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  • EADD Moderators: axe battler | Pissed_and_messed

NPS Act V1. Blankets? Just Say No!

One Thousand Words said:
Would be easier to just allow one or two more recreational drugs to keep the uncleanness masses happy.

Distraction with MDMA or mushrooms then no one would give a shit if their pensions are halved at 75
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you're expecting a state pension ?? I gave up on that one years back, I don't see it as a good bet as things stand.

Mushrooms are for fukin hippy wannabees, you are welcome to them, isn't MDMA already legal ?......fight the power
 
One Thousand Words said:
Would be easier to just allow one or two more recreational drugs to keep the uncleanness masses happy.

Distraction with MDMA or mushrooms then no one would give a shit if their pensions are halved at 75
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The simplicity of decriminalising a couple of established, well understood drugs compared to the complications of banning every single unestablished new drug...

Treacle said:
There is a silver lining (as already mentioned), and that's that people will hopefully just take the tried and tested illegal drugs, rather than guinea pigging random shite,
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Also, the other silver lining is that possession of Legal Highs is not proscribed. So, for the first time in the UK, drugs that are illegal to trade are legal to possess. Is this a subtle step towards decriminalisation of drugs for personal use..?
 
Thinking about it...

Are holland and barratt going to have to shut? 7 year sentence for selling chamomile tea? Nutmeg? That's a paddlin'

Ridiculous. I'm cross now
 
riases the question of the implications this would have for medical research and pharmaceutical innovation in the UK. It is already a dire situation re: schedule 1.
 
Dont they have to draw up a Bill, and then get it voted through the houses of parliament, then if successful it goes up to the house of Lords to have their say, and if they say 'we agree' only then does it become an Act, or a legally enforcable bit of legislation. I hope all the vendors hire some excellent lawyers to drag this out for years. It took years to ban fox hunting, and then it was unbanned again? If this is gonna happen, unless they find some way of 'rushing it through' it'll probably be years before it means all the UK vendors have to shut up shop. I hope im right with all this.:\
 
Transform said:
Thinking about it...

Are holland and barratt going to have to shut? 7 year sentence for selling chamomile tea? Nutmeg? That's a paddlin'

Ridiculous. I'm cross now
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And I get more annoyed every time I see things like this questioning whether H&B, or water, or Beethoven's 5th are enablers or psychoactive substances. This argument will go nowhere. They are not going to fucking shut Holland & Barrett.

What people need to do is to appeal to the Lords. Yes, the fucking Lords. This Bill has cross party support in the Commons, you aren't going to affect it that way. Instead we need to appeal to the Lords on the grounds this proposed law is not consistent historically with the principle of English Law which has always stated that unless something is specifically prohibited, it is not illegal. This is the major change this law brings in. Those are the grounds we need to argue on.
 
Ceres said:
riases the question of the implications this would have for medical research and pharmaceutical innovation in the UK. It is already a dire situation re: schedule 1.
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Some of the Pharmaceutical companies like Astra-Zeneka are amongst the biggest or richest companies in the UK? If they can no longer research anything will they stiil be able to produce stuff? What a fucking mess.
 
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/joshi-herrmann-csj-legal-highs-ban-466

also (published in New Scientist)

UK's legal highs ban is unscientific and will lead to more harm

14:00 29 May 2015 by David Nutt
For similar stories, visit the Comment and Analysis and Drugs and Alcohol Topic Guides

A plan to prohibit psychoactive substances not covered by existing law will only make matters worse, warns a former UK government drug policy adviser

A blanket ban on legal highs in the UK is on the cards. The new government included it in legislative plans unveiled in the Queen's speech this week and published its bill today.

Cue cheers from campaigners who say the new psychoactive substances it targets can be lethal, and that the "head shops" that sell them are disliked by local communities in the same way that sex shops used to be.

At the core of the campaign for a ban is the repeated claim that legal highs killed over 90 people in 2013, the last year for which data is available. DrugScience, an independent committee I set up, showed this to be false over a year ago. We revealed that very few of the drugs involved in this claim were in fact legal.
Ill-considered law

Campaigners are aware of this but continue to use this figure – which makes me parody the quote often attributed to Disraeli : "There are lies, damned lies and legal high statistics." To base a new law on such untruths is unpalatable at best and dishonest at worst. Moreover an ill-considered law could lead to much greater harm to users and to the scientific community.

In any event, bans don't stop deaths. Illegal opioids such as heroin kill around 1200 people in the UK a year, cocaine 200 and other illegal highs around 100. And don't forget that the biggest recreational drug killer is exempted from the new law: alcohol. It causes some 22,000 premature deaths per year in the UK.

How might the proposed ban increase the dangers of legal highs? If head shops are banned people will turn to backstreet dealers and the internet, neither of which have the same relationship with their customers as shopkeepers, so vital education and guidance on harm reduction will diminish.

A blanket ban on new psychoactive substances could also inadvertently prove a serious impediment to UK pharmaceutical research into brain disorder treatments. Such work is already shrinking rapidly, and another regulatory hurdle could run it into the sand: would new antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs be affected by the ban? It is vital that scientific societies fully evaluate the proposed legislation and highlight possible unintended outcomes.
Avoidable harm

All this could be avoided. There is a much simpler solution than a blanket ban - learn from the experience of other more rational countries such as the Netherlands. It has a network of drug testing centres that allow users to find out exactly what they have bought and learn about safe dosing and harm minimisation. Thanks to this, the Dutch have had low death rates from recreational drugs in recent years. Moreover they are able to rapidly identify dangerous new drugs and put out warnings.

They did this in December 2014 when pills bearing a Superman logo and packing a high dose of PMMA were detected; no deaths resulted. They also warned other European countries, including the UK, where PMMA is banned. But no official alert was sounded here and we had three deaths from people using them, presumably thinking they were a form of MDMA (ecstasy). This sad episode rather sums up the UK's unscientific and primitive approach: impose bans knowing that this won't work and will lead to some users dying from ignorance.

David Nutt is the Edmond J. Safra professor of neuropsychopharmacology and director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit in the division of brain sciences at Imperial College London
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StoneHappyMonday said:
And I get more annoyed every time I see things like this questioning whether H&B, or water, or Beethoven's 5th are enablers or psychoactive substances. This argument will go nowhere. They are not going to fucking shut Holland & Barrett.

What people need to do is to appeal to the Lords. Yes, the fucking Lords. This Bill has cross party support in the Commons, you aren't going to affect it that way. Instead we need to appeal to the Lords on the grounds this proposed law is not consistent historically with the principle of English Law which has always stated that unless something is specifically prohibited, it is not illegal. This is the major change this law brings in. Those are the grounds we need to argue on.
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so its already a bill, sorry im not fully informed on all this. Pretty sure the greens and lib dems were proposing decriminilasation in their manifestos. Not that they carry much weight in parliament. Even if the greens did get a million votes, i dont think getting nick clegg and caroline lucas on board will save the day.
 
No one listens to Professor Nutt Ceres, especially when what he says makes sense. They sacked him for making too much sense, and not just being a patsy and telling them what they wanted to hear for his monthly salary.
 
mydrugbuddy said:
No one listens to Professor Nutt Ceres
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He is held in high regard among his peers i.e medical professionals, and a lot of people do listen to him. Of course government advisory bodies will be full of sycophants, corrupt idiots and jobsworths. The vice article I linked above explains who the government is listening to for 'advice' on how to deal with the drugs issues. (loonies and ian duncan smith)
 
Ceres said:
He is held in high regard among his peers i.e medical professionals, and a lot of people do listen to him. Of course government advisory bodies will be full of sycophants, corrupt idiots and jobsworths. The vice article I linked above explains who the government is listening to for 'advice' on how to deal with the drugs issues. (loonies and ian duncan smith)
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i should have phrased my original post more accurately, the politicians in power didnt listen to him, they sacked him. I would expect that he is held in very high esteem by his colleagues and other associates as he had the integrity and balls to present an honest and accurate report on his findings to the government, which Im sure he knew it would not be well received. Im sure that a lot of people interested in the subject do listen to him.
 
Ive just thought of something, if the ban does go ahead, surely all the vendors need do is move their websites to be hosted in say Spain, but keep their production and stuff running in the UK, so that it can still be dispatched UK to UK. Im sure some of them will do this, but they will have to be very smart how they go about moving into criminal territory, probably not many will want to risk a prison sentence or have the balls to do it. The big vendors have probably already made gigantic enough profits to retire on several times over.

For example the profits on cannabinoid blends are known to be absolutely ridiculous, ive done the maths by making my own from the powders, it costs about £1 at the most to make a bag of 5g or w/e size they sell them in, and they shift them at £15 or even £25 a pop for the new ones iirc. I cant remember the exact figures but i think i made a 50g batch a few years ago, it was plenty strong enough and probably cost me about £3 for everything; the smokeable herbs cost more than the 'noid powders. If i wasnt of such a paranoid and anxious, conscientious nature, i'd be running a very profitable sideline in making and shipping these blends.

If kratom gets included in the ban my mood and energy level is gonna be fucked for months, unless i move back up the opiate ladder onto stronger opis again. Thus causing more harm than good on an individual, personal level. I have stocked up on stem and vein which will reportedly halve the physical w.d and recovery time from a month or longer to about 2 weeks. It wont be that hard physically but mentally it will be tough going. I'll possibly be fucking useless at work for a while and risk getting sacked. It will also force me to break the law, not that that worries me, unless i get caught!! Sorry for all this speculating, my imagination gets a bit carried away sometimes, expecting the worst.8(
 
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StoneHappyMonday said:
What people need to do is to appeal to the Lords. Yes, the fucking Lords. This Bill has cross party support in the Commons, you aren't going to affect it that way. Instead we need to appeal to the Lords on the grounds this proposed law is not consistent historically with the principle of English Law which has always stated that unless something is specifically prohibited, it is not illegal. This is the major change this law brings in. Those are the grounds we need to argue on.
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I'm with you there ..... So is there an actual procedure for doing this? I know members of the general public can write to their MPs, but are we even allowed to contact the Lords directly? And if so, how do we go about it, and how do we know to whom to address it?
 
Yeah ^ ?

StoneHappyMonday said:
A Bill is just proposed legislation. It has to go through three readings in the Commons and the Lords before becoming an Act (and therefore Law).
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& any rough idea of the absolute quickest this could happen with what is not, as far as I know, an emergency bill..?
 
What kind of argument is ever going to get a Lord to take anyones side against the government though?

I know Branson is pro-decriminaliation but he's only a Sir so far. I cant think of any Lords likely to oppose the bill. Any musicians or writers, artists or other creative types been made Lords? Perhaps the HR argument is the only one that stands a chance, in that this ban will just force the problem underground and force legal high users back onto the oldschool drugs, lining the criminals pockets again, and possibly seeing users moving up the drugs ladder until they get to crack and heroin (as the Daily Mail would have you believe.)
 
mydrugbuddy said:
What kind of argument is ever going to get a Lord to take anyones side against the government though?
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A legal one.

Not a drug one.

http://www.votesat16.org/votesat16/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/How-to-Lobby-a-Lord.pdf

How to lobby a Lord, page 4. That's a PDF from the vote16 issue but the same principle applies.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying we can win. Particularly bearing in mind the recent legislation that went through parliament effectively ending hundreds of years of entitlement to legal aid. But this is how we have a chance. We need to find Lords with particular interest in 'fair play' and tradition in legal matters. A major precedent is about to be overturned with this legislation.

Si, bills going through parliament can vary so it's really a question of how long is a piece of string. It depends on a few variables, not least how busy government is with other legislation.
 
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