blaming individual casualties seems a little cold to me - in the culture of silence and taboo that we are operating in anyway.
people that preach against harm minimisation are effectively saying that drug users deserve to die. in states in america that do not have needle exchange programs, and require prescriptions for fits, this is the reality.
higher incidence of HIV and hep C as well as other harms.
to me this is the irony of mr wood's position - but i don't blame him. he doesn't know any better.
tangerinO - i like your last post on the previous page. you raise an interesting point about how to read the absurdity that is our modern media and the modern approach to drug use.
i would suggest that one way to look at it is this; drug prohibition is not there to protect us from harm or from ourselves.
the whole purpose of banning certain drugs, and the campaign to demonise them through propaganda in the media is to keep certain people down.
whether they be poor people, rebellious people or certain ethnic groups (dependant on the country) drugs deemed 'bad' and 'illegal' are not those that are the most dangerous, but those that are not accepted by the current global power base.
with the current anglo-american dominance in world affairs (which seems to be changing?) has forcefully exported american drug laws to the rest of the world. the initial drugs that were prohibited were cannabis (which were associated with mexicans) and opium (which was associated with chinese migrants). then as the various social changes of the 1960s occurred, the favoured drugs of the counterculture (namely psychedelics and amphetamines) were first demonised in the media, then made illegal.
now, you could say that this is related to the dangers of the use of these drugs becoming normalised - but i think it has much more to do with the fact that the state wanted to control these people by force.
what force? the police force and the judicial system.
now the USA has the biggest prison population of any nation in history - and guess what? not only are the prisoniers are a slave labour force, but there are less 'rebels', less 'agitators' on the streets. whole communities in poor neighbourhoods now grow up with incarceration being a fact of life - brothers, uncles, cousins, sisters, mothers, fathers are absent from kids' lives because they are behind bars, if they grew up in the wrong part of town, the wrong culture.
it wouldn't come as a shock to many that a lot of these people are from ethnic minorities.
the civil rights era in the US may seem like a distant memory from history, but it is
the same people being oppressed by the 'war on drugs' as those that were oppressed by segregation - and it is the same the world over. wealthy folks in mercedes don't get stopped by police and searched for drugs, but poor folks on the street certainly do.
it is about the wealthy maintaining their positions of power in society, masked in an emotive pseudo-moral issue. moral issues are something everybody wants to get behind, from politicians to schools to religious leaders.
but it doesn't make any sense? of course not! it's a fucking sham. a red herring. a load of fucking bollocks.
finally it seems like some of the people that realise this are starting to speak out. it only took 80 years