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Drugs - Time to legalise - The Economist


Rob W
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Got a blowjob off a girl who had a mouthful of prosecco. Thought it would be amazing, but it was just a bit painful and not in a good way.

 

Expect the smaller bubbles in champagne would only make it worse as well.

 

Disappointing.

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"oh stop! the prosecco bubbles are hurting my helmet"

 

You're so gay Dave.

:lol:

 

Well, tell you what, at your next bacchanalian shindig, you give it a blast and let me know how it feels.

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Too right Gloom :lol:

 

I'm a little older now and tend to keep my opinions to myself more. That said, a lot of this thread is still tragic with 40year old dads discussing the best way to take coke :lol:

I wouldn't go near the stuff now like. Was just saying I never thought it was all that good anyway. And it was in relation to the topic being brought up

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I've got a mate who goes for regular colonic irrigations with his Mrs. And they say romance is dead

Not what she had in mind when he said they were going to get her ring resized?

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Nothing tragic about discussing wine, whisky or organic craft beers though.

 

As for the best way to take it, there is no discussion on that topic. As a birthday treat, an ex once gave me a champagne enema and then sniffed a load of gak off my bell-end. Pure Swag. To be fair, i was a right cunt back then.

 

What a time to be alive!

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In fact on reflection, even the hardest drugs are better off legalised and regulated. This little excerpt is fascinating, I'd love to see the documentary itself if anyone knows where it can be found.

 

 

DR. JOHN MARKS AND THE CHAPEL STREET SEGMENT—60 MINUTES (1990)

This is almost impossible to find these days—I watched it on a grainy VHS loaned to me by a legalization activist in England a few years ago. But the 60 Minutes segment on Dr. John Marks and his pioneering treatment of addicts in the Chapel Street Clinic in Liverpool earns a place on this list because of the massive impact it had. As the tail-end of the Margaret Thatcher era played out in the UK, and George H.W. Bush was president in the US, Dr. Marks was quietly going about the business of changing lives. The clinic was one of the few British drug-treatment centers that still operated under the so-called “British system”—ie, it prescribed pharmaceutical heroin and cocaine to addicts. This radical approach was launched in response to a heroin and HIV epidemic that was ravaging Liverpool at the time. The success of Dr. Marks’ work was astonishing: over two years, the local drug squad tracked the addicts who frequented the clinic and found that among them there was a 93% drop in theft, burglary and property crimes; HIV infection rates among the injecting drug users dropped to zero; and the number of deaths among the addicts—normally reckoned at 15% a year for that group—was also nil. Even more incredibly, the rate of new addicts also fell, as drug dealers stayed away from the area—discovering that their services were no longer required there.

All this stirred the interest of journalists, who descended upon the little clinic to see for themselves, a 60 Minutes crew among them. When the segment aired, however, it signaled the death knell for the clinic. When the Republican administration became aware that this little clinic was making a mockery of the entire US-led approach to drug addiction, they put pressure on their British allies to close it down. Dr. Marks recalls, “It was in deference to American sensibilities that Margaret Thatcher emasculated the whole harm-reduction program.” Heroin prescribing was stopped, Marks’ patients were switched over to methadone, and within a year the situation in Liverpool was as bad as ever—all thanks to a documentary that Marks says he'd given very little thought to at the time. “I’d forgotten all about [the film crew] among the plethora of other visitors, had no idea that their report had been broadcast nor that the Home Office would be interested in TV programs about clinics,” he now admits.

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It's no real surprise that giving out free heroin, cocaine and clean needles resulted in drug dealers being out of work, addicts no longer having to rob to fund their habits and hiv rates dropping.

 

Who pays for it though? Where's the motivation for addicts to be on a reduction program to ultimately stop taking drugs? What stops 1000s more young idiots developing Coke habits knowing they can get it free on prescription?

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It's no real surprise that giving out free heroin, cocaine and clean needles resulted in drug dealers being out of work, addicts no longer having to rob to fund their habits and hiv rates dropping.

 

Who pays for it though? Where's the motivation for addicts to be on a reduction program to ultimately stop taking drugs? What stops 1000s more young idiots developing Coke habits knowing they can get it free on prescription?

The problem is the current approach doesnt stop anyone taking drugs either, in fact it makes it cool. I favour treating drug addiction as a medical illness rather than a criminal offence. And I'd rather put the states resources into education and prevention rather than punishment and stigmatisation.

 

As for thousands developing an addiction deliberately to get free drugs, I dont think that would happen.

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It's no real surprise that giving out free heroin, cocaine and clean needles resulted in drug dealers being out of work, addicts no longer having to rob to fund their habits and hiv rates dropping.

 

Who pays for it though? Where's the motivation for addicts to be on a reduction program to ultimately stop taking drugs? What stops 1000s more young idiots developing Coke habits knowing they can get it free on prescription?

 

The taxpayer pays for it mate. We already pay for a methadone treatment program for 150,000 people (that was in 2009, the number is almost certainly higher now), surely this would make more sense financially in the long run? Especially seeing as the methadone treatment programme doesn't seem to really be reducing the number of new addicts at all - where as this clinic in Liverpool did do just that, by removing the need for a dealer. Surely that's the thing that stops people getting into these new habits?

 

I personally would never consider taking a drug like heroin even if it was legal and controlled, because I've been educated fully on how addictive it can be, and I've read testimonies of people who've just tried it once saying that a decade later the happiness that moment brought is the first thing they think of each day. That sounds scarily good. And is probably a better way of scaring off people from using such drugs than any amount of hyped-up overdose stories.

 

I don't know mate, it just seems daft to ignore such evidence when the taxpayer is already forking out for extremely similar drugs to these people, and it doesn't seem to be working.

 

The interesting thing about opiate addiction is the way that it's victims are stigmatised as being 'scum'. That baffles me a bit. The overwhelming majority of users of heroin find their way there after addiction to prescribed and legal opiates, as it's a lot cheaper. The rest have probably suffered more mental, physical and social trauma than most in life, and I'm not sure I can look down on them from my ivory tower.

 

As a side note, I would bet everything I own in the world that drugs such as MDMA and LSD will be absolutely imperative in dealing with mental illnesses at controlled doses in the future, and it seems criminal that governments have made it almost impossible for scientists to carry out such research.

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It's no real surprise that giving out free heroin, cocaine and clean needles resulted in drug dealers being out of work, addicts no longer having to rob to fund their habits and hiv rates dropping.

Who pays for it though? Where's the motivation for addicts to be on a reduction program to ultimately stop taking drugs? What stops 1000s more young idiots developing Coke habits knowing they can get it free on prescription?

You need to balance that against the cost of all the crime caused by the status quo though. I would imagine the monetary cost is lower via this different approach anyway but, on top of that, you can't put a figure on the 'cost' as it were to the addict whose life basically revolves around the search for their next fix. They're the least of my worries too in this, even if I do sympathise with them in many cases. There's the impact on their family, the inevitable victims of their crime and the people who live in areas where dealing is rife etc., etc. As has been pointed the current system costs a bomb and is an abject failure anyway. It's all moot though as the UK press and the short-termism in British politics would prevent such a pragmatic approach ever being adopted.
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  • 9 months later...

Sad to see Fabric going though not unexpected given recent trends. Haven't been down there for about a decade but used to love it back in the day. I was more gutted when they shut the end though, a regular haunt of mine. Went to the closing circo loco party there, which was off the hook.

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