Don’t Ride Horses on Ecstasy

In fairness, this is just a difference over what evidence-based policy means. For instance, I imagine the highly attuned outrage-o-meter in the basement of the Home Office was brringing away at 11 for hours, busily providing evidence about how much coverage talk of a downgrade would get in the half of each tabloid paper devoted to immorality-and-licence-run-riot stories.

The other half of the papers are of course devoted to stories about the nanny state.

A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And no one takes horses to raves, of course
But then again, perhaps you would
If you’re Ebeneezer Goode

(With apologies to The Shamen.)

They just banned magic mushooms (“paddo’s”) here in the Netherlands (“Holland”). It’s those goshverdarned Christian Democrats, of course, but happily the police and the food safety people are still arguing about which of them has to enforce the ban.

I don’t think either the tabloids or the government are in the slightest bit libertarian.
Journalists are not known to be teetotal, chaste, or devilishly attractive, but that doesn’t stop them writing “Celebrity without makeup looks a bit ugly” stories, “Celebrity gets drunk and looks stupid” stories, or “Celebrity has shameful affair” stories, and I think they’d get quite excited over a “Drunk celebrity cheats on wife with ugly bird” story. The Daily Mail might have a half-thought out Straussian thing going, the rest of the tabs are just doing Glenda Slagg – “Dontcha just love famous person? No, getting bored? Let’s hate them this week then”. Their own drug-taking just isn’t relevant.

As for the government, the ID card-pushing, Freedom of Information-gutting, 90 day detention-seeking, CC camera and ASBO-loving government… libertarian?

I think both journalists and politicians are probably libertarian about drugs, in the sense that if they’re sitting down with you in an informal context, over a spliff perhaps, they’ll agree that there’s a lot of nonsense talked about drugs and they aren’t really that harmful, and alcohol is actually worse in many ways, etc, etc, etc
But they have no motivation to actually act on that mild libertarianism, and feel that it is easier and safer to be ‘tough on drugs’ – it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy naturally – and anyway, it’s not as if their kids or colleagues are going to be banged up, so where’s the harm in hypocrisy?

yes, the government is really, sincerely repressive about this, these days. It’s taken a decided turn for the puritan.

It’s not just puritanism: it’s puritanism put forward by insufferable fourth-rate arseholes like Smith, Blears and Burnham.

If I had children, I would be far happier to learn they were using MDMA (ecstasy) than to learn they were drinking vodka… MDMA is probably the most benign of all the illegal drugs, certainly better for you than cigarettes, booze, and probably even coffee.

I volunteer as a crisis worker, helping people at raves and festivals, most of whom are having drug related problems. The vast and overwhelming majority of those people show up at our space with one of two problems: Alcohol, or Alcohol mixed with GHB. After literally hundreds of raves, I can recall only one MDMA related problem, which occurred after a drunk guy decided 9 pills would be a sensible dose (one or two would be about sufficient.) As MDMA is a stimulant, he was rather excited for about an hour, and he ran a fever of 101 f for a little while. Other than that, and a temporary inability to stop hugging me every couple of minutes, he was fine. Two hours after he arrived, he was back on the dance floor.

I will also comment that I have substantial, erm, personal experience with MDMA. It’s effects can be summed up simply: It makes you happy, and gives you enough energy to dance your ass off for 3-6hrs. It also engenders within you an urge to be nice to people.

If you use it too frequently, which for most people would be more than monthly, it’s effects tend to diminish, and eventually, they disappear. Most people who use MDMA stop using it for this reason…So in most people, the tendency to abuse is neatly short-circuited.

So lets see. It’s an underground substance, untaxed, and likely untaxable. It’s inexpensive, makes you happy, and you are shocked that goernments hate it? Exactly how are the liquor boys supposed to make money if we can just pop a little pill before we go out on the town? What happens to all the taxes on all that booze you won’t need to drink?

“What happens to all the taxes on all that booze you won’t need to drink?”

Tax the ecstasy? Why not?

It also engenders within you an urge to be nice to people.

A selection of the most punitive British officials WRT it:

James Anderton
Michael Howard
Jack Straw
David Blunkett
Jacqui Smith

Now there’s a group of people who have made a life’s work of never knowingly being nice to anyone.

zamfir:

How you gonna tax it? It’s made in illicit labs, by people who are entirely uninterested in running a VAT account…

The stuff is made in labs, largely in Asia, where the local authorities are sharing in the profits. The choke points to prevent (or rather to fail to prevent) distribution are generally during import, so you cannot tax at point of production. Marketing is right on the street, good luck enforcing a tax there.

rea:
Amen.

Made in illicit labs? You could have said the same about alcohol, any time it wasn’t being made by corporations. See Prohibition, Hogarth’s Gin Lane, etc. The point is, it’s trivially easy to make a corporate profit by making the stuff legally, and scaring the population away from the illicit stuff. But not making it at all, thus leaving the illicit stuff as the only game in town, and then trying to discourage its use, makes no sense at all, and has no chance of success.

I think the point is that if it were legal, it could be taxed.

It’s not necessary for something to be legal in order for it to be taxed, as Al Capone could tell you.

This whole mess goes some way to being a picture of the fear-stricken dilemma that is governments’ relationship with ‘drugs’. ‘Drugs’ in quotation marks because, as we all know, a lot of illegal drugs are on a par with or more benevolent than the legal, condoned, drugs of alcohol and tobacco. I need only allude to the well known more-deaths-by-alcohol stat for everyone to nod in agreement.

Everyone knows the current legislative and, by extension, general social attitude towards drugs is extremely misinformed, wholly illogical, and completely self-contradictory. Even when the government appoints an expert scientific advisory panel (for the purpose, it now seems, of avoiding criticism that it is making ill-informed decisions), it just ignores its two most significant pieces of advice. For what reason?

Largely fear, I would argue. Fear that in a time of economic crisis, hard work is the image to pursue, so downgrading cannabis or MDMA would be seen as out of touch, harking back to the party days of Blair. Fear that half the voting public have actually bought into the crap that previous governments have fed them about drugs (while at the same time offering another pint of beer, and a pleasant cigarette), and so would rebel at the polls.

I find it hard to believe that any intelligent, informed and reasonably transigent [not sure if that’s a word, but it fits] person could go along with the logic that alcohol and tobacco are OK to be freely distributed, but that cannabis and MDMA are not. It doesn’t add up. And horses are really dangerous!

Oh, and I forgot to add – if Valium hadn’t been devised and introduced to the marketplace by powerful drugs companies, it would be in the same category as many illegal drugs. “It might make you feel better for a short time, kids, but in the long term you’ll be disconnected from reality, and suffer sever side effects. Just say no.”

Not that there aren’t lame-o hypocrites all over the problem, but that the energy driving it is the same as everywhere else, money. M-o-n-e-y.

That’s easy to say, but harder to actually be specific about where this driving force originates from, or where it’s pushing towards. I do think the problem – in that there are glaring inconsistencies all over the shop – is largely political, but it would be folly to ignore economic weight as well, hence the Valium example. It’s germane to note that Valium is capitalised, while heroin, cannabis, and so on, are not.

>Illegal< drugs cartels are undoubtedly very wealthy, but I sincerely doubt they have much say in governmental decisions. Legal drugs companies, on the other hand, most certainly do.

If you’re just going to say that the problem comes down to m-o-n-e-y, then you’re really going to have to be more specific. Perhaps an argument could be made that no government wants its population to be caned off their faces, so reducing productivity, and so on, but I think it would be a pretty flimsy way of explaining the contradictions in current drugs legislation.

Put them in jail or threaten them with it, and then put them to work on something else. The 60’s saw more than a few behind the scenes snitches who were coerced into feeding info back into the system by just such threats.
Things are interconnected, rarely exist in isolation, and when it comes to big money they get real interconnected.
The unprovable but pretty much common knowledge that DEA/CIA direct involvement in the crack cocaine epidemic and all its damage, and wealth redistribution, is one big elephant in this fairly small room. Not the agencies themselves maybe, but within them, through them, under cover of their secret license. Iran/Contra was rife with drug money, and that was over two decades back. These are criminal conspiracies still functioning, with years of deepening protection.
The sense most people have today still, that the illegal drug industry is completely unconnected to political power coalitions, is naive in the extreme. There’s huge sums involved, and a lot of otherwise inexplicable geo-political maneuvering makes a lot of sense in that light.
It’s what makes the idea of the problem being just a bunch of anti-fun campaigners almost a complicit response.
Once again we have a majority of the people in favor of something, in one obvious example legalization of pot, yet politicians, who are, somewhat naively, expected to react to the will of the people, keep the hammer of the law beating down. Why? Who are they responding to, if not their constituents?

Are not most governments historically more authoritarian than they need to be? Maybe we should start to see law enforcement excesses through the lens of the simple human thirst for power over others, and how government will naturally attract those in the sway of this. I realize this sounds like what a lot of the Libertarians say, but I would say wealth is also a form of power, and the thirst for it has similar motives, but less muted by a sense of responsibility to the whole of society.

Who gave the horse the ecstasy?

The Mafia, for $0.17 per gram. It was an offer the horse couldn’t refuse.

Are not most governments historically more authoritarian than they need to be? Maybe we should start to see law enforcement excesses through the lens of the simple human thirst for power over others, and how government will naturally attract those in the sway of this. I realize this sounds like what a lot of the Libertarians say, but I would say wealth is also a form of power, and the thirst for it has similar motives, but less muted by a sense of responsibility to the whole of society.

That sounds completely sensible, and not especially Libertarian.

Ben, I would not say that the quest for money is equivalent to the quest for *political* power, but it is a quest for power of a different kind. Commanding resources is power, and getting others to do things for you is power; those are the two primary consequences of money.

I would like to point out that prohibiting drugs is a particularly extreme form of power. Not saying the act of using drugs is extreme, nor the penalties necessarily, but telling someone what mind-altering substances they may take is to some degree dictating what they may do with their minds. If you thirst for power, mind control, even partial, is the gold standard.