Citizens Assembly - Drugs - decriminalisation of possession presumably for er 'private' use

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WizardDr

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I have held a radical view of Drugs for some time - that the whole shooting gallery on a world wide basis should be legalised period. Another ATM for lawyers as people could sue under Tort / Contract for a whole pile of issues. With the US attitude - no time soon.

This proposal from the Citizens Assembly isn't well thought out. One simple reason is that if you or anyone you know buys drugs then you are contributing to the Kinahan & Associates pile of cash and the murder and mayhem that goes with their employees, suppliers and unpaid monies. No two ways about it. But this middle class blindness just doesn't want to make the link.

Here is what I would do if we wanted to avoid 'criminal conviction':

- You agree to do community service of X hours in some form of Drug Rehabilitation where you see the carnage.
- You agree also pay a multiple of what the street value is to certain charities.
- 3 strikes and you will go to jail.
 
WizardDr said:
I have held a radical view of Drugs for some time - that the whole shooting gallery on a world wide basis should be legalised period.
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That would be a total disaster. It is radical though. Not sure it's working too well in the likes of Vancouver, Portland or San Francisco.
 
michaelm said:
That would be a total disaster. It is radical though. Not sure it's working too well in the likes of Vancouver, Portland or San Francisco.
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It has to be world wide basis as stated. Then the criminality is totally gone. Its a bit like the booze in 1930s U.S. which coincided with one of the most violent periods in their history.
 

This is it in a nutshell - middle class and wealthy drug users are the biggest problem by far. They make the market profitable for the cartels and they are less likely to feel the same consequences as poorer/working class drug users.

I don't even drink coffee but I do think people should have maximum freedom to drink alcohol, smoke, use drugs, etc. They are not however entitled to enjoy themselves by consuming products that involve exploitation, intimidation, and murder.

When alcohol was banned/restricted people still drank it but they risked disability or death if it was a bad batch. Regulation increases the availability but decreases the overall risk. The challenge with many modern synthetic drugs is the high risk of addiction and the very narrow window between safe doses and overdose.
 
I’ve had some experience of addiction in my family and I was struck by the pointlessness of the legal aid merry go round where people with profound mental health, intellectual and social problems are churned through the courts week in week out.
Agreed.
WizardDr said:
But this middle class blindness just doesn't want to make the link.
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While I agree that middle class drug users are for the most part deeply hypocritical they are not the biggest market or anywhere close to the source of the biggest social problems.
The Gardai are, in my experience, brilliant about how they handle addicts. I saw pragmatism from as well as an intense frustration with the healthcare industry, both public and private, which in my experience shows an active unwillingness to help.
Most of all I saw a deep compassion from Gardai and desire to help. I can say without hesitation that my family member is alive today because of the Gardai and despite the health service.

The three strikes and you’re out rule is totally pointless when it comes to addiction. Addicts will do whatever they have to in order to feed their addiction. They can’t help it.

I’d like to see the money wasted on legal aid spent on rehabilitation. It generally takes three attempts at rehab before someone can get on top of their addiction. That’s expensive but it’s still cheaper than prison.
 
Purple said:
t... the pointlessness of the legal aid merry go round where people with profound mental health, intellectual and social problems are churned through the courts week in week out.
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Agreed - a complete waste of time, money, and effort and in far too many cases, lives.
Purple said:
The three strikes and you’re out rule is totally pointless when it comes to addiction. Addicts will do whatever they have to in order to feed their addiction. They can’t help it.
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Unless they get suitable treatment promptly.

Compulsory treatment, as an alternative to prison, is always destined to fail, no matter how many times its tried.
Purple said:
I’d like to see the money wasted on legal aid spent on rehabilitation. It generally takes three attempts at rehab before someone can get on top of their addiction. That’s expensive but it’s still cheaper than prison.
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And I'd like to see a lot of the centrally funded local drink drug/initiatives measured in terms of ROI. How many lives saved, how much has the local drink/drug-fuelled crime reduced, and by how much have A&E attendances, hospitalisations, and ambulance calls been reduced? And, addicts don't get on top of their addiction; like diabetics and people with other chronic illnesses, their treatment is long-term and symptoms will persist

Your generalisation about how many times an alcoholic/addict needs treatment before leading a clean and sober life is very much off the wall. Any stats and what do you mean by treatment?
 
mathepac said:
And, addicts don't get on top of their addiction; like diabetics and people with other chronic illnesses, their treatment is long-term and symptoms will persist
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The evidence from the US suggests otherwise. WE don't hear about the successes. We only see and hear about the failures.
mathepac said:
Your generalisation about how many times an alcoholic/addict needs treatment before leading a clean and sober life is very much off the wall. Any stats and what do you mean by treatment?
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Some US data here. They find that the median number of attempts is 2.
That said I'm sceptical of most sociological studies as so many of them, from the original Broken Window study to the Stanford Prison Experiment have been shown to be contrived nonsense.

The success rate for rehab is, obviously, higher the earlier supports are given and they can't be given until they are looked for.
Just as it's better to stop the diabetic becoming fat and unfit in the first place it's cheaper to treat drug use earlier. We spent approximately €2.5 billion treating diabetes in Ireland in 2022. Most of that is obesity and diet related. It's hard to get date on the overall cost of obesity but this projected a cost of around €6 billion a year by 2020. If we invest that sort of money in people who have one kind of addiction/health problem why do we invest so little in people with a different kind of addiction/social problem?
When a drug addict dies of an addiction related illness many of us shrug our shoulders and say that's what you get for taking drugs. When a fat person gets cancer or diabetes or a heart attack we don't say "It serves you right fatty, you shouldn't have been greedy and lazy". We don't do that because it's cruel and inaccurate and we understand there are lots of reasons people become obese but because chronic drug addiction has been mainly confined to a particular cohort of society the rest of us have been okay with cruel and inaccurate generalisations about them. Maybe addressing that should be a major part of a national drugs strategy.
 
mathepac said:
Compulsory treatment, as an alternative to prison, is always destined to fail, no matter how many times its tried.
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Just on this. What evidence do you have to back that up?

Remember that addicts do not, for the most part, fall into the stereotypical group of emaciated looking wide eyes "junkies" staggering around the street and they certainly don't start off like that. Much like most medical issues early intervention massively increases success rates. As long as we criminalise certain forms of addiction we greatly reduce the chance of early intervention. That is unless the addict has private health insurance and the supports necessary to get them into private rehab.

That brings us back to the socioeconomic cohort from which the stereotypical "Junkie" is most likely to come from and the social and economic segregation that allows the people who make the decisions in the State and are members of the legal and medical industries to have less empathy for those who don't speak like them or dress like them and don't really look like them. It's strange how we need a connection, a familiarity, to really have empathy and how often empathy can be the enemy of compassion.
 
Thought this was relevant here... Germany to legalise cann abis clubs.

The link below is corrupted by the site filter so check out The Journal homepage for more.

https://www.thejournal.ie/germany-legalises-weed-spamspamspam-6342231-Apr2024/
 
All very fine to decrimilise possession but I do think the laws need to be changed to reflect the impact of usage, drug driving being a case in point which is getting far more prevalent
 
For those who mystifyingly still think that decriminalization of illicit drug use and possession are great ideas, please read about the consequences and how some “decriminalisers”, lauded as visionaries, now want to row back on their commitments.

If these articles disappear behind paywalls, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Oregon’s drug decriminalisation went horribly wrong. What now?

When drug use was decriminalised, opioids tightened their grip on Portland. Now the policy is being reversed — but it may be too late
www.thetimes.co.uk

Inside the fentanyl trade powering the world’s deadliest drug crisis

What started as prescription painkiller is now the cause of a public health emergency. Where does it come from? Stephen Gibbs and Keiran Southern follow the money from China via Mexican gangs to the streets and suburbs of America
www.thetimes.co.uk

Oregon shows drug decriminalising doesn’t work

After declaring a state of emergency over fentanyl, the US state is backtracking on its 2020 law
www.thetimes.co.uk
 
Those are all behind a pay wall.
I don't know why you are attempting to link fentanyl to the decriminalisation of possession of illegal drugs.
What I would say is that removing 50 years worth of criminal justice infrastructure and replacing it with a corresponding healthcare based system in a couple of years is a mammoth task, particularly in a country like the USA where there are so many layers of bureaucracy and inefficiency. It would also be a challenge here where there is such a low level of labour mobility in the State sector and huge inbuilt levels of waste.
 
Purple said:
I don't know why you are attempting to link fentanyl to the decriminalisation of possession of illegal drugs.
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Fentanyl and other synthetic drugs have had a catastrophic effect because they can be produced locally. The precursor chemicals required are often legal or easier to smuggle in than a final product. China is the main supplier and trafficker of the component chemicals. They are flooding the US market for 2 reasons: cash and politics. In this context fentanyl is relevant as the decriminalisation takes place in a world with easier access to more potent drugs and therefore higher risk to health - decriminalisation in 2024 is a different proposition to Portugal's approach in 2001.


This is exactly it. There was a good New York Times podcast on this where they examined the reasons for the failure. The consensus was that the decriminalisation bit was done but the crucial medical supports which were part of the plan were never put in place. So it was destined to fail.
 
I'm aware of all of that but for me that's an argument in favour of decriminalisation as it's almost impossible to halt the supply.
Decriminalisation isn't a panacea. A well structured and managed alternative has to be in place but what we are doing now just doesn't work. It's a terrible waste of police and court time.
The New York Times is so woke and leftie it's hard to take it seriously anymore but it can occasionally produce some excellent journalism.
 
Purple said:
A well structured and managed alternative has to be in place but what we are doing now just doesn't work. It's a terrible waste of police and court time.
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Go on, go on, go on, ya good ting, givvez a fer instance or a few example please.
 
mathepac said:
Go on, go on, go on, ya good ting, givvez a fer instance or a few example please.
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There was an excellent interview with Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland Oregon in the New York Times at the start of this month. Well worth a read.

Mr Wheeler points out that the "War on Drugs" has failed and while Oregon took steps to "return law enforcement and public safety tools to our first responders" what is really required to address the root causes is the supports and mental health infrastructure and "In terms of the botched implementation: To decriminalize the use of drugs before you actually had the treatment services in place was obviously a huge mistake."

Now you show me where criminalisation of drug possession has reduced the drugs problem.
 
I’d prefer if you took time to reflect on where the legalisation of alcohol and tobacco has led us. Despite a couple of hundred years experience of the legal sale and consumption of alcohol and tobacco-based products, we STILL have no adequate supports, next to zero effective legal, medical or mental health infrastructures, nationally or locally, to deal with the consequences of these two highly addictive drugs.

We still have illegally manufactured alcohol and tobacco available for sale, we still have smuggling of products from low-tax economies into countries with higher taxes. Sure, what we need is more of the same with another array of addictive and potentially lethal products.
 
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mathepac said:
I’d prefer if you took time to reflect on where the legalisation of alcohol and tobacco has led us.
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I'd prefer if you reflected on what constituted a discussion and offer some reciprocity.

Maybe you could also reflect on what happened in the USA when they banned alcohol.
Levels of alcohol consumption in Ireland have reduced significantly over the last 20 years despite increased access and a booming economy.
Smoking in the over 15's has reduced from 35% to around 20% of the population since 2000.
Better public health information, taxation policy and public health supports have all contributed to those very positive trends. Both of these things have happened without criminalising addiction or addicts.

I do agree that the Mental Health industry and those who work in it have failed their customers and the public in general in relation to drug addiction, despite vast amounts of funding, but that's true in the medical industry/profession/sector in general. I think that the heroin substitution gravy train that GP's make aa killing on (pun intended) is disgusting and immoral.
They are more interested in whining and moaning that doing their jobs properly. That's not an argument for banning alcohol or tobacco. It's an argument for reforming a self aggrading "profession" that is blinded to it's own failings by bombast and ego.

"I can't or won't do my job properly so please criminalise the people I should be helping and ship them off to prison" isn't, in my view, a sound argument.

And yes, I've come to that conclusion having reflected on it and having had significant personal experience.
 
Purple said:
Maybe you could also reflect on what happened in the USA when they banned alcohol.
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and when they decriminalised the possession of illegal substances in certain areas.

One possible conclusion is that our TransAtlantic brethren aren’t good at this stuff. Maybe we should look elsewhere for guidelines or solutions.

Where to look? How about here at home and have a gander at how well our laws and the enforcement of them are working at reducing the death and destruction on our roads, the people killed and injured in fights, the people whose health and that of their families is being ruined by tobacco and alcohol addiction?

When was the last time you heard of a publican being prosecuted for serving alcohol to an already intoxicated customer? What about automatic jail for someone detected driving over the legal limit? Automatic jail and loss of licence for 5 years as a starting point, sentences doubled for each person injured if the driver concerned is found culpable in a road traffic collision, doubling again for each person killed or sustaining life-altering injuries.

None of these measures would suit the liquor licence holders in Dáil Éireann, which is why they’ll never even be discussed. If we’re serious we need to take unpalatable steps, then maybe we can discuss what to do about the illegal drugs.
 
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