addicted to ANYTHING, there was a woman who became psychologically addicted to DRINKING WATER! Ban this sick filth now, we must destroy all remaining h2o!! its our only hope..

Another distraction...

...what a load of bullshit...so much hypocrisy... look into the amount of land being cleared for Biofuel crops, another fucking pipedream from the wet dream wonderland of modern Covenment. But no, it's cocaine, and don't you know it's bad for you? Like when you smoke cannabis somewhere god kills an Iraqi.. Oh no, hang on, that would be our troops...what a crock of shit. Don't take cocaine because it destroys the rainforest - oh fuck off - they clear rainforests for all sorts of crap far less entertaining than coke, I say that and I don't even buy the shit anymore, since I figured out most of the money was going to government agencies and not `terrorists`...hang on....AAhhh now I see....

Another thing, seeing as they seem to care so much about the environment at present, maybe they should stop spraying paraquat and all manner of other lethal (to everything living) chemicals as part of their `show` they they are really trying to stop this `evil` trade....ah I can't be bothered.... what's the point, we're all doomed with these muppets in charge. 28 Weeks later, Orwell, here we come.

War on Drugs

The War on Drugs is partly maintained because it's a political hot potato - there are still enough tards around who believe the party line that all drug use is automatically bad.

It's also financially and politically profitable. From a US standpoint, it helps to politically destabilise South America. The 'Drug Czar' holds a cabinet-level post in the US government. Untold numbers of jobs are tied into this matter. Finally, can you *imagine* how much profit is made by the parties who prosecute the 'War'?

It might be interesting to follow the money trails from the involved companies back to wherever...

A solution!

Right heres my plan

1) Legalise it

2) Apply Fair Trade product Standards

3) Go Organic for the premium stuff

4) Tax the crap out of it

5) Use the profits to build myself a new Prime Ministers Palace and finance a few wars to pass the time

6) Save the planet.

I imagine only a couple of them are practical.

Paris - She would be a good spoke woman whose knowledge and experience of the product you could trust - allegedly

@Not quite

AJ Styles and many others, I sure agree with what you said. Being illegal makes a bigger mess, etc..

But I'd like to point out that going legal would most probably NOT help the environmental causes, logical thinking notwithstanding.

You see, that is South America. Regulations exist to be ignored, specially the ones dealing with environmental issues. (big capital loves to look "social" in such cases: "we should not care about monkeys when children are starving!!!") I am from Brazil, but I'm pretty sure Colombia is in the same situation. Do you think the LEGAL activities do not destroy our part of the Amazon forest at an amazing pace? Do you think our legal and "regulated" industries refrain from dumping chemicals wherever they want? You should see out rivers in São Paulo. No need to see, just smell it...

For example, the diesel we use there has concentrations of sulfur hundreds of times higher than what's considered adequate in "developed" countries. Great stuff for your lungs, asthmatics love it (not). And that's the legal situation. Imagine when things are done ignoring the law.

Drugs ...

@ImaGnuber:

"Have you never seen the destruction of a friend or family member or whoever by drug use? Maybe you should get out into the real world."

As some others said, there are some legal ones that kill: Alcohol and tobacco come into mind. If you agree to keep the ban on coke/marijuana/whatever, then you should agree to ban tobacco. Why?

- That crap sticks in your lungs FOREVER.

- Second-hand smoke will affect everyone NEARBY, unlike coke snorters where they waste only themselves.

Legalize marijuana, coke; ban tobacco!!! ;)

the war, on drugs

ImaGnuber, just stop, please just shut up and keep your nanny-fannying for those nearest and weirdest to you. The "I've lived through the 60's" rubbish doesn't give you any better or worse perspective than anyone else. I lived through punk and rave ... can I lecture you on the evils of whizz and discos ? Of course I can but I'm not, please also try not to be an arse.

The two basic problems you haven't addressed with pro-prohibition are the institutional insubordination inherent after personally experiencing a pleasant drug experience following years of government anti-drug propoganda, and the shattering of millions of lives as a result of getting mixed up in the perfectly understandable, excusable human desire to get high - so becoming a criminal, getting caught and being locked up and being really unable to hold a job down and being a real drain on society and fulfilling all of the fears you attribute to drugs and their over-hyped addictive quality.

Very few illegal drugs can cause physical dependency quickly, many are capable of inducing an extremely pleasant feeling that leaves a strong mental desire to take a drug again, or over and over - eventually creating physical dependency of a sort, but the big problem is the human brain and its poorly constructed reward mechanism which cannot discriminate between genuine and fake induced emotion. The ego also adapts too quickly to a new experience or situation and sets up a mental tolerance far quicker than any physical immunity. Why do we have such mental shortcomings ? Because unfortunately a benevolent creator did not build us out of handy lego bricks instead we are a semi-random collection of mutated fleshy bits that worked well enough to get sex and reproduce (and die by 30) on the plains of Africa but have no facilities specifically to function beyond.

In short criminalisation, like imasaddeludedgruber, is wrong. VERY WRONG.

Whilst it's true to say...

... that the majority of problems caused by drugs are as a result of prohibition rather than the direct effects of the drugs, legalisation would not make all the problems go away and drugs do have a negative effect on personality and behaviour no matter what spin and propaganda the pro-drugs (read people who profit from the sale of drugs (and drug users)) will tell you.

And whilst it's true that many people take drugs purely because they are illegal and people want to rebel against authority, if drugs were legal, more people would take drugs with the excuse of "it's legal, so why shouldn't I?"

Whether you take cocaine or not, whether you support legalisation of cocaine or not, it's hard to deny that schoolchildren carrying and using cocaine routinely, being sold it from cars outside the school gates, is an extremely bad state of affairs.