Save my Kids - legalise drugs!

I have never taken an illegal drug in my life. When I was at the influential age drugs weren't a part of the culture of rural mid-Wales, so I didn't have the chance to use drugs as a teenager / young adult. But I fell for beer and fags without much of a fight - so I would, probably, have gone for other things had they been available.

When I see people who suffer from drug addiction I don't feel holier than thou, I feel there but for the grace of God go I!

I am the father of two boys who are approaching teenage years. I hope that neither of them ever touch a presently illegal drug, but statistics suggest that my hope will not be realised. I hope against hope that they will buck the trend and live drug free lives. But, if they become part of the statistics I want them to have the safest possible experience.

The reason that the Government wants to reclassify cannabis is because the cannabis on sale now is apparently stronger than it use to be. Today's joint may be 10 x stronger than the joint of a decade ago.

Many overdose deaths are caused because users think that they are taking the same amount of a drug as usual. Apparently the purity of some drugs depends on market forces. A dose of heroin may be as high as 100% purity or as low as 10% purity, so you don't know if you are drinking a pint of whisky or a pint of beer!

If my kids do go down the drugs road, I would prefer that road to be regulated by the Government rather than the Mafia. I would prefer them to be able to read strength and cutting ingredients on the package under trading standards rules, rather than to guess strength and hope that nothing toxic has been used in the cut.

Like every Tory MP and Daily Mail reader I would like to live in a society where recreational drugs don't exist or only exist amongst the criminally insane. Unfortunately that place is now called Cloud Cuckoo Land. Drug taking is part of our current social existence. Banning drugs has failed miserably. Legalising drugs under strict licence is the only sensible way of dealing with the problem, and the only way of ensuring the safety of our children as they grow up in a drug taking world.

Drugs, criminality and taxes

I have never taken any illegal drugs. Not because of any moral superiority, they just weren’t a part of the society in which I lived during the years in which I might have been most influenced to take them. However, it took little to tempt me to succumb to beer and fags, despite dire warnings! If a drugs culture had existed in rural Wales when I was a youngster, I have no doubt, whatsoever, that I would have been part of it. I haven't done drugs through luck, no other reason - just luck.

Many of those who pontificate about anti-drugs policies are in exactly the same situation as I am. There but for the Grace of God / luck of the draw go I.

It is clearly evident that the taking of illegal recreational drugs is now a part of the cultural norm for many in the Western world. Too many people, from all walks of life, take drugs for the trade to be abolished by any sort of war on drugs or just say no policy.

So many of the deaths of children and young people by gunfire and knifing incidents in recent years have been caused by the unregulated drugs trade. The lifeblood of the gangs that terrorise urban areas is the drugs trade and their control over and desire to protect their control of that trade.

The idea that people won't report crime to the police for fear of recriminations from the gangs is too simplistic. Many otherwise "respectable" people don't report crimes because they are part of the problem they worry about the police snooping into their own illegal practices:

Will the police smell the pot in my living room?
Will they see the residue of lines on my coffee table?
Will helping them find the murderer cut off my supply chain?
Will the criminal that I shop grass on his minion and his minion grass on his minion's minion and start a lead down to the fact that I am one of the minion's minion's minion's customers for illegal drugs?

The only way that the drugs trade can be controlled is by governments taking control of it, by legalising those drugs that are now illegal, specifying quality controls and licensing outlets.

Before I am lambasted in the comments section - I am luck enough to be able abhor the idea too, but all other ways have failed and failed miserably!

The only way left to tackle drugs crime is to take criminality out of the drugs trade by taking the criminals out of the trade and replacing them with qualified, licensed and taxed legal traders.