DM - Kew Gardens drugs storm over 'Intoxication Season' which includes talks on...

[edgarshade]

Kew Gardens drugs storm over 'Intoxication Season' which includes talks on mind-altering plants

7 September 2014
Nick Constable And Ben Ellery For The Mail On Sunday

With reader comments

• Speakers will discuss the uses of marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms
• The three-week exhibition at Kew Gardens is open to visitors of any age
• Plants displayed include cannabis and poppies - used to make opium
• Curators insist event will 'in no way condone use of illegal drugs'

Anti-drugs campaigners last night condemned an exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew where speakers will discuss the uses of marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms. The Intoxication Season is open to visitors of any age and displays plants including cannabis, the hallucinogen peyote, and poppies, which are used to make opium. Professor David Nutt, who was sacked as a Government adviser for his views downplaying the dangers of drugs, will give a keynote speech on the ‘chemical underworld of mind-altering plants’.

Other lectures include Seeing Through The Smoke, about the ‘helpful properties’ of cannabis, while another event celebrates the hallucinogen psilocybin as the ‘powerful chemical which makes mushrooms magic’. The three-week exhibition is set to begin on September 20 at the 300-acre Kew Gardens, which receives about half its funding from the Government. It has been given £114.5 million of public money since 2010. Curators insist that the event, which will display ‘notorious mind-altering plants’ in the Princess of Wales Conservatory, will ‘in no way condone the use of illegal drugs’.

David Raynes, of the National Drug Prevention Alliance and a former HM Customs Assistant Chief Investigation Officer, said: ‘Professor Nutt will go anywhere and do anything to bang his drum for the normalisation of drug use. He writes about giving drug users accurate information but those most badly affected by drugs are often young people who haven’t developed a risk-judgment mechanism.’

More...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ason-includes-talks-mind-altering-plants.html

 

[S.J.B.]

It’s Gardeners’ Question Time!
Josh Hulbert
DrugScience
September 7th, 2014

The Mail on Sunday today invented a “storm” of controversy over Kew Gardens’ upcoming Intoxication Season, where the public will be recklessly endangered by learning things about plants with …(whisper it)… drugs in them. The comments posted below their laughable article show how easily readers see though this. The comments give the encouraging feeling that the attitude taken by the Mail here is losing its foothold in the UK. Given that, it would be totally unnecessary to write a blog telling you how silly these journalists are. But it might be fun…

Kew’s Intoxication Season will I think inform and excite anyone who visits about the plants and fungi that contain drugs. Perhaps the understanding gained might even help a visitor to more safely navigate life in a world where, like it or not, intoxicating plants exist. We hope you’ll come along.

But will the Drugscience experts speaking at Kew, including David Nutt and Val Curran, be endorsing drug use? Only in the sense that a heart-surgeon’s lecture can be taken as an endorsement of cutting people with blades. To understand heart surgery or pharmacology is to understand that a knife or drug has no intrinsic good or evil, but that humans, with knowledge guiding their choices, can minimise the harm they can cause and maximise their benefits. The Mail journalists on the other hand believe in a black-and-white world in which use of certain drugs is harmful and wrong, and they imagine we at Drugscience see the same drugs as helpful and right. Their mistake is to see ‘harmful’ and ‘helpful’ as contradictions, when of course we are familiar with countless things which can be both;- cars, fire, journalists, doctors. The opium poppy and the cannabis plant both have the potential to be used in ways that harm and to be used in ways that help, that is simply a statement of well-established fact, not of opinion or ideology.

Read the full story here.

 

[edgarshade]

An article so ridiculous that the DM completely lost traction with their readership, judging by the comments. Only about two comments in support of the article and most of them are probably just being sarcastic.