The murder of Keane Mulready Woods.

thegetawaycar

jam_mac_jam wrote: »

Marijuana would be a large part of the illegal market, you legalize that and you have taken a lot of the money out of it. Its not all coke they are selling.

In Portugal (just as it's the usual example) selling Marijuana IS illegal, having it for personal use is not. If we were to go the Portugal route, it would still be the same as now only the end user is not a criminal.
Portugal even has it illegal to purchase seeds to grow weed (Spain allows buying seeds for personal growth) and I can't see how the move to a system like that would affect these gangs at all.

easypazz

I suppose you could legalise it for a period of time, then ban it again.

That way the gangs will have lost their supply chain and once its banned it will take time to filter through again, at which point you legalise it again and repeat.

jam_mac_jam

thegetawaycar wrote: »

In Portugal (just as it's the usual example) selling Marijuana IS illegal, having it for personal use is not. If we were to go the Portugal route, it would still be the same as now only the end user is not a criminal.
Portugal even has it illegal to purchase seeds to grow weed (Spain allows buying seeds for personal growth) and I can't see how the move to a system like that would affect these gangs at all.

I would legalise weed as well. Would take away huge resources for handling hard drugs. Would also take huge profits away from the gangs

Ardillaun

jam_mac_jam wrote: »

I would legalise weed as well. Would take awat huge resources for handling hard drugs.

Go the Canadian route and legalize weed. That’s an easy problem to solve. The trickier questions involve the more dangerous drugs. Will legalization of cocaine and heroin lead to an abrupt rise in users and more patients on trolleys?

Jimmy McGill

If coke was legalised and businesses here were able to sell it, who exactly would they be able to buy it from legitimately?

jam_mac_jam

Ardillaun wrote: »

Go the Canadian route and legalize weed. That’s an easy problem to solve. The trickier questions involve the more dangerous drugs. Will legalization of cocaine and heroin lead to an abrupt rise in users and more patients on trolleys?

I honestly don't think it would. It would still probably kill less people then smoking.

It's never going to happen with hard drugs anyway.

Ardillaun

If hard drugs were legal, I’m sure there would be suppliers. Of course, this being Ireland, there’d also be lawsuits the following day by users who didn’t know the drug was dangerous and suffered horrific injuries etc.

jam_mac_jam

Ardillaun wrote: »

If hard drugs were legal, I’m sure there would be suppliers. Of course, this being Ireland, there’d also be lawsuits the following day by users who didn’t know the drug was dangerous and suffered horrific injuries etc.

What horrific injuries? Nobody sues Guinness.

Jimmy McGill

Duke of Url wrote: »

Is there any country in the world where it’s legal to supply and sell cocaine?

No

empacher

Buy raw coco plant and process it here in a lab. Guaranted quality

Ardillaun

Duke of Url wrote: »

Is there any country in the world where it’s legal to supply and sell cocaine?

I don’t know of one. Just googled it. The cultivation of coca is legal in multiple countries. Possession of small amounts is legal in Mexico and Colombia and decriminalized in a few other countries. It is legal for restricted medical use in Canada and the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_cocaine

The thing is a conversation about the sale and supply of these drugs is overdue and we need to question our assumptions. The current system of outsourcing the job to death squads who aren’t big on quality control isn’t working very well. Is it really the least worst option? I honestly don’t know but there’s no harm in talking about it.

tuxy

Duke of Url wrote: »

Is there any country in the world where it’s legal to supply and sell cocaine?

Not to sell only possession in small quantities is legal(decriminalised) in a few countries.

It's also used for a very limited number of medial procedures in some countries. So there much also be someone providing legal supply in this very limited situation.

mikeecho

easypazz wrote: »

I suppose you could legalise it for a period of time, then ban it again.

That way the gangs will have lost their supply chain and once its banned it will take time to filter through again, at which point you legalise it again and repeat.

It says that the prohibition law which was passed here 200 years ago was repealed 199 years ago.
Release the prisoner! Oh! On behalf of the city, I'd like to apologize and ask how long it will take for you to flood this town with booze again? Well, sorry.
I'm not in that business anymore.
Four minutes.

mikeecho

I've no sympathy for Keane Mulready-Woods.
His death has saved the state millions in :

future investigations,
Court time,
Garda time,
Legal aid,
Probation services,
Prisons,
Social welfare etc etc.

It has also saved countless families becoming his victims.

This guy IMO is no loss to society.
Hopefully a few more of them get removed, and when the cesspool has been significantly reduced, then the Gardai can deal with what's left.

Ardillaun

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is Ground Zero in Canada’s opioid epidemic and proposed solutions for the crisis from that city are correspondingly radical:

The B.C. Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU) has unveiled a vision for how legal heroin sales could take place in the province, as health officials continue to grapple with an unrelenting overdose crisis that kills roughly four people per day.

The idea is to create a heroin buyers club, or compassion club to sell regulated, pure heroin to people addicted to opioids.

Its architects — which include addictions experts, physicians, as well as drug users — drew inspiration from the cannabis compassion clubs in the 1990s, which provided access to medicinal marijuana, and the AIDS buyers clubs that helped people obtain medications that weren't yet approved during the height of the AIDS epidemic.

...According to Wilson, underground heroin buyers clubs have already popped up in the Downtown Eastside. Someone who finds a supply of uncontaminated heroin pools resources with 12 or 15 other users to buy a large quantity.

"You know we pay up to $200 a gram for heroin down here? That same gram sold in Switzerland, legally, is $3.80," he said, adding that the difference all goes to criminals.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/heroin-buyers-club-safe-supply-1.5027479

Dr. Mark Tyndall, a public health professor at the University of British Columbia, says installing a vending machine that dispenses clean drugs could help.

Tyndall, who is also lead of research and evaluation for the Provincial Health Services Authority's Opioid Overdose Response Team and has spent 20 years working in the Downtown Eastside, said he will have a prototype that could be ready to roll out in as little as two months.

"The focus should be on treating this like a public health emergency, like it was declared. This is a poisoning epidemic, and like any other thing that people are being exposed to, we try to change that exposure," Tyndall told Stephen Quinn, the host of CBC's The Early Edition.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/it-s-time-to-install-vending-machines-to-provide-addicts-with-clean-drugs-ubc-prof-says-1.5238989

Prescribing heroin to addicts is showing promise in multiple countries:

https://transformdrugs.org/heroin-assisted-treatment-in-switzerland-successfully-regulating-the-supply-and-use-of-a-high-risk-injectable-drug/

The immediate beneficiaries of such programs would be users but several effects could also flow to law enforcement over time - fewer minor possession and dealing cases to waste time on, less crime by addicts trying to feed their habit and more drugs supplied through legitimate routes.

Effects

mikeecho wrote: »

I've no sympathy for Keane Mulready-Woods.
His death has saved the state millions.

Someone else will just pop up in his place.

STB.

thegetawaycar wrote: »

In Portugal (just as it's the usual example) selling Marijuana IS illegal, having it for personal use is not. If we were to go the Portugal route, it would still be the same as now only the end user is not a criminal.


Portugal even has it illegal to purchase seeds to grow weed (Spain allows buying seeds for personal growth) and I can't see how the move to a system like that would affect these gangs at all.

The main point is that it is decriminalised. This means that the police's time and the courts is not spent emptying the pockets of people with a small amounts of cannabis on their person and needlessly clogging up the system. These resources can be spent elsewhere.

Marijuana - please do not use this word. It was American propaganda 100 years ago that has us where we are in relation to cannabis.

And by the way, ALL drugs are decriminalised in Portugal.

Ardillaun

mikeecho wrote: »

I've no sympathy for Keane Mulready-Woods.
His death has saved the state millions in :

future investigations,
Court time,
Garda time,
Legal aid,
Probation services,
Prisons,
Social welfare etc etc.

It has also saved countless families becoming his victims.

This guy IMO is no loss to society.
Hopefully a few more of them get removed, and when the cesspool has been significantly reduced, then the Gardai can deal with what's left.

How much has the state really saved? Is there a finite pool of young drug dealers out there?

The most effective way of addressing this scourge is by reducing demand - simple but not easy.

washman3

Effects wrote: »

Someone else will just pop up in his place.

Wrong.!!
Somebody else will be ALLOWED pop up in his place because we've never had a Government with the balls to tackle them head on, ironically for fear of upsetting the minority of snowflakes in our society. and a police force that's completely out of it's depth in dealing with these scumbags

tuxy

washman3 wrote: »

Wrong.!!
Somebody else will be ALLOWED pop up in his place because we've never had a Government with the balls to tackle them head on, ironically for fear of upsetting the minority of snowflakes in our society. and a police force that's completely out of it's depth in dealing with these scumbags

Which country have been the most effective at stomping out drug gangs like we now have in Ireland?

Ardillaun

washman3 wrote: »

Wrong.!!
Somebody else will be ALLOWED pop up in his place because we've never had a Government with the balls to tackle them head on, ironically for fear of upsetting the minority of snowflakes in our society. and a police force that's completely out of it's depth in dealing with these scumbags

Unless you’re prepared to bring in an authoritarian police state you’re not going to make much of a dint in the drug trade through prohibition alone, and even if you do impose martial law success is not guaranteed. Look at the example of the Islamic Republic of Iran, hardly a regime known for its snowflakes:

Out of a population of 81 million, about 2 to 3 million Iranians are estimated to be addicts, continually one of the world’s highest addiction rates. Prisons abound with users: In 1987, 78,000 people were imprisoned in Iran on drug-related charges; in 2004, the number was 431,430. In the mid-2000s, Iran and the United States shared a similar rate of imprisonment for drug users, some of the highest rates in the world.

... In January 2018, Iran raised the amount of drugs in possession that triggers the death penalty from a mere 30 grams of heroin, morphine, and cocaine, and 5kg of cannabis and opium, to more than 50kg of opium, 2 kg of heroin, and 3 kg of crystal meth. The change allowed around 5,000 people on death row to have their cases reviewed, with the prospect of having their sentences commuted to imprisonment or fines. The death penalty for marijuana possession and trafficking has been completely eliminated. And in the spirit of marijuana-legalizing times, a 2015 proposal even sought to decriminalize opium and marijuana and introduce state-controlled cultivation.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/01/24/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-old-irans-revolution-drug-policies-and-global-drug-markets/

So even the mad mullahs are considering the decriminalization of opium. That should tell us something.

Effects

washman3 wrote: »

We've never had a Government with the balls to tackle them head on, ironically for fear of upsetting the minority of snowflakes in our society.

Once someone starts mentioning 'snowflakes' you know their judgement is clouded.

tuxy

Effects wrote: »

Once someone starts mentioning 'snowflakes' you know their judgement is clouded.

That kind of thing can only be from someone who lives in North America or thinks they do and at that stage you have to wonder why they are commenting on Irish politics.
Not that people from NA can't comment on other countries they just won't use terms that don't apply here.

joe40

Addicts will do whatever it takes to get their hit and I have sympathy for them.
However casual users of cocaine buying drugs in the full knowledge that criminal gangs are benefitting is immoral in the extreme.
You can argue they should be legal, maybe so, but the fact is they're not so recreational drug users are literally bankrolling criminal gangs, and are therefore complicit in the violence.

tuxy

joe40 wrote: »

Addicts will do whatever it takes to get their hit and I have sympathy for them.
However casual users of cocaine buying drugs in the full knowledge that criminal gangs are benefitting is immoral in the extreme.
You can argue they should be legal, maybe so, but the fact is they're not so recreational drug users are literally bankrolling criminal gangs, and are therefore complicit in the violence.

I agree with this and think there is a shared responsibility involving the gangs, government and users.

The government is the one with the power to make real changes though.

Strumms

Decriminalizing cocaine use means more people using it, more people addicted, the costs that the state will incur will be massive...due to the services needed.

You’ll have people getting behind the wheel of a car coked up, pubs and clubs full of it, more fights, injury, deaths guaranteed... it’s a horrible cûntish drug. I’ve been around enough people drunk, stoned on cannabis, high on ecstasy... but nothing ever comes close to seeing fûtwits on coke, asshole drug, for assholes.

tuxy

Strumms wrote: »

You’ll have people getting behind the wheel of a car coked up

I don't know if the Garda twitter is a good indicator as they may pick and choose posts but cocaine is the most common substance that they show people failing roadside intoxication tests on.

Effects

tuxy wrote: »

That kind of thing can only be from someone who lives in North America or thinks they do and at that stage you have to wonder why they are commenting on Irish politics.
Not that people from NA can't comment on other countries they just won't use terms that don't apply here.

That term is pretty widespread in Ireland these days to be honest.

Effects

tuxy wrote: »

I don't know if the Garda twitter is a good indicator as they may pick and choose posts but cocaine is the most common substance that they show people failing roadside intoxication tests on.

Are most of those tests usually after pulling someone over after observing their driving? Maybe cocaine leads you to drive more erratically than the likes of cannabis, so more likely to get pulled, and then tested.

tuxy

Effects wrote: »

That term is pretty widespread in Ireland these days to be honest.

Yes by people who watch too much American TV and social media, it's not retentive to Irish politics and those people don't know enough about it to debate it.