England's Changing Attitude to Drugs

One of the reasons I believe that drugs should be legalized -- or at least decriminalized -- is because I think it is a tremendous waste of police time to hunt down people who really are no menace to society.  Yes, they may be a menace to themselves, they may be doing damage to their bodies, but people using soft drugs like marijuana are not a menace to society.  People who smoke marijuana are not going to run amuck: they are not going to attack you or me, unless, of course, they are violent people, and violent people don’t need a drug to be violent.  Peaceful people will smoke dope & continue to be peaceful people.
 
All this is a preface to what I’ve been reading in British newspapers.  As I mentioned in a previous talk, England is seriously considering a soft approach to certain drugs.  They are already not pursuing marijuana users, not jailing marijuana users, and a recent article pointed out that in six months such a policy “saved officers & staff in one borough more than 2,500 hours and led to a 19% increase in arrests of Class A drug dealers.” End of Quote
 
There are two parts to the above quotation.  In one borough alone they saved 2,500 hours, which the article goes on to point out gave the borough the equivalent of two extra full-time officers.  That is in one borough only -- a borough is roughly the equivalent of one neighborhood.  In just one neighborhood they saved 2,500 hours, and the second part of the statement points out that they then had enough time to arrest 19% more Class A drug dealers.
 
The police could, and did, focus on drug dealers, not drug users, and the drug dealers they focused on were “Class A” drug dealers -- dealers who peddled drugs that are classified as “A” drugs --heroine, crack cocaine” because such drugs might, indeed, seriously damage the health of a drug user.
 
Because such Class A drugs are not controlled by the government, not checked by a reputable authority, the drugs are often adulterated: strychnine poison is added, or some other poisonous substance is added to the drug.  Personally I think all drugs should be legalized & supervised, but that is another question altogether.
 
Meanwhile, at least in the case of soft drugs, drugs like marijuana, let us leave the drug user alone.  Hounding & pursuing & jailing users of soft drugs is costing our society an immense amount of time & money.  You do not need to be reminded of how many users of such drugs are being sentenced to long prison sentences.  Our jails are full of such prisoners, prisoners who, if they used such drugs in other countries, or in other eras, would not even be in prison.  As someone once said: society creates the crime and then the criminal commits it.
 
Soon smoking marijuana will not be a crime in England, as it already is not a crime in several European countries.  Leave pot smokers alone; focus on real criminals who commit crimes against others.  As the article points out, in six months, in one borough alone, they saved 2,500 hours of police officers’ time, the equivalent of two extra full time police officers.  The article also points out “that an additional 1,168 hours of police support staff time was saved by not having to process cannabis prosecutions through the borough’s criminal justice unit.”
 
It is time we decriminalized pot smoking.

 

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