Ban on mephedrone "a failure".

[melthebell]

I feel sorry for you misssing out on Beatlemania.

not much of a beatles fan anyway theyre ok

 

grew up listening to the likes of the stones, hendrix, who and loads of rhythm and blues from mi dad anyway, much prefer that stuff

[Bassman62]

not much of a beatles fan anyway theyre ok

 

grew up listening to the likes of the stones, hendrix, who and loads of rhythm and blues from mi dad anyway, much prefer that stuff

I played/gigged all through it and the years that followed and I'm still playing without ever once having had to resort to performance enhancing drugs.

[spindrift]

Can't stand Simon Jenkins but sometimes he's on the money:

 

 

Only drug dealers will benefit from this absurd ban on mephedrone.

 

Prohibition will drive supply underground, endanger users and make it tougher to wean addicts off harder drugs

 

As its last measure the present parliament will approve its silliest. It will "ban" a recently discovered party drug called mephedrone. MPs will declare next week that, while they may have been venal, spendthrift and corrupt, at least their final act will have protected thousands of young innocents from the devil. They will have well and truly banned something. They will feel much better, and go off whistling into the night.

 

They are the only ones who will feel better. The reason for their contentment is that they have responded to a headline of a tear-stained family pleading for a drug to be banned after the sad death of a daughter after taking it. If nowadays the public wants something banned – other than alcohol and cigarettes, which MPs enjoy – then it will be. Perhaps the outcome will be no different, indeed a sign is that MPs will declare they are merely "sending a signal". But something will have been done about a headline, the only stimulus to action known to the Home Office.

 

The shenanigans now enveloping drug classification and scheduling under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act have become absurd. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, set up under the act to advise ministers on harm classification, has valiantly tried to honour its mission. But since its advice is purely advisory and can be overruled, its work is polluted. Its members have acquired the aura, in some cases unfairly, of Soviet scientists ordered to doctor their disciplines to toe the party line.

 

That is why the council's David Nutt was sacked last year as its chairman, after questioning aspects of government drugs policy. He accepted that ministers were entitled to do whatever they liked, but they could hardly object if he expressed his own opinion, in this case in an academic lecture. Six members of Nutt's committee resigned and a seventh, Polly Taylor, went this week. She was ordered to sign an Orwellian statement that could only have been penned in home secretary Alan Johnson's bunker, that she "should not act to undermine mutual trust" between herself and Johnson. Paranoia has driven British government to this pass.

 

 

Nobody I know who is conversant with the drugs scene, even those in favour of a "clampdown", regards the present law as anything other than an out-of-date nuisance. Britain has no workable drug laws, merely legislation that randomly fills jails with those unlucky enough to get caught, and ruins thousands of families more completely than the impact of the drugs themselves.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/01/drug-dealers-profit-illegal-mephedrone-ban

 

 

Over 7,000 each year die of alcohol "overdosing" and tens of thousands from nicotine poisoning. Amphetamines kill something like 100 a year, but barely a dozen deaths have been attributed to mephedrone – far less than paracetamol.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Great article. I'm not sure what it's going to take to convince the Daily Mail and co that the current drugs policy actually makes things worse.

[melthebell]

I played/gigged all through it and the years that followed and I'm still playing without ever once having had to resort to performance enhancing drugs.

 

ive never had viagra niether

[Bassman62]

ive never had viagra niether

Neither have I and I've got four lovely grown up children.

[spindrift]

I played/gigged all through it and the years that followed and I'm still playing without ever once having had to resort to performance enhancing drugs.

 

 

 

You admit using alcohol, one of the most dangerous drugs around, which can reduce its users to vomiting violent louts whose inarticulate drunken ramblings make the conversations of some one high on marijuana seem like the height of wisdom.

 

The only person that I have ever known to end up in a mental hospital as a consequence of taking drugs was an alcoholic mate of mine, and the drug that got him there was alcohol.

 

Well each to his own.

 

The report on the Portuguese experiment in decriminalising drug use is particularly interesting.

 

http://www.idpc.net/php-bin/documents/BFDPP_BP_14_EffectsOfDecriminalisation_EN.pdf.pdf

 

The report concludes that within a few years of the measure cannibis usage increased significantly (up by about 50%), heroin usage fell significantly (down by more than 50%) and drug related deaths fell by more than half. No doubt vast sums of money were saved by the criminal justice system.

 

There is not a single argument that can be deployed against mephedrone (or cannabis, for that matter) which cannot be used against alcohol, the biggest criminogenous factor in society, as reliable statistics show.

[Nagel]

It probably is easier but at least people know its MDMA. Pills can be and are just about anything as this site shows http://www.pillreports.com/index.php?page=region_home&region=2&sub_region=7

 

How do people know that the powder is MDMA? Just because it's a powder?

 

It could be any of the combinations of drugs used to make the fake pills which are often made with piperazines, cathinones and plain old caffeine. The only way to tell would be with a test kit.

[discodown]

How do people know that the powder is MDMA? Just because it's a powder?

 

It could be any of the combinations of drugs used to make the fake pills which are often made with piperazines, cathinones and plain old caffeine. The only way to tell would be with a test kit.

Which people have and use. Besides MDMA isn't a white powder like cocaine, its more crystal than powder so is a little harder to disguise

[Nagel]

Which people have and use. Besides MDMA isn't a white powder like cocaine, its more crystal than powder so is a little harder to disguise

 

I've never seen MDMA crystals, but I understand what you mean now. Anything obviously crystalline has to be pure as the process of crystallisation is a method of purification. I suppose the stuff could be recrystallised to get rid of any adulterants.

 

It used to be that the Green Party sold cheap drug testing kits as part of their policy on drugs, but I don't think they do that any longer.

[discodown]

In fact it looks like this http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=mdma+crystals&hl=en&rlz=1C1_____enGB362&prmd=ivnsfd&source=lnms&tbs=isch:1&ei=oIZaTfh2hMuEB_yOmNYN&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CA0Q_AUoAQ&biw=1440&bih=809