Want To Curb Alcohol Use and Save Money? Open Cannabis Coffee Shops

Want To Curb Alcohol Use & Save Money? Open Cannabis Coffee Shops – WideShut: Alternative News.

Wideshut: Alternative news

Jun 19th, 2012 | By Keelan Balderson |

A lot of Government rhetoric has been flying around recently about how to scale back Britain’s binge drinking. It would be naive to think this is because politicians care about our wellbeing; (is it even the Government’s job to care?) The main proposals are as always to increase alcohol taxation and therefore prices. This implies it’s really about pulling in more revenue to help with the national debt problem.

In March David Cameron stated [1]: “We’re consulting on the actual price, but if it is 40p [minimum price per unit] that could mean 50,000 fewer crimes each year and 900 fewer alcohol related deaths per year by the end of the decade.”

Other than Government keeping their nose out of our business there may be another answer. Former drugs advisory committee chief David Nutt suggested to the Commons home affairs committee today, that permitting Amsterdam style “coffee shops” that allow the consumption of cannabis, could reduce alcohol consumption by as much as 25% and therefore saving the kind of money the Government want.

Due to its illegality smokers tend to fall in to the weekend binge drinking culture, when many would likely prefer social gatherings based around smoking pot.

“A regulated market for illicit drugs would be the best way and we could reduce alcohol consumption by as much as 25% if we had the Dutch model of cannabis cafes,” claimed Nutt.

He also suggested that police would probably prefer to deal with laid back stoned citizens (if they had to at all) rather than those under the influence of alcohol. He previously argued in the Lancet that drinking alcohol is linked to domestic violence, child abuse and road traffic accidents. Anybody who’s spent a cursory amount of time in the weekend clubbing scene will be well aware of the vomit covered violence and danger caused by alcohol. Statistically speaking alcohol is also a massive killer due to its negative health effects, while cannabis doesn’t even register on national death rankings. Professor John Beddington, the Government’s chief scientist agrees with Nutt that alcohol is more dangerous than pot, saying the evidence to support the claim was “absolutely clear cut” [2]. Cannabis simply doesn’t cause death.

According to Nutt the cost of targeting cannabis use, mainly possession, is only £500m a year, while it costs taxpayers £6bn a year for policing the use of alcohol, mainly dealing with people who are drunk and disorderly. If Britain’s 3 million cannabis smokers were given a social environment to pursue their past-time, it could significantly dent the weekend party ritual, and claw some of that £6bn back.

Nutt also reiterated his famous example of illogical drug policy to MPs, stating “Horse-riding is considerably more dangerous than taking ecstasy….It is a popular activity, dangerous but addictive. I am told that many riders find it difficult to give up.” A similar statement partly lead to his dismissal as the Government’s drug adviser. He backed up this claim saying costs to the NHS from injured riders who had fallen from their horses were not being acknowledged. Riders who lose control of their horses on the roads are the cause of “more than 100 serious accidents every year”.

As noted by the Guardian:

Nutt was using the example to illustrate his argument that the classification of different illegal drugs was often completely unrelated to the relative harm that their use caused society. He said politics rather than science had dominated drug policy in Britain over the 40 years since the Misuse of Drugs Act was passed in 1971. Only one drug – cannabis – had ever been downgraded and that was quickly reversed against the advice of the ACMD.

Nutt said the decision by the home secretary to classify magic mushrooms as a class A drug alongside heroin and crack cocaine was “the final nail in the rationality of the 1971 Drugs Act”.

Nutt Was Sacked By Then-Home Secretary Alan Johnson In 2009 For His Views On Cannabis.

Attending the 55th annual session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

Posted by LEAP

By James E. Gierach,

“The end of the story is not a happy one, for the status quo prevailed.  Prohibition was reaffirmed miraculously without any dissent and without a single vote.  As encouraged by 55th Session documents to present a “single voice,” the delegates moved commas and periods and labored over word-choice, but reaffirmed prohibition as the drug policy of the world without a hitch.”

    I recently returned to Chicago from a week in Vienna, Austria, having attending the 55th annual session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND).  Vienna is the home of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).  It was quite an experience to be at the fountainhead of world drug prohibition.  Fog, demons and Al Capone-ghosts circled and crowded the dark skies over the Vienna International Centre (“the VIC”) like something out of a Harry Potter novel but the demons of drug policy were real.

    A month before my UN drug trip, I was a guest speaker, among others, in Mexico City on behalf of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization that is anti-drug use but even more anti-drug war.  I had been invited to speak in Mexico City by a group of business and community leaders who were at their wits end over the drug prohibition corruption and violence, a group called Mexico Unido Contra La  Delincuencia.

    Antonio Mazzitelli, the UNODC representative for the region including Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, spoke before me and said, fearfully, we cannot legalize drugs because legalization would make drugs more available and worsen public health.  I spoke immediately after him, and I criticized the “U.N. /Al Capone Drug Policy Paradigm,” because world prohibition history and world news evidenced on a daily basis that prohibition harmed public health more than drugs.

    During my presentation, I asked Mazzitelli how public health was aided by the deaths of 50,000 people killed in Mexico in drug cartel violence since 2006 when Pres. Filipe Calderon accelerated the Mexican war on drugs, funded since 2008 with hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars via the “Merida Initiative.”  I asked what was it about U.N. prohibition policy that amassed 15 tons of methamphetamines that were seized by Mexican authorities in one bust while we speakers were in town.  And I asked him how such a policy helped the public health.  I implored Mr. Mazzitelli to take a message back to the U.N. that Latin America, the U.S., and the world had had it with the failed drug war and the auditorium in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City rocked with applause.  The “End the drug war” message was conveyed but would it be delivered to prohibition headquarters at the UN?

    For me, the importance of the Mexico City trip was my heightened appreciation for the fact that three international UN treaties, called conventions, are at the heart of the world’s war on drugs.  The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 consolidated earlier drug treaties and prohibited the production and supply of narcotic drugs, including opium, coca, heroin, morphine and marijuana, with limited exception for medical use, and empowered the World Health Organization (WHO) to add and remove drugs from the four schedules of substances appended to the treaty.  Two additional international UN treaties expanded the scope and breadth of prohibition: the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and the 1988 United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.

    Wikipedia succinctly notes that the United States and the United Kingdom enacted the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, respectively, to fulfill treaty obligations voluntarily assumed by them.  Other treaty Member States did likewise, all such nations now mutually entangled and cemented in “Just say no” prohibition glue and goo.  I took my new appreciation of the UN as the fountainhead of the world’s drug prohibition crisis to Vienna last week, hoping the Mazzitelli message would be delivered but neither he nor the message was anywhere to be found.

    In preparation for the Vienna trip, I read the UN documents that would provide the foundation and focal point for UN-delegate discourse and action regarding the world drug situation.  My reading included the 30-page reports by the Secretariat that detailed page after page of increased drug use and escalated drug trafficking worldwide.

    Given the bloody, fertile drug prohibition soil of the world and the Secretariat reports – maybe, just maybe, the Mexico City message and Latin American calls for an end to the drug-prohibition war would be heard and discussed in committee-of-the-whole and plenary sessions of the UN.

    But maybe not.  The United States sponsored a resolution celebrating a 100-year-old opium treaty (The Hague Opium Treaty), the world’s first drug treaty and, in the “wherefore” conclusions of the resolution, the US called for the reaffirmation of the three prohibitionist UN-drug treaties, the rope and gallows from which the UN member states swing by the neck.  The resolution would have been fine if it had called for the “repeal” rather than “reaffirmation” of the three UN drug conventions, a course error of only 180-degrees.

    The end of the story is not a happy one, for the status quo prevailed.  Prohibition was reaffirmed miraculously without any dissent and without a single vote.  As encouraged by 55th Session documents to present a “single voice,” the delegates moved commas and periods and labored over word-choice, but reaffirmed prohibition as the drug policy of the world without a hitch.  Countervailing forces, messages, and drug-policy-reform demonstrators could not even gain admission to UN premises and prohibition ground zero.  Admission was limited to those with badges and invitations.  And if there was media present in the VIC “Press Room,” somehow it already knew that nothing happens there.  And nothing did.

    Disturbingly, in Vienna, I watched the fate of the world and its public health, safety, and welfare steered by a roomful, or two, of delegates who effectively acted outside the scrutiny of the world, behind a translucent curtain made of world drug-policy obliviousness, boredom, and disinterest.  With immunity, the process picked the pockets of the world taking peace and quiet, sobriety, freedom, human rights, good health, the Golden Rule, national sovereignty, cultural, historic and (in some cases, e.g. Bolivia) sacred tradition from them, ostensible by consent.

    Delegates only discussed the “safe” drug policy topics – treatment, prevention, education and law enforcement, and the need for more.  But they did not discuss the economics of drug prohibition that made illicit drugs the more valuable than gold.  Drug prohibition economics was the elephant in the room never mentioned.  As I watched the delegates finish their work and seal the world’s prohibition fate for another year, I could hear the loud laugh of Al Capone, the snickers of Mexican drug cartels, and the thunderous applause of the drug-war benefactors, grantees and consultants.  The drug-war gravy-train riders were secure for another year.

    Eerie, ghoulish, chilling – it was to see and hear what the delegates could not.

    Now, back home in Chicago, I again see the price we must pay around the world for our dear beloved drug-prohibition policies.  This week, news that Mexican police found 10 heads severed from their bodies in Acapulco as the search for the bodies continued; news of a six-year-old shot and killed in Chicago gang violence along with six others shooting deaths here with dozens more shot and wounded.  Today, Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy says that the “gang menace is getting worse and the city needs to fight harder” to respond to the “bloodbath of violence.”

    Society continues to choose the hell of drug prohibition over the legalization, control, and regulation of substances, and the price for that delusional choice is steep.

James E. Gierach, a former prosecutor in Cook County, IL, is a board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com).

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Calls to legalise cannabis and ecstasy

Panel of distinguished world figures wants an end to 50-year war on drugs

By Guy Adams

It isn’t working. It never has worked. And so long as it continues to be fought in its current form, the “war on drugs” will do little to curb the spread of illegal narcotics or prevent hundreds of thousands of people from continuing to lose their lives each year as a result of the international drug trade.

So says a panel of world leaders who called yesterday for the biggest shake-up of drug laws in half a century. “The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world,” declared the Global Commission on Drug Policy. “Fundamental reforms… are urgently needed.”

The Commission, which counts the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan along with former presidents of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia as members, believes governments must now experiment with “legal regulation of drugs.” “This recommendation applies especially to cannabis,” reads a major report it published in New York yesterday. “But we would also encourage other experiments in decriminalisation.”

Ecstasy, which is currently considered a class-A substance, ought to be reclassified in line with medical opinion that it is far less dangerous than legal drugs such as nicotine and alcohol, the report suggests. Users of narcotics should be offered education and treatment, rather than being incarcerated, it advises. And countries which insist on continuing a “law enforcement” approach to drug crime should focus resources on taking down high-level traffickers, rather than arresting everyday drug mules and street dealers.

Although the recommendations are regarded as a statement of the obvious by many experts, they fly in the face of the official policies of most Western nations. Their endorsement by the Global Commission is therefore likely to be highly controversial. However, campaigners for drug reform are hoping that yesterday’s report may herald a shift in the way drug policy is debated by the international community.

The 24-page document notes that years of prohibition have resulted in a steady rise in the number of people regularly using drugs, which the UN currently estimates at around 250 million worldwide. Opiate use has grown by around 35 percent in the past decade, while world consumption of cocaine and cannabis has risen 27 and 8.5 percent respectively.

Current laws leave this growing industry in the hands of criminal gangs, resulting in spiralling violence from the slums of West Africa to swaths of Central and Latin America. In Mexico, a supposed government crackdown on drug gangs has resulted in 38,000 deaths in the past four and a half years.

The Commission, which also counts Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, George Shultz, the former US Secretary of State, and Sir Richard Branson among its 19 members, says the UN should now lead an “urgent” rethink of global drug policies, based on scientific evidence rather than political expediency.

Citing the success of liberal drug policies in countries such as Portugal, Holland and Australia, it recommends taking money spent on costly law enforcement campaigns and investing it instead in preventive drug education and treatment programmes proved to curb addiction rates and prevent health problems among users.

“Overwhelming evidence from Europe, Canada and Australia now demonstrates the human and social benefits of treating drug addiction as a health rather than criminal justice problem,” said co-author Ruth Dreifuss, the former Swiss president, at yesterday’s launch of the report in New York. “These policies need to be adopted worldwide, with requisite changes to the international drug control conventions.”

The “war on drugs” was declared in 1971 by the US president Richard Nixon, a decade after UN members signed the “Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs” which established the fundamentals of the world’s current policies. It was reinforced by the Reagan administration which told young people to “just say no” to drugs.

Today, polls indicate the public still support the current, tough laws. As a result, Bruce Bagley, an expert on drug trafficking at the University of Miami, told The Independent he believes there is “about zero” chance of the Commission’s recommendations being taken up by the US and other major nations.

“That said, this is a significant contribution from some very prominent individuals, which form part of an emerging conversation,” he said.

Timeline: 50-year campaign

1961 The United Nations passes the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, enshrining drug prohibition in domestic law across the world. It remains the keystone for global narcotics policies.

1970 The Nixon administration funds an expansion of methadone programmes in Washington, run by Dr Robert De Pont, who first documented a link between drugs and crime in 1969. Within a year, burglaries in the city decrease by 41 per cent.

1971 In January, the UK Misuse of Drugs Act is passed classifying illicit substances and outlining punishments for illegal drug possession. It remains the basis for UK drug policy today. Five months later, President Richard Nixon officially declares a “war on drugs” and identifies drug abuse as “public enemy No 1″ in the US.

1977 Jimmy Carter endorses a federal decriminalisation bill for marijuana, but it garners little support and momentum fizzles out. The UK Misuse of Drugs Act is amended to include MDMA (Ecstasy) as a Class A drug.

1982 Notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar is elected to Colombian Congress.

1984 Nancy Reagan launches her famous “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign. By 1988 more than 12,000 “Just Say No” centres existed globally.

1985 Colombia extradites drug traffickers to the US for the first time.

1986 President Reagan signs the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which assigns $1.7bn to continue fighting the “war on drugs” and imposes mandatory minimum penalties for drug offences.

1989 Forbes magazine lists Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar as the seventh-richest man in the world. President George H W Bush creates the Office of National Drug Control Policy. William Bennett is appointed first US “drug tsar”, and aims to make drug misuse socially unacceptable.

2000 Colombian President Andres Pastrana Arango wins $1.3bn US funding to combat drug-trafficking, decrease cocaine production by spraying coca crops with toxic herbicides, and fight guerrilla rebels who profit from and protect the drug trade, under a campaign dubbed “Plan Colombia”.

2002 Portugal decriminalises possession of all drugs for personal use.

2004 President Hamid Karzai calls for a jihad against Afghanistan’s multibillion-dollar drugs industry. The campaign costs British taxpayers £850m between 2002 and 2009. The UK reclassifies cannabis to Class C.

2009 US diplomat Richard Holbrooke announces that Western policies to eradicate Afghanistan’s opium crops “have been a failure. They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work.” The Obama administration drops prohibitive, “war on drugs” rhetoric in favour of prevention and harm reduction strategies favoured by Europe.

2011 A report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy says the global “war on drugs” has failed. It calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users.

Calls to legalise cannabis and ecstasy – World Politics, World – The Independent.

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High Society exhibition: can dope give us hope?

Image via Wikipedia

By Jake Wallis Simons 09 Nov 2010Last week, the news took on a decidedly trippy tinge. First, Professor David Nutt, sacked as an adviser to the Labour government for criticising its policy on drugs, sparked controversy when he published research suggesting that heroin was less damaging than alcohol. The following day, Californians went to the polls to vote on a proposal to legalise cannabis. In a dramatic move, President Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, threatened to intervene if the outcome was a “yes” (it wasn’t).

It is timely, then, that this Thursday, the Wellcome Trust will open the doors on High Society, an exhibition exploring the history of mind-altering drugs. In keeping with the Wellcome ethos, the exhibition blends a scientific and cultural approach, with curiosities such as a 20 metre opium pipe – an installation by the Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping – sitting alongside more scientific (if no less bizarre) exhibits, such as a Nasa experiment that studied the strange webs spiders spin after they are given different types of drugs.

Amid the debate about drugs, one thing is often ignored: their surprising potential in medicine. Most people are familiar with the idea that cannabis can be used therapeutically, chiefly in relieving pain or the nausea caused by chemotherapy, but also to moderate autoimmune and neurological disorders. But according to Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and director of the Beckley Foundation – a charity that promotes research into drugs and consciousness – we have not fully harnessed its potential. “The prohibition of the past 50 years has dramatically slowed the advancement of knowledge in the area,” she says. “In combating the recreational use of cannabis, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water.”

More surprising is the fact that harder drugs may also have therapeutic potential. Class A substances such as LSD and ecstasy, Feilding claims, may have a wealth of health benefits. “We need to wash these substances of their taboo by using the best science,” she says. “Opium and heroin are already widely used in hospitals. Hallucinogenic drugs, however, are victims of a prohibition that came into place in the Sixties.”

Feilding is something of a fringe figure, having earned the nickname “The Cannabis Countess” from the tabloids, and pioneered the art of trepanation, or drilling a hole in the cranium (in order to expand one’s consciousness). But hers is not an isolated view: the past five years have seen an increase in psychedelic research, to the extent that a full scientific conference is being organised on the topic in April.

“The potential of Class A hallucinogens for clinical use is tantalising,” says Mike Jay, curator of the exhibition. “Psychedelic drugs have been subjected to the most stringent legislation. Yet when administered clinically, they are non-addictive, non-toxic and effective in the smallest quantities.”

LSD was discovered in 1943 by Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist. Hofmann, the story goes, was carrying out experiments and got a tiny amount of LSD on his fingers. As he was riding his bicycle that evening, the world “transformede_SLps dissolving into a flux of kaleidoscopic spirals and fountains”.

“In the 1950s, the advent of LSD sparked a furious interest in psychedelic psychotherapy,” says Dr Ben Sessa, a consultant psychiatrist involved in organising the conference. “Then the substances leaked to recreational users, the drug revolution started, and the government halted the supply, even for therapeutic use.”

These may sound like the views of a crank. But Dr Sessa points out that he is not “a fringe figure in a wacky tie”, but a “serious, grey-suited scientist” who has “no interest in decriminalisation”. There is, he adds, particular excitement over research into MDMA, the active component of ecstasy. “MDMA is an incredibly clean substance when administered in a controlled setting. It’s very unlikely to cause a bad trip. There is no evidence that it is physically addictive. And it is extremely effective in psychotherapy, and to ease the anxiety experienced by cancer sufferers.”

This doesn’t mean that we should dispense MDMA over the counter at Boots. But the drug, which was developed in 1976, has proved its mettle in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dr Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist from South Carolina, has carried out extensive research in this area. He found that for the 30 per cent of PTSD sufferers who were too traumatised to talk about their experiences, therapy was useless. The administering of a small amount of MDMA, however, enabled them to talk freely about their trauma, allowing them to “move on”.

The British Government maintains that its rules on drugs do not mean that legitimate research is being curtailed. “The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 recognises the importance of research into drugs such as MDMA,” says a Home Office spokesman, “and allows it to take place under licence.”

Anecdotal evidence, however, points the other way. “It can be frustrating,” says Dr Celia Morgan, a psychopharmacologist at University College London who is engaged in research into cannabis. “Our work is funded by the Medical Research Council, but it was hard to come by. I’d like to see fewer restrictions and more scope for real research.”

The Government’s restrictive attitude, she says, is highlighted by a proposed amendment to the 1971 Act that will give ministers the power to ban “legal highs”, without any scientific evidence that they are harmful. “Prohibition should be based on proper evidence,” she says. “Science should not be circumvented or curtailed.”

Morgan and her co-researcher, Professor Val Cullen, have found that an element of marijuana called cannabinadol, or CBD, which has a beneficial effect on psychosis, anxiety, inflammation, nausea and cancer cell growth, is being bred out of commercially available cannabis. “Only 30 per cent of cannabis on the street contains any CBD at all,” says Prof Cullen. “That makes it far more dangerous.”

From the point of view of the Wellcome Trust, the societal forces that influence drugs policy must also be taken into account. According to Mike Jay, every drug has its own history. “Traditionally, we tend to be suspicious of drugs associated with other cultures, while being tolerant of those identified with our own,” he says. “For example, we don’t take alcohol very seriously, despite its dangers. Cannabis, however, with its historical links to Caribbean immigrant communities, has been viewed as far more dangerous.”

This is illustrated in the High Society exhibition by two pre-war posters. One reads, “Guinness is good for you”. The second states that “marihuana” is a “weed with roots in hell” and leads to “weird orgies, wild parties and unleashed passions”.

“Another good example is kava, a narcotic drink that has a central role in cultures across the South Pacific,” says Jay. “It encourages cordial conversation and comfortable silence. Yet in 2001, the EU banned it, on the flimsiest of evidence.” The ban has now been lifted.

“Every society is a high society,” he says. “The question is, what are we going to do about it? If illegal drugs can be used as effective medical treatments, it would be wrong not to research that rigorously.”

High Society exhibition: can dope give us hope? – Telegraph.

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