In my Opinion

WAYNES WORD ON COMMON SENSE The Conservative government move to crack down on drug addicts and drug addiction and move away from harm reduction is so misguided it seems ridiculous to even answer to it, but here goes.  What drugs are illegal is mostly an accident of where you were born in the world, in western countries alcohol, prescription drugs, and the odd little anomaly such as peyote are legal, in the middle east and much of the rest of the world, the Moslem world in particular alcohol is illegal and marijuana, hashish are legal. Each society does what it can to maintain this illusion of control over it's citizens choice of poisons. The reality is that all society's past and present pretty well do as they please in respect to their personal choice of drugs or combination's of drugs, be that alcohol, opiates, marijuana, hashish, mushrooms, chemicals, glue and solvent snifters, or one of the new designer drugs that come out each and every day. Regardless of the various draconian methods used to control their appetites and addictions whether it be death, incarceration, beheading or whatever the local fanatics can come up with to stop their illegal, possibly self-destructive ways. The lunacy and the injustice of this policy  is quite obvious to me. Millions of people use alcohol, marijuana, opiates, and countless other drugs moderately with no real harm to anyone.  There is about 5 percent of any population that seem to be genetically predisposed to addiction and they can become addicted to any number of substances or even human emotions such as depression, caffeine, sugar, nicotine or physical urges such as sexual addiction or even pain. There seems to be no limit to the things some humans can become addicted to.  The injustice comes when you realize that if a person becomes addicted to most of these self-destructive behaviors such as sexual, alcohol, prescription drugs, depression, obesity, bad eating habits (sugar, fats or even foods that we know to be loaded with poisons) these are all self-destructive dependency's and  we should help them to overcome these addictions with companionate understanding and medical treatment and there is no doubt that some of them will never beat or recover from their addictions no matter how much care or treatment we bestow on them, some will inevitably fall by the wayside and live out a sad pathetic existence and then die before their time, but never the less there is hope and treatment for those persons that have the courage to change their self-destructive lifestyles whether they are addicts because of their genetic predisposition to the condition or they have been purposely addicted to get them into prostitution for example or just to be a captive income source for some drug dealer.  Then you have the other group who happen to be born in the wrong country and are addicted to what is deemed to be an illegal drug, you might not even be addicted to the substance but just a casual user but if you get caught you go to jail and in America if you get caught three times you will be in jail for the rest of your life.  It won't only be the jailed person who suffers but the family and friends of the unfortunate individual who is punished, unlike the other legal drug group who gets treatment and can then reenter his or her life, back to the job that the company he works for might even have paid for their treatments, our jailed sick person on the other hand after two or three years of cruel and unusual punishment will be sent out into a world were they will probably not be able to use the skills or training he used before going to jail, it will if he can get a job at all will probably be a minimum wage job at best, most decent jobs a worker has to be bondable and you will just not qualify, the chances are you will be right back at your self-destructive ways within no time at all. Never mind the lost potential of these individuals, they are very likely to be a costly burden on society for the rest of their lives the billions of dollars that it costs to incarcerate them, the the billions of dollars it will cost in collateral social costs such as welfare for their families. The cost of all the lost tax dollars as they will likely never again be a really productive member of society. Their children will be brought up in poverty and chances are will fall victim to the very same stresses that the parents fell victim to.  What an injustice, what a waste we all know alcoholics and other addicts who finally got their lives in order without going to jail, I don't know anyone who went to jail and got their life right after that experience. Life is hard enough without the handicap and stigma of a criminal record never mind the inevitable negative mental changes spending any amount of time in jail is sure to cause (beatings, rape, drugs). It was up till 1929 and you could get cocaine in what were called soft drinks at the time (CocaCola) and opiates were available in grocery stores (laudanum) and the drug addiction rate was probably better than it is today with the so called war on drugs. Prohibition has repeatedly been shown to be ineffective and in fact makes the problem worse because there is so much money to be made by purposely addicting people. You simply have to take the money out of drugs by legalizing them and have the government selling pure drug compounds only to adults as liquor is sold today. We must have education and treatment for the individuals who fall victim to there affects, which there most surly will be just as individuals fall victim to alcoholism now. You will always have a massive resistance to this idea, first you have the drug czars who of course want to keep making their billions of dollars of ill gotten blood money, then you have the corrupt politicians who are paid to turn a blind eye to the problem, then you have the police who know that police forces could be reduced by up to 80 percent if they didn't have the farce called the war on drugs, and then of course you have the religious wing nuts who are against anything and everything that resembles common sense. Let the sanity begin.