Drug use in Ireland

The sooner the better, the War on Drugs has failed. Why not try legalization for a couple of years, if it doesn't work out, revert to prohibition.

They couldn't become more common

Yes , we saw how easy it was to ban the Head Shops. More recently when we eased restrictions during Covid, it wasn't difficult to reintroduce them.

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I don't think the effects of drug taking are at a neutral cost to the state/society. Legalising will certainly reduce cost for some areas but will increase them for others.

I wouldn't like to hang a drug policy on "usually".

Also, would the use of illegal drugs not still remain - non VAT levied and non licenced products?

A lot of clothes, designer makes, football jerseys etc are made and sold illegally. I never hear any calls for the genuine ones to be banned.,

Good lord, you are some way out of touch if you believe your local friendly intravenous heroine user will hand over their needles and suffice with swallowing said heroine, and waiting patiently for a kick.

Good point!

To be honest I shake my head when ever the topic of legalising drugs comes up. Like people have notions that everything will be better if legal. There'd still be scumbag dealers selling a cheaper drug.

Sure what do they say, the more things change the more they stay the same.

And I shake my head when anti-drug supporters say let's continue with prohibition. It's about 50 years since Nixon declared The War on Drugs and they were illegal then. It"only" took 6 to defeat Hitler. I love the way prohibitionists can predict the future, will u lend me your crystal ball, I wanna get the winning lottery numbers.

great for you, mabey you have a better doctor or a more prsonsilble with your meds that some .

there is a massive out of control and hugely damaging opiate problem in the US and a lit if it is down to greedy doctors and dodgy pharma , dopesick is the current show about it

Then there's also problems with that. As I say, there's always variables. Nothing of this nature is smooth sailing.

Like, my two cents are that hash will be legal at some point in Ireland. You see places like California doing it and Ireland is the same country that brought in Smoking Ban, Gay marriage, first female president yonks ago. What I mean is I don't think its a far stretch to say hash will be legal at some point.

Something like coke could never be. To make cocaine you have to use kerosene and bleach to break down the coca leaf. There's no way say, on one hand you have special shops selling that. Then on the other we still have drug manufacturing laws.

Heroin didn't take your friends life; they did, or the problems associated with drug illegality did.

Many years ago, I attended a talk in a foreign country about drugs, given by a chief coroner. He said that on every single day of the year, he could point to a body on his slab that was there because of alcohol consumption and that in a given year, he might get one that was attributable to heroin use, but then emphasised that unlike the alcohol deaths which were due to it's toxicity, the heroin ones were the result of dosing accidents caused by the great variability in purity or occasionally due to toxicity of the substances it was cut with. Both of these were a direct result of the illegality of the drug, not the drug itself, which is not toxic and is widely used in hospitals worldwide as diamorphine. He argued that if addicts had access to known dose high purity heroin, like diamorphine, accidental overdoses wouldn't hardly occur and the deaths from it's use would be near zero. He gave the example of wealthy middle class professionals, who were long term users and who had been using heroin for 30+ years with no appreciable negative health consequences.

There have been a couple of highly publicised and hyped deaths in the Uk attributed to MDMA use. The reporting is usually entirely and deliberately deceitful and in the same category as attributing deaths to heroin, rather than the negative factors in it's supply chain. The stories are slanted to portray MDMA as a dangerous drug and that the 'victims' died because of this. What actually happened was that the 'victims' poisoned themselves with water by drinking too much of it because they had read stories warning of dehydration while raving and had overcompensated and drank too much water in too short a time span, which leads to a reduction in salinity of the blood supply and then death.

The illegality, and ignorance about drugs that it encourages, is the most deadly aspect of illicit drugs, and that is probably less than the damage from negative social and legal consequences.

The sugar in Coca Cola can have negative health consequences, but it's widely available, relatively cheap and so doesn't require huge sums of money and criminality to support a habit. It doesn't have negative consequences for employment as there is no stigma and no criminal record.

Almost all of the negative consequences of illegal drugs, stems from them being illegal.

Let's be honest, people don't care where or how it's made. They just care about the high.

But let's say you are right. Cocaine becomes legal. Let's take a look at potential variables. First up the Irish government could never let any legal seller sell cocaine obtained through the Columbian cartels or other drug cartels. We would be complicit in the south american drug war.

You say safely make it. Let's dig into that. So instead of using kerosene and bleach. Other, more safer chemicals are used. So the price tag of this legal safer coke is much, much higher than illegal coke. That's if Ireland would allow a manufacturing plant to exist in the first place. It is one thing to pass a law allowing use and then manufacturing.

But let us say that comes to pass. So you got a legal and 'safe' coke. Which costs so much more. High most likely won't be the same. So there is always a market for a drug dealer to sell the 'real' stuff.

However, let's envision a world where coke is safe and you can go into specialty shops and purchase

Then a bunch of scumbags who call themselves a drug gang, who used to sell coke will start selling heroin. Suddenly heroin becomes cheaper. I did say the more things change the more they stay the same.

Erm, perhaps you should re-read my post.

this, the scumbags would make theirs more potent.

you couldn’t get it off the streets as white powder looks the same. So... keep it illegal.

Because people will end up craving a stronger hit...

it would play into the hands of the criminals who would seek to maintain market share.