Top Tweets for #Reduceharm

We say there is a war on drugs, but it is only a war on some drugs. We all use drugs. However, the state approved and taxed drugs really dont want any competition - they have a strong and powerful privileged position. They dominate the market, and those who benefit from the Drug Wars (and there are so many diverse groups) will do anything to keep it this way. We’ve identified eighteen key stakeholders: 1. It provides the Banks with massive investments from money laundering. 2. It provides an attractive and unquestionable dogma for moral crusading groups to ‘say no’ to drugs, avoiding the complexities of science, reason and rationale, and indeed avoiding the contradiction in respect of other psychoactive substances sugar, caffeine, tobacco and alcohol. 3. It provides a much-needed distraction from the serious problems caused by the more harmful, addictive and culturally embedded legal drugs – alcohol, tobacco, sugar and pharmaceuticals. It provides the police with powers to easily stop, search, arrest, interrogate and prosecute almost anyone. 4. It protects the market share and status of the privileged, promoted and culturally embedded legal psychoactive drugs. Essentially ethanol; caffeine; tobacco; sugar and pharmaceuticals enjoy market protection. 5. It allows governments to deflect attention away from the key structural drivers behind most chronic addiction (inequality, stigma, exclusion, poverty and blocked opportunities) and instead, misleadingly shift attention towards the supposed devastating power of the illicit drug. 6. It provides politicians on both sides with a societal scapegoat, and the chance to rally support and votes by getting ‘tough’ on a socially constructed enemy within: the ‘addict’ hooked and controlled by the ‘demon drugs’. 7. It provides the news media, TV and film industry with easy, cheap sordid stories, dramas and images illustrating the horrors from ‘drugs’ – without ever questioning the social and political drivers for drug harm. 8. It provides excellent opportunities for the state to disproportionately target, monitor, control and punish the poor, indigenous people and minority ethnic groups. 9. It successfully attracts significant additional funding for police, armed services, customs officials and security services, and additional resources for the police/state through the seizure of assets. 10. It provides justification for military action, espionage and invasion of other countries. 11. It provides excellent business opportunities and a ready supply of victims for the ever-burgeoning penal industrial complex. 12. It provides opportunities for new technology development and sales, in the invasive and expanding drug testing industry. 13. It provides considerable opportunities for new technology development and sales, in the underground avoidance of drug detection industry. 14. It provides the drug rehabilitation business with an endless supply of illicit users, who are required to always abstain, and forever be in recovery. 15. Internationally, it rallies otherwise disparate nations together by finding common ground to fight a shared war against a global enemy, ‘drugs’. 16. It provides researchers and academics with a constant and reliable stream of funding sources for endless research to uphold prohibition propaganda - such as reefer madness, gateway theory, crack babies and krokodil. 17. It provides a lucrative illegal market that enables gangsters and drug cartels to make incredible untaxed profits. 18. It provides excellent careers for drug enforcement officials and drug policy entrepreneurs and careerists, facilitating debates, inquiries, international travel, networking and conference events, particularly via the United Nations. It is clear there are a lot of groups that benefit from prohibition!

You don’t like a drug, fine don’t do it. Convince your family and friends not to use it. But keeping it illegal only helps crime & criminals. Just like alcohol prohibition, drug prohibition supports a black market economy. It only helps criminals and just like alcohol prohibition it creates the environment for street gangs and cartels. It’s a simple concept, someone is going to provide the drug, do you want legal companies or criminals. AnheuserBush or Al Capone. You speak against psychosis, when Alcohol-induced psychosis is about 50 times more common. Tobacco induced psychosis is also higher than cannabis. Can drug use be a problem for some people? Yes. Just like every other drug has problems for some people, but the decision about drug use is better made at home. Attempting prohibition at a society level doesn’t stop drugs at all. The drugs are here, the attempt at prohibition creates a marketplace for drugs, an illicit black market. It doesn’t stop them, it makes all the drugs into the most dangerous form of the drug that is possible. We have Fentanyl, Crack, Crystal Meth and synthetic cannabinoids that are all much more dangerous than a legal version of the drug would be, just like Bathtub Gin during alcohol prohibition. History shows this with every single drug, with every single attempt at prohibition. Alcohol prohibition brought us the mafia. Drugwar prohibition has brought us cartels and street gangs. I’d rather have AnheuserBush than Al Capone. I’d much rather have Phillip Morris rather than Pablo Escobar. Legal companies that follow rules and regulations and pay taxes is always better than crime, corruption and criminals.