The country is going to pot
I have been following this drug business for the last few days.
At first there was some confusion as to whether they were going to legalise marijuana, heroin and cocaine or decriminalise them. There are some important differences.
It appears now they are going down the decriminalise route which, on the face of it sounds grand. I had lovely mental images of people wandering around the streets in a beautiful blue haze and smiling inanely at everyone, lampposts and every other thing they encountered. When you're on a high, who gives a shit?
They seemed to have a different idea of "decriminalise" from my definition though.
Smoking a toke will be the equivalent of a traffic offence, for fucks sake! I suppose there is a twisted logic there – if you're having a good trip then traffic laws should apply?
From what I can gather, drugs will still be illegal but will be decriminalised which really makes a lot of sense. You can't buy or sell 'em and you can't grow your own but if you do miraculously find some materialising in your tobacco pouch you can smoke the stuff and will just get a slap on the wrist.
Actually you don't get a slap on the wrist. You get hauled up before a "dissuasion committee", whatever the fuck that is.
Under the proposals to be unveiled on Thursday, people caught with small quantities of drugs would be referred to dissuasion committees made up for addiction and mental health professionals as well as social workers.
I presume they mean "made up of" but that's beside the point.
So I am brought up before this committee and have to listen to them drone on about the incredible damage to my health, how I am wrecking my job prospects and how I can only look forward to life in the gutter and an imminent death, blah, blah, blah. I let them drone on for a while about how incredibly misguided I am and will then reply. I will tell 'em I'm a grown man of reasonable intelligence, that I have read and discounted all their horror stories and that there is nothing like a big fat doobie to relax and take away the twinges of pain that come with old age. I'll tell 'em that as an adult in my mid sixties, what I do, how I do it and where I do it is none of their fucking business and I don't give a flying fuck what the law says. Finally I will suggest that they all light up and chill out a bit. They probably won't thank me for that but then the truth often hurts.
If I were in charge, I think I would take a slightly different approach.
I would give the old Mary Jane out for nothing to anyone and everyone who wants it. Let the entire country get high.
If the entire country is permanently stoned, then nothing else matters.
As usual you need to follow the money. By making drug possession a "ticket" the government get to collects fines and in many places also charge you "court costs". At the same time they avoid the cost of actually putting people in jail. An alternative is to make it "legal" adn collect license fees for producers and taxes for purchasers and this becomes a new revenue stream.
Which ever way they do things, they'll fuck it up. Criminalising it just fills the jails [which by all accounts are noting more than gigantic crack houses anyway]. Legalising it will just mean gubmint control and massive taxation which will mean the underground will still thrive. Decriminalising it the way they have done just means a "lesser offence" which doesn't really change anything. Decriminalising it altogether is the only way to go. Remove the whole shebang from the statute books.
Heh! Same as that,GD. I used to smoke industrial quantities of the stuff when I was younger, and I still enjoy a toke.
I don't get this 'decriminalisation' stuff though. Either you legalise, regulate and presumably tax the stuff, or you don't.
Personally, and I've been saying this for more than forty years to anyone who would listen, I'd legalise all drugs. The only reason there is a drug 'problem' is because drugs are illegal.
When I was in Thailand in 1970/71, dope was a social norm. Everywhere I went I was constantly being invited for a smoke, and dynamite weed it was too. Then the lawmakers, in their wisdom, decided that it needed to be eradicated, so there was a crackdown. Result? All the kids are doing meth and going out robbing and murdering now. Brilliant.
Same thing when I arrived in Australia after I left Thailand. The place was awash with locally grown 'Zombie' grass. Very good, cheap and plentiful. So of course gubmint decided to fix that by finding all the plantations and razing them to the ground, which choked off the supply. Result? A year later, all the kids were doing heroin and dying in their hundreds from overdoses etc etc. Clever, huh?
I can't decide if it's because the authorities are complete fucking morons, or whether it's a deliberate ploy. Because it's as plain as the nose on your face that if you take one drug out of circulation that people will find an alternative. And usually that alternative, at least initially, will be an unknown quantity.
I can understand some kind of control on heroin which by all accounts is pretty messy stuff [never tried it myself], but trying to impose laws, rules and regulations on something you can easily grow at home just doesn't work.
Trying to control something by either banning it or making it difficult to obtain is only going to lead to a massive black market. They discovered that in the States with Prohibition and they are discovering it here now with tobacco. Let the market have free reign and crime will all but disappear.
Having weed freely available is of course a problem for gubmints. A population, half of whom are stoned out of their minds is a lot harder to control!
The government won't decriminalise either the possession or sale of anything unless it sees ways to snatch revenue from the punters. The tobacco companies are going to lobby heavily too as they don't want to see competitive sources of smoking pleasure easing onto their pitch.
If my memory serves me correctly, wasn't it the tobacco companies who originally campaigned to have marijuana made illegal? Of course they can't renew that campaign now as the Puritans have told the gubmint they must never talk to Big Tobacco!