Yossarian wrote:

I must say Igor, your objections to even soft drugs, seem to be, much like many others', based on a vague moral objection to them which fails to hold up under any sort of scrutiny. This whole moral aspect to this debate does seem to be something which exists only in relation to people liking to get high and which seems to distort the general debate. It seems mental to me that you can not find an equivalency between getting stoned and getting drunk and somehow come to the conclusion that one is worse than the other simply because one's socially acceptable. I hope that made sense, I'm quite drunk.

I don't think that getting drunk and behaving like an idiot, as far too many people appear to do every weekend, is any more socially acceptable than the societal problems caused by those who habitually take illegal drugs.  I absolutely believe in personal freedom to stuff whatever you like into your own body and get drunk, high, stoned, whatever though, but only until those actions impinge negatively on others around you or on society as a whole, as they all too often do.

That said, illegal drugs are banned precisely because they cause great and lasting harm both to individuals and to society as a whole, far more so than legal non-prescription drugs. Alcohol is, of course, an exception and I only wish there were much tighter controls on that too, in order to try to curb the horrible excesses that make town/city centres a no-go zone and needlessly burden A&E depts across the country, every weekend. Perhaps the solution to this though is simply for far more effective punitive measures against those that cause the problems.  I guess that if a person were made to pay £80 fine every time they were drunk and disorderly, or given community service to go around cleaning up the streets on a Sunday morning, they'd perhaps think twice about doing the same the following weekend.

Oh great it's this fucking episode again.

LazyGunn wrote:

Moral objections to drugs hold absolutely no water, the consensus morality regarding them was socially engineered at the turn of the 20th century

Yeah the background on this stuff alone is nigh enough to make me go ach fuck it all. 

We need a lot more data on health consequences of prohibited substances than we have. We know that booze and fags can be ruinous megakillers because they've been mainstream for ages and so easier to study in quantity.

I avoid the narcs because I'm not especially interested in their effects, their illegality makes them a pain in the arse to source and the realities of supply chains are indeed a bit fucking gross. I want the lot legalised and regulated, and currently available leisure intoxicants deglamourised. One is permitted to do 'em, but it helps if one's always made to feel a bit skeezy for doing so. Brown-paper-bagism.

Absolutely no one should be in chokey or reprimanded at all for consuming, a uniquely modern kind of barbarism. Health and safety violations on supply side, fine, throw the fucking book.

igorgetmeabrain wrote:

illegal drugs are banned precisely because they cause great and lasting harm both to individuals and to society as a whole.

Bullshit are they. The whole cat and mouse game with new chemicals being created and banned should be proof of this. There is no evidence that any of these new creations are harmful yet they get banned as a reflex action. There's no evidence that the odd joint is harmful beyond what it does to your lungs (and even then it can be eaten or vapourised). Hell, there's not even any evidence that heroin is harmful (seriously, it sounds nuts, but pure heroin, responsibly taken under supervision of a doctor rather than illegal stuff cut with whatever taken in whatever dodgy circumstances has not been shown to have any long term ill effects). These policies show no sign of being made to protect the individual or society but rather as this general drugs are bad attitude which ultimately undermines them to such an extent that (based on the figures for what's happened with cannabis use in Holland) they may actually be causing more people to take them than otherwise would.

Yossarian wrote:

igorgetmeabrain wrote:

illegal drugs are banned precisely because they cause great and lasting harm both to individuals and to society as a whole.

Bullshit are they. The whole cat and mouse game with new chemicals being created and banned should be proof of this. There is no evidence that any of these new creations are harmful yet they get banned as a reflex action.

Err, I think I'd rather a default position of banning was the case rather than not. It would be grossly irresponsible to do anything else.

It takes years, decades even, to put new drugs through clinical trials to ensure safety. It would be utterly ridiculous to make something Barry has cooked up in his home lab legal.

Woke up at 8AM holding a beer that I'd let tip forward and spill across my bed at some point. Realising this, I rolled away from the liquid and in my confusion managed to roll straight out of bed on the other side.

Lying between my bed and the wall, looking up a the ceiling and feeling rather bruised, I wondered if perhaps sobriety could be a good option, if only to avoid the recurrence of such a markedly unpleasant event.

On the subject of 'legal highs' or research chemicals - these are not things that 'Barry has cooked up in his home lab' - they are created by PhD level chemists working for grey market vendors who kit them out with professional-style laboratories and pay them a lot of money - because there's a hell of a lot of money to be made from the result. These are not cottage industries, this is big business.

That doesn't make them safe, as obviously they are untested in terms of long term effects etc. And for the most part they are not banned. If you think that the right thing to do is for the government to ban this untested filth then you should petition it to do it more stringently. In the last few years all they have banned is cathinones such as mephedrone (now readily available in cut form on the street), ketamine analogues, targeting methoxetamine in particular and three kinds of synthetic cannabinoids. All the RC vendors had new, just as effective and even less tested cannabinoids in place before the ban happened, and have been selling effective MDA analogues such as 6-ABP and it's relatives for bloody years, as well as the long acting psychedelic stimulant AMT, and ritalin and amphetamine analogues like Ethylphenidate and MPA. Not to mention at least two forms of benzodiazepine - highly addictive pharmaceutical downers. And these drugs do work - 6-ABP is just as effective a stimulant and euphoriant as it's illegal counterpart - it was very carefully and expensively designed to be. Plenty of people actually prefer it to MDA or MDMA, partially because it lasts longer and has fewer negative side effects - at least in the short term. Etizolam has just as effective anti-anxiety, hypnotic and muscle relaxant effects as xanax, and is just as habit-forming. And yet I have seen no moves whatsoever to ban these substances.

So there is no 'default banning' of legal drugs. The government bans stuff that makes the headlines because on a slow news day the Mail picks up on a feature in Mixmag about how easy it is to get hold of MXE and the home office bans it to make it look like they're doing something to stem the availability of 'legal highs' for the benefit of a briefly outraged public. Most of the time they can't really be arsed.

@igorgetmeabrain

http://www.badscience.net/2009/06/this-is-my-column-this-is-my-column-on-drugs-any-questions/

"Drugs instantiate the classic problem for evidence based social policy. It may well be that prohibition, and the inevitable distribution of drugs by criminals, gives worse results for all the outcomes we think are important, like harm to the user, harm to our communities through crime, and so on. But equally, it may well be that we will tolerate these worse outcomes, because we decide it is somehow more important that we publicly declare ourselves, as a culture, to be disapproving of drug use, and enshrine that principle in law. It’s okay to do that. You can have policies that go against your stated outcomes, for moral or political reasons: but that doesn’t mean you can hide the evidence, it simply means you must be clear that you don’t care about it."

Also: http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/the-nutt-sack-affair-part-493/

It's nice when a new poster takes their hobby seriously.

Brooks wrote:

It's nice when a new poster takes their hobby seriously.

Sometimes a long time lurker is emboldened to speak up on a subject - maybe this is the case?

He's not allowed to enjoy it so much.

Most of the related problems people are discussing about alcohol and drugs I think are cultural. Yes alcohol can turn purple into nobs but it seems to happen more here then elsewhere and I feel the same about drug 'culture' in some places it'd be fine, in others it'd be abused. Same difference between America and Canada with their gun laws.

Absolutely n0face. I think a huge part of people acting like twats when drunk is not down to the alcohol at all, but down to them being twats, and thinking it's ok to do twattish things.

Nooo, do it I. The d/l *wink wink*

I'll give you Clarky Cap for £20. You don't want your hand to feel like a week in a lead balloon. My friend got a bad crack handle, ended up on a negative blooty and had jessop jessop jessop.

Of a kind.

Diluted Dante wrote:

Absolutely n0face. I think a huge part of people acting like twats when drunk is not down to the alcohol at all, but down to them being twats, and thinking it's ok to do twattish things.

Exactly. The thing about alcohol is one of it's main effects is dis-inhibition - it stops people caring about the consequences of their actions. But the fundamental desire to carry out these actions has to be there in the first place. I don't become violent when drunk because I don't carry around a latent desire for violence. It seems that a lot of people do, and becoming intoxicated on alcohol (amongst other drugs such as cocaine and amphetamine) makes them feel able to manifest this desire despite the consequences. You do wonder what it says about us as a society that so many people walk around with such burning rage inside them that it only takes a few drinks for them to start abusing people and fighting in the streets.

It were rather good it seems.