MPs and Illegal Drugs

[Flosshilde]

I can't see why we couldn't continue with the current classifications but with an exemption for self-confessed addicts who wish to address their addiction. In other words, maybe there could be a "prescription" status for such people who would visit specially qualified medics at required times, stay for as long as is necessary and be given increasingly smaller measures as the medic thought appropriate.

This does happen, to an extent, with heroin addicts, who are prescribed methadone, which they obtain from a chemist, & have to consume on the spot. It has been criticised for simply replacing one addiction with another. Amateur's comments in his penultimate paragraph above (no.56) are the route to go.

[Lateralthinking1]

No, I don't agree with that paragraph of it. In fact, it makes me shudder, much as I respect amateur's views. We have had Holmes. Imagine if you will, a fictitious situation where cigarettes had never been legal, it was known that they were being used widely in 2011, and that many folk had signs of addiction. In these circumstances, the Government of the day decides that it will allow them to be put on sale in shops in some sort of managed way with profits going to the suppliers and those suppliers being taxed to pay for health treatments. My reaction - and I say this as a long-term smoker - would be to feel physically sick to the point of panic. It would suggest to me that the country had sunk to an all time low. The new arrangements would make it seem dirtier in several senses of that word. And this is precisely how I feel about the suggestions here of deregulating a range of other drugs.

How then can I be vehemently against the removal of choice from pub managers about smoking on their premises? My strong opposition to this and many of the other measures already introduced to curtail cigarette smoking is about the way in which they "change the rules in the middle of the game". That too is dirty because it is a form of cheating. I just don't think it is morally right for governments over decades to actively promote the idea of an acceptable dependency - cigarettes are ok - and then to constrain and condemn people who have been encouraged to be utterly dependent on those messages as well as the substance. It is in fact a form of psychological torture. I feel much the same way about encouraged dependency on well-established pension rights. New rules for the next generations are one thing but don't bully aging and "institutionalised" people who only believed and did essentially what they were told.

We have all given this a good go, for which thanks, BUT I think teamsaint strikes a chord here. While perhaps predictably we got involved in a discussion about drugs, this may not have been quite the direction I was initially intending. What I think my first post conveyed - and I can only see this fully with hindsight - was a sense of dismay about the characters of those who run our lives. I am sure that we can agree on that point. For me, the woman whose surname means "human being" apparently is just the latest example of malaise. If one were to forgive her earlier abandonment, there is still something god awful about so much time having to be spent by people in the Westminster village and beyond on coming clean about aspects of their own lives. The fact that it has to be done shows that they can't be sufficiently authoritative to be focussed on the job of helping the population.

There is one more thing. The more we all shrug our shoulders and the less outraged we feel, the more we simply accommodate their increasing fecklessness. We become complicit in their limited effectiveness and, yes, it then becomes a downhill trend. Whatever we think about cocaine, we should all be very concerned that it takes a Milly Dowler case or a case of elected representatives being sent to the clink for theft for enough fury to emerge to lead to decisive action. How scary that anything less extreme now is generally brushed off ably by the powers that be. Teamsaint says that we should stop people who want to be MPs from becoming MPs and I think he is right. They are not the best suited and deep down Britain knows it for it has a very different approach to the law. The largely effective jury system is based on random selection.

[Flosshilde]

twaddle.

[Lateralthinking1]

I was minded not to respond but I will. BBC Radio 3 is regarded generally as a bit high-brow by 98 point something per cent of the population. A little beyond them perhaps. If ever there was a forum on the internet where one might hope for and expect some depth and respect, surely it is this one.

But this otherwise excellent site occasionally reveals too that there is something just wrong at the heart of Britain. On an equivalent site in France, Russia or the United States, you wouldn't get a post like that. It is a toned down version of what you would find on any forum for teenagers.

I don't have a particular problem with it. I do find it though rather sad and in its own strange way extraordinary. A kind of superiority that isn't. By the way, I was too polite to mention it earlier but when you accused me of being ungrammatical, you missed an "m" out.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/8672161/Phone-hacking-Our-moral-bankruptcy-is-Tony-Blairs-lasting-legacy.html