Drugs

Hats-off to the former Home Office Minister and Secretary of State for Defence who will use a Westminster Hall debate today to say: “I have just been reading the Coalition Government’s new Drugs Strategy. It is described by the Home Secretary as fundamentally different to what has gone before; it is not. To the extent that it is different, it is potentially harmful because it retreats from the principle of harm reduction, which has been one of the main reasons for the reduction in acquisitive crime in recent years. However, prohibition has failed to protect us. Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harms

There’s good and bad news this month. The disappointing news is that the latest surveys suggest only one in five American high schoolers smokes tobacco even occasionally. The good news is that one in five smokes marijuana from time to time. According to this year’s official figures: For 12th-graders, declines in cigarette use accompanied by recent increases in marijuana use have put marijuana ahead of cigarette smoking by some measures. In 2010, 21.4 percent of high school seniors used marijuana in the past 30 days, while 19.2 percent smoked cigarettes. This is good news? Yes it is. For one thing it shows that teenage stoners have a better grasp of

Stephen Pollard argues that this piece by Antonio Maria Costa, formerly Executive Director at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “simply rips apart the dangerously sloppy thinking from those who argue for the legalisation of hard (and soft) drugs.” Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Alternatively, one can think it profoundly misleading and alarmist. Costa argues that any attempts to introduce sanity (that’s not how he describes it) to the drug conversation will inevitably produce a sharp rise in drug use, and consequently addiction. Leaving aside the philosophical debates about drug-use, this is an argument that while intuitively plausible isn’t necessarily endorsed by the evidence available.

Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of our drug policies, I hope we may agree that they’re much less important than drug policy in the United States or the countries that produce narcotics. Nearly 30,000 people have been killed in Mexico since the “War on Drugs” was re-militarised in 2006. Now former President Vincente Fox is the latest Latin American statesman to suggest that the war is a pointless, murderous folly that weakens civil society while empowering the very people it’s supposed to be fighting: “Legalization does not mean that drugs are good … but we have to see (legalization of the production, sale and distribution of drugs)

What does left mean these days? And what, for that matter, about right? Increasingly the divide that really matters is between the liberal and the authoritarian. When it comes to drugs, for instance, Melanie Phillips is an authoritarian. Well-intentioned, I’m sure, but an authoritarian nonetheless. This means that, whether she or the other Drug Warriors like it or not, they have more in common with drug-producers than consumers. Indeed, the Drug Warriors might be said, objectively speaking, to be furthering producer interests at the expense of the consumer. This might help explain why marijuana producers in California are appalled that the state might, by referendum, legalise pot this year. Theyre

Nikhil Arora at the ASI makes a good and necessary point in response to the mephedrone moral panic: Realising the danger that ‘legal highs’ pose to their core market of young night-clubbers, cocaine and ecstasy dealers mobilised every lawyer and lobbyist at their disposal to ensure that their rivals’ products are outlawed as quickly as possible. Quite. Nevertheless, the urge to ban currently legal drugs merely because they may be ill-used or have problematic, even terrible, side-effects will doubtless prevail. It’s sad when people die from reactions to the drugs they take (or from mistakes in the taking) but those deaths are not in themselves a compelling argument for yet

Does it matter if this story is actually true or not? It’s clearly going to be a movie soon. All that needs to be decided is the casting: A lingerie model is believed to be the mastermind behind an all-women drug gang that smuggles cocaine into Britain. An international arrest warrant has been issued for Angie Sanselmente Valencia, 30, who is said to only hire glamour models to transport the drugs from South America to Europe. It’s believed that Colombian-born Valencia had been seeing a Mexican drug lord known as ‘The Monster’ but split with him at the end of last year to form her own cocaine-smuggling gang. […] Her

I don’t doubt that there would be costs were we to have more sensible (and philosophically agreeable) drug laws but one thing we might avoid is what’s happening here right now: in the last couple of weeks seven heroin users have been killed by anthrax-tainted smack. But I don’t think Melanie need really worry too much. The Conservatives, if they win the election, are highly unlikely liberalise our drug laws. On the contrary they’re likely to double-down on a series of failed and failing policies whose principle merit is that they allow politicians to seem tough. Their “core” commitment to individual responsibility doesn’t extend to letting people make their own