UK - Government Just Banned Everything!

[Si Dread]

Government Just Banned Everything

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/05/27/the-government-just-banned-everything

Even by the standards of modern legislation, the psychoactive substances bill is startlingly inane. It seems to ban any substance which can cause a mental or emotional reaction. As must be obvious, that's almost everything in the world. Did this taste remind you of your mother's cooking? It's a psychoactive substance. Did it bring you a moment of happiness? It's a psychoactive substance. The government is about to ban almost everything.

This is not, to be fair, the legislation. This is just the advert. But the description of the bill in the Queen's Speech is troubling enough.

"The Bill would make it an offence to produce, supply, offer to supply, possess with intent to supply, import or export psychoactive substances; that is, any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect. The maximum sentence would be seven years’ imprisonment."

Note the line "any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect".

That therefore includes all substances, given that at the point someone was caught by police it would only be pertinent if they intended to give it to other people.

The World Health Organisation defines psychoactive as:

"Psychoactive substances are substances that, when taken in or administered into one's system, affect mental processes, e.g. cognition or affect."

So at this stage everything is included.

There are, of course, rather substantial caveats. The next section says:

"Substances, such as alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, food and medical products, would be excluded from the scope of the offence, as would controlled drugs, which would continue to be regulated by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971."

So existing illegal drugs are exempt. So are existing mind-altering drugs which are legal, such as alcohol. Food is exempt, which gets rid of our 'mum's food' example above. And so is caffeine, although it seems that whoever wrote it did not know that theobromine has a stimulant effect on the brain and is found in tea and chocolate. Chocolate will be OK because of the exemption on food, but hot chocolate won't. So that might need fixing before they end up criminalising half the country.

You'll notice as well that solvents aren't mentioned. The food exemption also raises the question of what you do about people who cook legal-high versions of cannabis into cakes or biscuits. Professor David Nutt's plans for a safer version of alcohol, which could save millions of lives, would be illegal right off the bat. In fact, it's worth considering for a moment how far-reaching these plans are. The world is now illegal until proven otherwise.

That seems to stretch what might be considered the valid powers of the state into the world of fiction.

How has it happened that such a nonsensical idea could find its way into a Queen's Speech? The story starts in New Zealand. When they experimented with a different approach, world governments realised that being sensible about legal highs meant bringing the war on drugs to its knees.

This is their problem: Once a new legal high is blacklisted, those clever chemists alter its composition just enough that a new one does not fall under the remit of the law and can be freely sold. Chemists – especially those with the appropriate financial incentive – typically work faster than legislators.

New Zealand had a particular problem with this. It's out in the middle of nowhere and there aren't many people living there. Drug smugglers weren't really keen on finding routes into the country. But demand still existed, because Kiwis are humans and if you give humans the opportunity they will take drugs.

So legal highs were very popular in New Zealand. The government came to a sensible solution. It would offer drug designers the chance to get approval for their products if they could convince a Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority they were safe. It was a great idea and passed with just one vote against. And then it all went wrong.

Because the world is sillier than any of us are really prepared to admit, it went wrong not because of a backlash by drug prohibitionists, but because of animal rights activists. The interim licensing sections were repealed and a section added banning the advisory committee from authorising a product where the trial for its use involved the use of an animal.

Putting aside the eccentricities of Kiwi politics for a moment, the reasonable original proposal was profoundly dangerous for supporters of the war on drugs. It threatened the idea that drugs must be banned, regardless of harm, out of some quasi-religious anti-intoxification agenda. It introduced the notion that drug regulation should take place on the basis of evidence of harm, rather than some sort of historic crusade. Basically, it was sensible. And because it was sensible, it was a threat to the global system of drug regulation.

So if you can't do that - for fear of undermining half a century of madness - you have to go the other way and ban everything until its proved it won't do anything in your head. That is the oh-so-sober suggestion of the drug warriors: they want to ban things which make the brain do things. It's basically a war on subjectivity. A child would know it was madness. Only a civil servant could think it was sound policy.

It's easy to laugh, but what has happened here is a dark legal turning point in British history. Previously, everything was legal unless the government passed legislation outlawing it. That is the benefit of not having a constitution – your freedoms are not granted, they are only ever taken. It makes legislation a sober undertaking which demands responsibility and sincerity from those who write and vote on it. It is the great achievement of British society: the idea that the people are free and the government must justify its intrusions, not the other way round.

This is the opposite. It is the spilling of the legislative ink, so that it covers everything. It is the rank opportunism of the state at its worst. And it is contrary to the legal basis upon which this country has operated for hundreds of years.

 

[Mysterie]

so this is pretty similar to australia's analogue act?

 

[foolsgold]

this is fucked up like said in another post this will kill some benzo addicts a lot more than if they legalised things

 

[StoneHappyMonday]

This legislation, if it goes through, will kill people. This is not hyperbole. Let me explain.

A significant number of people are using RC (legal high) vendors, based in the UK on the web, to buy benzodiazepines. Legal, uncontrolled benzos. Forget the moral rights or wrongs of that and just accept what I am saying is fact. Enormous benzo habits are being built by a large amount of people.

You cannot just stop a benzo habit. That equals death. You cannot go to a British GP with a benzo habit and be expected to be accomodated. The over-prescribing of benzos by GP's in the 1970's still sees a policy whereby benzos are never going to be given out freely again.

So we have a group of people with nowhere to go. Its analogous to making alcohol illegal tomorrow. Do that and you will kill a significant number of alcoholics.

This will kill a significant number of benzo addicts.

This is a very real, if underground, problem.

Of course, I don't expect a callous government to even know or care about such a group of people. We will happily report on every hospitalization of a middle class Spice user. You will never hear of the very real, very significant, and very dangerous problem posed by government legislation to a group of people who are addicted to dangerous (through sudden withdrawal) drugs off the internet.

Except in this post.

This legislation is outrageous for many reasons. The one I have outlined here WILL cause deaths.

...

 

[rc_benzo]

You can still bypass this law by creating inactive, non-psychoactive drugs that metabolize into active ones.

A good example is Benzobarbital. It is inactive and completely legal, however when in your liver, 70% of it is metabolized into Phenobarbital, which is a powerful, active, long-acting barbiturate

Another example is Ketazolam. By it self it is inactive, however, in your liver it metabolizes entirely into Diazepam, which is obviously active.

This can be done with a lot of substances.

 

[Si Dread]

New Government, No New Approach to Drugs!

from - http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/nia...6.html?1432807382&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067

Well here we are again! A new Government - albeit one that has the remnants of the previous - but nothing new in the UK's drug policy, at least in terms of what can be deemed progress by any rational measure.

No, instead we have full blown regression, encompassed now in "New legislation [that] will ... ban the new generation of psychoactive drugs," it was announced Wednesday in the Queen's speech.

The alleged purpose of the Bill is to "protect hard-working citizens from the risks posed by untested, unknown and potential harmful drugs." How noble of the Government. Does this mean, therefore, that there is an exemption in the legislation so that those who aren't in work, or those who aren't that "hard-working," will be able to be involved in the trade without fear of prosecution?

In the wake of this announcement the Release team feared how far reaching the definition of "new psychoactive substances" could be. What would happen to chocolate or alcohol, for example? Thankfully, we can still eat chocolate and have a glass of wine. The Government has clarified that the Bill would essentially create a number of offences related to "any substance intended for human consumption that is capable of producing a psychoactive effect" excluding "alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, food and medicinal products." So, tobacco is fine but e-cigarettes possibly not, marking a perhaps not insignificant blow to this harm reduction measure. There is potential difficulties in relation to nitrous oxide or 'laughing gas' which has a number of legitimate purposes within the exceptions. There is no doubt that this will be a technical nightmare for those drafting the Bill.

Facetiousness and finer points aside, the proposed legislation is simply another example of why we need an overhaul of our drugs policy. New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) is in itself an unhelpful term, but if we take it as new powders and substances that are produced to mimic the effects of traditional illegal drugs, then we must recognise that these drugs have not appeared in a vacuum; rather, they are a response to the current system of prohibition.

Decades of outlawing illicit narcotics - a measure which has little effect on prevalence - should be proof enough that a blanket ban will solve nothing. This is why we need an approach that reflects the reality of the market, realising that different products emerge as a result of developments or trends in the current established trade, not as a result of their legality or otherwise. To use just one case study, the rise of mephedrone use in the late 2000s was mainly as a result of low MDMA and cocaine purity levels and the unprecedented "advertising" campaign by the media highlighting this new "drug scourge."

Ultimately, if we really want to reduce the harms of drugs we need to look at all drugs separately and not as a homogenous group. The proposed legislation is the complete antithesis to that approach.

Take cannabis, for example. As most people know the Netherlands has permitted legal use of cannabis through the coffee shops since the 1980s and has little recorded use of synthetic cannabinoids. Indeed why would people access something synthetic when they can get the real thing? Conversely, synthetic cannabis use is on the rise in the UK especially amongst young people and certain vulnerable groups including prisoners. This group of substances is thought to be much more dangerous than the home grown variety, with some manufacturers claiming that the potency is 20 - 30 times higher than cannabis.

It is our current drug policy that has resulted in this situation occurring. We know that continuously banning drugs rarely diminishes use and never makes the problem go away - ketamine use in the UK has doubled since it was made illegal in 2006.

As well as considering how the market interacts in relation to the available products, it is also worth thinking about what happens when we make a substance illegal. We hand that substance over to the illicit market, where there are no product or purity controls, no age controls, where drugs are adulterated and the risk associated with their use increases. People are put at a greater risk of harm as a result of prohibition.

The reality is that people want to use drugs; many people enjoy the pleasure associated with specific substances, something we cannot ignore. A small percentage - about 10% - use drugs problematically but that is a more complicated situation, where people who have often suffered trauma or have mental health problems are self-medicating.

One in three adults have used a drug at least once in their lifetime, including, funnily enough, a number of politicians. The current Prime Minister won't answer the question on his drug use but we can assume; many Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet members have admitted to their past use, the current US President and the last two all admitted to using cannabis, with Obama admitting to using cocaine when at college. Prohibition did not prevent their drug use, they were just lucky/privileged enough not to get caught and end up with a criminal record like so many millions of others, but they are an example of the reality of the situation. Lots of people use drugs and the criminal justice approach does not deter use.

What we at Release would like to see is a new approach to drugs. Let's start with the end of criminal sanctions for possession of all drugs - it is welcomed that this Bill will not criminalise people caught in possession of NPS, but why not all currently illicit substances?

The Home Office's own report of October 2014 highlighted that, based on the evidence, tough sanctions does not deter use. It would be good if Ministers finally followed the evidence produced by their own departments instead of opting for an ideologically driven, myopic approach. Once decriminalised we take a step by step approach to each drug, starting with cannabis, and work out the best and safest way to regulate these substances so as to mitigate their harms. To be frank if we start with cannabis and MDMA we would undermine the whole NPS market immediately!

Niamh Eastwood is the executive director of Release, the UK centre of expertise on drugs and drug laws

 

[alasdairm]

itt: the government tells you you can't feel a certain feeling

alasdair

 

[SteamboatBillJr]

The Queens speech also mentioned future legislation reducing free speech and peaceful political dissent in the same sentence. The newly re-elected Prime Minister David Cameron has been advocating similar policies with the implementation of default Internet censorship (aka porn filter) and suggesting limitations on the use of encryption. Personal liberty continues eroding.

Measures will also be brought forward to promote social cohesion and protect people by tackling extremism. New legislation will modernise the law on communications data, improve the law on policing and criminal justice, and ban the new generation of psychoactive drugs.

 

[Si Dread]

motherfuckers!

...burn it all down!