However, tell you what, here’s a more interesting and relevant question:

How do you think the overall safety record of street drugs like heroin and Cocaine, might compares with SSRI’s?

For starters I guess you can say that street drugs don’t usually cause movement disorders – or do they? George Monbiot was quoting your article the other day, and seemed to agree that the health risks from heroine/cocaine were pretty minimal.

What are your thoughts on this. Regards.

It’s a slippery slope. If we give politicians a mandate to lie to us whenever they believe it is for our own good, then who are they accountable to? Who watches the watchers?

@DrJG the cat’s already well out of the bag. Has been for decades. Anyone who wants drugs can get them. The dealers don’t even ask for proof of age. Those criminals are not just going to go away, but prohibition has dramatically expanded high return criminal employment.

@NeilHoskins I’m wondering where you do live? On a remote island perhaps? Maybe a very strict Muslim country? You won’t really find any western country that does not have druggies walking around. Especially when there’s a game on.

I’ve been attacked by someone completely sober. I blame the lack of drugs. I don’t want to live in a country with sober people walking around.

It may have a bearing on cocaine use in humans but we cannot derive any conclusions from it because it is so unrelated. There are hundreds (thousands?) of systems in the body that balance & keep us going. Replacing dead cells, replenishing fluids & chemicals. The study you mention cannot take these into account.

Yes, I see more harm from alcohol and tobacco than from drugs. But then again, a lot more of my patients drink or smoke than use illegal drugs. I see little sense in smoking, but, just like the suppressed WHO report claims for cocaine, most alcohol “users” suffer little harm. And I say that as someone whose father’s alcoholism was probably the biggest single influence on their childhood. Ultimately, though, I would say that the arguments for stricter controls on alcohol and tobacco are stronger than those for relaxing controls on other substances.
Nor am I convinced by arguments based on the negative consequences of Prohibition in the US. I do not accept that experiences gained from banning a drug which had been widely and legally used for many generations can be safely applied to a situation where there has been no prolonged or widespread legal use, if any. Yet, should legalization be tried and turn out to have severe negative consequences, it could prove a very difficult cat to re-bag.
I have read many earnest and well-meaning articles blaming all the harm from opiate use on its restriction. They almost make it sound as if the times of the London Opium dens were some forgotten halcyon days, which is patent tosh. Opium and its relatives were brought under legal controls for very good medico-social reasons.
I will agree that poverty and drug use made, in Victorian times, and continue to make a very damaging cocktail, but the world of the rich and famous is littered with examples which prove that great damage can still be caused to those wealthy enough
a) not to need to turn to crime to fund their habit, and
b) with far better social networks to afford some protection from the consequences of their use. Amongst my own patients, some have continued to hold down steady jobs to “pay their way” but if anything they are more likely to report the harm their habits cause them than those who fund it through crime and show more obvious outward signs.

Finally, Ben recently commented on spurious figures for the “costs” of illegal downloads. If read many equally dubious figures for how much money is “wasted” on fighting the illicit drug industry and the organized crime which lies behind so much of it. These figures only make sense if one is going to claim that the criminals are in it largely due to a commitment to maintaining the supply of drugs as a service, rather than committed to getting money from whatever crime pays best. Lets be a bit more realistic about this, take away one source of illicit profit, and few criminals are going to go straight, most will find some other niche, so the potential savings in law enforcement do not actually materialize, they just get diverted to another department.

No, I don’t like the deliberate suppression of information and evidence, but I’m not ready to accept that evidence as the last word on the subject.

If you legalized (not just decriminalized) addictive psychotropic drugs — sold like cigarettes, for example — could we force the manufacturer of the “dangerous product” to pay for drug rehab for all their customers? If someone is high as a kite, or tripping on a hallucinogen, and gets into a car wreck, can we make the drug maker to cover the full costs?

http://www.dovepress.com/getfile.php?fileID=4844

I’m guessing you didn’t want to extend this discussion into legal, prescription drugs, but what the hell, I’m burning with curiosity about this, so will go ahead and ask about it here, anyway. (And besides, drugs is drugs, right? They all make you happy, after all).

It’s just I came across this report recently, suggesting that SSRI’s are damaging to motor neurones in the brain, and that this needs to be investigated further:

http://www.dovepress.com/effects-of-selective-serotonin-reuptake-inhibitors-on-motor-neuron-sur-peer-reviewed-article

I’d be interested to know how seriously you think this ought to be taken? Looks like the authors did concede that the experiments in rats were not directly equivalent to human physiology, but it does look quite dramatic, all the same.

If you could use a few seconds to offer your feelings about this, I’d be very grateful indeed. Cheers.

You already are – by far the biggest source of street violence is alcohol.

Because it involves selective allocation of limited resources to target the bogey-man of the moment, prohibition often makes the situation worse.

The classic example is the ’success’ of Australia’s attempts to limit the supply of heroin, a drug that has very few negative side-effects if administered in pure form (overdoses and other health issues from heroin arise from the erratic quality of an illegal supply – addicts prescribed heroin in the UK before its super-criminalisation lived balanced and productive lives).

The limiting of the supply of heroin led to an explosion in the use of crystal meth, a drug far likelier to set its users off on violent rampages than heroin.

The paradox is that those calling for severe drug prohibition are often also the same stripe as those demanding free markets in everything. Yet if people who want to get off their races had true free choice the evidence suggests they would pick far ‘nicer’ highs than alcohol and crystal meth.

Give me a world where those who can’t handle reality (or want a temporary holiday from it) escape using cannabis or heroin any day.

@44

Heroin is dirt cheap to produce and opium poppies not hard to grow. Tasmania supplies a large proportion of the world’s opium and has a climate similar to France.

The market for cigarettes is seriously unbalanced by taxation, which massively inflates the street price of legal tobacco products and has the unpleasant side-effect of addicting governments to a revenue stream based on letting a handful of drug barons slowly kill a proportion of its population. The USA, for example, earned almost $15,000 million from tobacco taxes in 2006; yet the previous year all the states spent $541 million on anti-smoking measures while the tobacco industry spent around $13,000 million on marketing.

The elephant in the room is the reported increase in street violence and disorder since pub opening hours were deregulated in the UK, and the problems that the police say center around late-opening very large pubs in Sydney. This should give pause to those of us who’d legalise everything, because it indicates that some groups of people really can’t be trusted to behave responsibly in a free market: allow the suppliers of substances with socially harmful side-effects open slather and they will find ways to exploit the weak-willed.

Personally I believe we should legalise it, tax it and use the proceeds for educating people so they can make an informed decision, and healthcare for the percentage of people who always become addicted to a substance.

Very interesting about Portugal, BKrapcha #48, I never knew.

I’d love to know the reason why drug use was reduced. Likely to be a combination of effective treatment, and a reduction in the ‘glamour’ of it all, but that’s just a guess.

However, by criminalising supply you’re still leaving the trade in the hands of the Al Capone’s, and skewing the incentives towards strong concentrated drugs that can be easily smuggled. Strong bathtub spirits where the product available during alcohol prohibition because they were so much easier to move than gallons of beer.

Still, I’d rather that the girls and you can turn to a criminal justice system that isn’t drowning under prohibition cases.

Plus the girl will have much better odds if shes working in a legal, established industry rather than an industrial estate, and all of us will have better odds if the junkies can fund their addictions without sticking needles in our faces.

From the April 7, 2009 Scientific American article “Five Years After: Portugal’s Drud Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results”

“”Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they’re learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely,” report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.”

and

“”Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal,” of reducing the health consequences of drug use, [Peter Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, College Park]says, “and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination.”"

Difference between decrim & legalize, from same article:

“Drug legalization removes all criminal penalties for producing, selling and using drugs; no country has tried it. In contrast, decriminalization, as practiced in Portugal, eliminates jail time for drug users but maintains criminal penalties for dealers.”

You seem willing to ‘ignore the bleeding obvious’ which is that many of those advocating the end of prohibition are not ‘encouraging the public consumption of a wider variety of drugs’.

You assume that the only alternative to ‘drugs are illegal – no-one should use them’ is ‘drugs are legal – everyone should use them’.

Try thinking about ‘drugs are legal – no-one should use them’.

In the LEAP video linked to above, one of the former police officers says making drugs legal won’t cure the drugs problem but it will cure the crime and violence problem so you can devote a lot more effort to the drugs problem.