Sunday, September 06, 2009

Demons Vs Imps

The Guardian - UK has an editorial up on the failure of the drug war.

The political fixation on drugs prohibition really took hold in the west in the 1960s as much from moral panic about a subversive counterculture as from analysis of the harm caused by particular drugs.

Since then, the law has tried to maintain a distinction between reputable and disreputable substances that neither users nor medical research recognise. Scientific attempts to classify drugs in terms of the harm they do – to the body and society – routinely place tobacco and alcohol ahead of cannabis and ecstasy. The point is not that the wrong drugs are banned, but that the law is nonsense to anyone with real knowledge of the substances involved.

One point of general agreement is that heroin is the big problem.
Ah. The heroin demon vs the marijuana imp. Progress.

But if you take out superstition all you have left is that "People take pain relievers to relieve pain. The stronger the pain the stronger the pain reliever required."

It pains me to see anti-prohibitionists still mired in superstition. I may have to seek pain relief.

H/T Drug Policy Forum of Texas

2 comments:

cjm said...

the funny thing is, once someone is a heroin addict, they don't actually get much of "high" from it. they just feel intense discomfort in its absence. kind of ironic really.

M. Simon said...

No irony. The intense high comes from the initial pain relief.

You can't get less than no pain.