Amy Winehouse RIP xxxx

[Leon Retro]

I don't think anyone can claim that drugs are a beautiful thing that make life much better and lead to a person feeling truly better and healthier. The same with alcohol. If you're not happy, are stressed etc... drugs and drink aren't the real answers to your problems. It's much better to face your demons/problems and overcome them. Finding healthy obsessions is better.

The problem with people who are hooked on drugs or alcohol, is that they can't see themselves from other people's perspectives. They may well think they're behaving normally, look fine etc... but it can be the opposite. Being hooked on something also means the person will make excuses and live in denial because they are addicted to something that has a powerful hold over them.

If people venture down the path of drug taking and heavy drinking, they are most likely to end up in a bad way. Sadly.. for some people like Amy, addiction destroys them.

[Charlie]

The thing is addiction of any sort is an ill. And drug addiction is dangerous. It's important that people are aware drugs can destroy healthy personalities, bright futures, relationships, senses of identity, kill people, and all the other nasties associated with them. But drugs can (and that's the key word here, can) be beautiful.

Anybody who watched the brilliant BBC series Tribe with Bruce Parry will know he frequently took hallucinogenic drugs on film with the natives he was living with and he claims to this day that they were some of the most significant and beautiful moments of his life. Same goes for Dr Michael Mosley in the BBC programme The Brain - A Secret History, he was given psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and he called it a beautiful, albeit disturbing, experience.

Some drugs, hallucinogens in particular, allow your subconscious to seep into your conscious, now depending on what's lurking in your subconscious that can be an incredibly beautiful experience, at it's best akin to meeting the Supreme Being or feeling a meaningful sense of unity with the universe and everything in it. On the flip side it can be an extremely terrifying experience, a nightmare made real, from which there is no escape, no tonic, you just have to ride it out and those 8 hours or however long it lasts can seem like a lifetime in the midst of time dilation. That's why drugs like acid are such a lottery and for every "I saw the face of God and it was beautiful" story there's a burnt out soul whose brain might not ever fully recover. You could call it a spiritual form of gambling.

[nakamura]

Surely if you are taking mind altering drugs then the 'experience' is largely fake? We must have millions of things or all sorts buried deep within our minds and pulling them up via a drug is hardly an experience. An experience is something that is real. Something like visiting poverty stricken towns in Africa or South America. Something like swimming the Great Barrier Reef.
Not some drug that makes your mind go mental.


Anyway, what are peoples thoughts on legalising all drugs?

I was chatting to someone at work today about this and he raised some great points about legalising it all. Cleaner supplies would be one step and it would help remove some aspect of crime from it. People would still natually commit crime to buy it but there would be a lot less in the way of dealing.
Also they could focus more money into talking it rather than stopping it as so far stopping it is clearly not working. Even with all of the warnings and clear dangers people still take drugs so preventive measures are not working.
Not saying that drugs are readily available at Boots or whatever but certainly a way of controlling what is a problem.

Most people who take hard drugs are not of sound mind, they clearly have issues as drugs, like any addiction is a form of escapism. I think perhaps by legalising it, it might help us help people rather than commit them to the bottom row of society.

[abigsmurf]

Decriminalise possession of cannabis like it was before Brown. Increase penalties and checks for driving whilst high.

Other less harmful drugs reviewed, Heroin, meth and Coke stay the same.

The "crime will go down" thing is a bit misjudged in my book. Crime vaccuums quickly get filled. Sometimes with things that are worse (racketeering, big heists etc). Whether a fix of heroin costs ?10 or ?50, it doesn't make too much of a difference as they'll still not be able to hold a job, they'll still turn to petty crime.

Prison population may go down a bit but more casual users will go on to develop addictions and kept prisoner to those instead.

[koopatroopa90]

I think the issue with legalising drugs is that it won't stop a black market from appearing, as with everything. I can't see crime gangs wanting to, amongst other things, give a cut of their profit to the government, and if drugs were regulated then they wouldn't get away with lacing the drugs with other cheap/dangerous crap so they have more quantity to sell.

[speedlolita]

Anyway, what are peoples thoughts on legalising all drugs?

I think it'd be a stupid idea, really.

I do think that many people would stop abusing drugs though, as they'd be readily available and no longer "cool" or "hip".

I hate drug users, idiots.

[Jusatsushi]

They should decriminalise all drugs on the understanding that the producers of them lace a ratio of 1 in 10 of everything with cyanide. This will mean that addicts can still get their fix, albeit with an understood and documented risk. It would act as a deterent for those tempted to start and it would lower the population of a world already buckling under the weight of humanity.

[Stoppy2000]

An unrelated note I'm off on my stag-do to Amsterdam this weekend. Wahoo!

[koopatroopa90]

I quite like that idea, or better yet you could do Russian Roulette. Each retailer is sold boxes of 100 packets - one of which will contain death. Consumer then has 1 in 100 chance of certain death each time they jack up!

[Fader209]

They should decriminalise all drugs on the understanding that the producers of them lace a ratio of 1 in 10 of everything with cyanide. This will mean that addicts can still get their fix, albeit with an understood and documented risk. It would act as a deterent for those tempted to start and it would lower the population of a world already buckling under the weight of humanity.

They would still do it as they do them even now knowing the risks, smoking included.
I think we all had a similar demonstration in Biology class with a diseased lung from a smoker displayed for us all to gawp at and you can guarantee out of that class people still went on to smoke.

[Charlie]

Surely if you are taking mind altering drugs then the 'experience' is largely fake? We must have millions of things or all sorts buried deep within our minds and pulling them up via a drug is hardly an experience. An experience is something that is real. Something like visiting poverty stricken towns in Africa or South America. Something like swimming the Great Barrier Reef.
Not some drug that makes your mind go mental.


Anyway, what are peoples thoughts on legalising all drugs?

I was chatting to someone at work today about this and he raised some great points about legalising it all. Cleaner supplies would be one step and it would help remove some aspect of crime from it. People would still natually commit crime to buy it but there would be a lot less in the way of dealing.
Also they could focus more money into talking it rather than stopping it as so far stopping it is clearly not working. Even with all of the warnings and clear dangers people still take drugs so preventive measures are not working.
Not saying that drugs are readily available at Boots or whatever but certainly a way of controlling what is a problem.

Most people who take hard drugs are not of sound mind, they clearly have issues as drugs, like any addiction is a form of escapism. I think perhaps by legalising it, it might help us help people rather than commit them to the bottom row of society.

I subscribe to the Buddhist and Taoist philosophical notion that everything is mind. I look at a tree, my eyes take in light, my brain filters and translates that information and makes 'sense' of it, but that's not to say I'm seeing that tree as it 'truly' is. I see Saddam Hussein being hung on the internet, little chemical reactions go off in my brain making me feel sad or glad or whatever emotion I feel, and I think to myself that's good or that's bad. But in truth external events are neither good nor evil, happy nor sad - it's only attitutes towards those events that take on a moral quality.

As a child I loved certain songs, I don't love those songs anymore, when I hear them today my brain does not release the same chemicals and thus create the same electrical currents that made me feel joy as a kid, does that mean what I felt as a kid was fake? I don't think so. It just means my brain has changed since then, my attitude has changed, my desires have changed, and so on and so forth, so if I change those aspects of myself, even temporarily, using a drug, why should those experiences by any less real or valuable or significant?

I suppose whether one regards drug experiences as valubale or not depends on what level of faith one invests in every day reality. I don't believe the world we experience in every day waking life is the ultimate reality, I believe it's a subjective form of reality, a projected reality produced largely by our minds. We've built instruments to detect infra red and x-rays and gamma-rays and ultra-violet and magnetism and suspect other things such as dark energy and dark matter and the like exist, so it's clear there's a whole lot more to reality than our natural senses can detect, and I dare say a whole lot more to reality than our scientific instruments have detected. So, yeah, I'm in favour of of disabling the filters in the brain (it's widely believed by the scientific community that hallucinogenic drugs disable these filters) that evolution put in place to help ensure our survival as a species, and feeding raw information into the brain and seeing what it comes up with. And from experience I can tell you that doing that is sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, sometimes valuable, sometimes useless, but it's usually exciting, and always interesting.

[EvilBoris]

"OLIVIA , YOU'VE GOT TO GO BACK IN THE TANK!"

[nakamura]

Interesting reading Charlie and I can certainly see your points in the final paragraph. These drugs I guess can reduce our 'filters' and perhaps provide a more raw experience but who is to know what the human brain was like many many years ago.

Regarding the child aspect, for me it is simply that as a child your brain is not developed and finds pleasure in much more simple ways. Primary colours, fun and basic music that is more annoying to an adult because of the adults ability to go deeper into it. A child cannot appreciate complex sounds like an adult can in most cases.

[Charlie]

I hate drug users, idiots.

You can hate them, but to call them idiots?

Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, Francis Crick, was under the influence of LSD when he first visualised and deduced the double-helix structure of DNA. He was pretty clever.

[dataDave]

Anyway, what are peoples thoughts on legalising all drugs?

Do it. Either legalise everything, or make everything illegal. Don't pick and choose and be subjective.

I'd like to ban cigs and booze if we're banning weed and mushrooms. I don't see why we have some and not others. I think booze is the worst personally, I can handle a fair bit of it, but I become a teat in the process. Nothing else turns me into a dickhead like booze.