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UK Home Secretary Theresa May is continuing a trend of ignoring science advisers when it comes to drug policy:
Home Secretary Theresa May and her statutory advisers on drug policy look to be heading for a showdown over government plans to deal with so-called "legal highs". Some members of The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) are understood to be furious that they were not consulted on proposed legislation for a blanket ban on psychoactive substances. The relationship between the ACMD and ministers in various governments has long been strained. There have been sackings and mass resignations in the last few years, amid claims that expert scientists were being bullied and ignored because their advice didn't coincide with government policy.
Questions are now being asked as to whether the ACMD is being edged out of the drugs debate - 44 years after a Conservative government set it up to ensure science rather than politics dictated policy. In the House of Lords yesterday, a number of peers demanded to know why ministers had not asked the ACMD's opinion before drawing up the controversial Psychoactive Substances Bill.
"It is actually a legal requirement set out in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 that the ACMD must be consulted before alterations to the Act or new legislation is brought in," Labour peer Lord Rea told the House. "Instead, a specially appointed expert panel was set up by the Home Office. I can only suggest that this was done because the opinion of the ACMD is often not exactly welcomed by the Home Office".
The principle which underpinned the drugs debate in the UK at that time [in 1971] was the longstanding and broadly accepted view that addicts were ill and required treatment rather than punishment. Known as the "British system", ministers felt a medical science-led approach was preferable to US-style prohibition. Roll the clock forward four decades and the government view seems to have turned around entirely in responding to the threat from so-called "legal highs". The bill to outlaw NPS prohibits everything "capable of producing a psychoactive effect" unless it is specifically exempted - and there are concerns that the proposals are being introduced without proper consultation with health experts.
A blanket ban on psychoactive legal highs with prison sentences of up to seven years was featured in the Conservative Party's election manifesto and the Queen's Speech.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zz9zZ on Saturday June 13 2015, @12:10AM
Thanks for the links! While important cautionary tales, those are a far cry from someone turning into a cannibal and eating human flesh.
While these are disturbing, there are way more such occurrences of suicide / death from alcohol. I am very suspicious of the man who murdered his wife, but yes altered states of mind can be dangerous. This is more of an issue with drug education.
And again (for wisnoskij) the negative stories from drug use are overshadowed by the negative affects of prohibition: creating a black market, theft, murder, and imprisonment (which creates a cycle).
All that said, of course there will be substances that will be regulated. As new drugs are created they must be tested before legalization.
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday June 13 2015, @01:57AM
The flesh eating zombie thing is probably a reference to a case in Florida. However, in spite of the sensationalist headlines, the M.E. found no trace of cathinones in the zannibal's system. NMaturally, those headlines were nowhere near as larg or stridently reported.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday June 13 2015, @04:30PM
Agreed on alcohol and prohibition in general. It's almost dark humor that two of the most dangerous drugs we know, alcohol and tobacco, are legal, while safer drugs such as cannabis are illegal.
Ken Burns' documentary Prohibition almost makes the case for cannabis legalization. (Sometimes I wonder if that wasn't the main thrust of the documentary.) Again, it's dark humor that we can't apply what we learned during alcohol prohibition to cannabis prohibition. Of course, there's always racism. During alcohol prohibition, the crime was in our backyards. With cannabis prohibition, the crime just affects brown folks. /s
Speaking to designer drugs, I do wish that HU-210 (among the other components of the “old” spice, back before the DEA cracked down on HU-210 and spice had to change its formulation to be imho useless—it was this useless formulation that made headlines in the USA, not the old spice [cue the Old Spice Guy]) specifically would be given proper safety trials and made legal. The high is somewhat different from cannabis and more psychedellic.
While I have great respect for the various highs Mother Nature has given us, it behooves us to understand that the human mind is a complex organ and that perhaps putting it in a “debugging mode” does involve hallucinations. We should understand the importance of introspection and drugs that operate on a, dare I say, “spiritual” level in creating psychological change. It could be the case that the solution to a number of mental illnesses is at our fingertips, if only we'd accept that irrational states of mind are useful debugging modes.