I feel that social services should run knocking shops, with the revenue raised going back into the local social services dept, whilst local NHS should be the source of 'recreational' drugs, with the money going back into the local NHS services.

Keep the gangsters out, focus the police on 'protecting the legal trade', control the price, supply and quality control, and whilst you won't solve the problems, you'll stem the corruption and compounding of the problem (its arguably a lot better to treat addiction with rehab and social services, than to simply keep criminalizing people for possession, whilst providing them with cheap, high quality drugs at a reasonable price). A junkie who can afford their smack is much less of a problem to everyone else, than one who can't.

Plus, if they do then get clean, its unlikely that they'll have a string of criminal convictions related to financing their habit holding them back from employment.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]

In theory making it legal sounds aces, however in this country I fear it would just lead to more poor young immigrant women from eastern Europe being brutalised and sold into sex slavery.

Sort that problem first, then make it legal and have an authority that can shut them down if standards are not met.

To make it legal now would be sheer lunacey.

"It's not the bullet that's got my name on it that concerns me; it's all them other ones flyin' around marked 'To Whom It May Concern.'"

It says that someone has the common sense to realise that diamorphine is a drug that needs ever increasing doses to maintain the same level of effect, until eventually that reaches a lethal level, at which point, indeed, both the problems of prostitution and drug taking are solved.

Basically, that would constitute legalised euthanasia by the State.......

A stairway to Heaven and a Highway to Hell give some indication of expected traffic numbers

It would lead to less I think.

Just like the black market for anything the state can't stop a black market for drugs or brass still existing.....All it can do is lower the profitability of having one.

With a legal option to compete with the black market would have to lower its prices to stay attractive. That lowers the risk/reward element for criminal gangs.

The problem still exists but the numbers affected negatively are fewer. The gangs have a legal competition.

I agree with the state aggressively attacking sexual exploitation and slavery.....That's independent of a change in the law for the sex trade designed to protect them.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

The problem of an illegal drug trade though is that it doesn't prevent people becoming drug addicts, or the availability of drugs either (which are fairly easy to get a hold of). It just creates an artificially high price for drugs that creates a lot of crime as addicts need to commit.

Things like cocaine and heroin are actually very cheap to produce (Cocaine pure is about £1 per gram without a real laboratory, diamorphine, heroin probably around a fiver, for a gram of pure heroin). Crack is actually even cheaper than cocaine to produce).

The street price of cocaine, is around £50 a gram for 20-30% cocaine hydrochloride and around the same for heroin of about the same quality.

Amphetamines are ridiculously cheap to produce (as in the equivilent of 20 grams of street grade speed, is produced in a lab for pennies.

These three represent the big problem drugs of abuse in the UK (although methadrone use is growing now its illegal).

The fact is that an addict committing crime to maintain a gram a day heroin habit, is going to need to generate around 200 worth of crime to feed that habit. Where as with a legal source, allowing for purity, the need to find around a fiver a day (which means even legal work could support many habits).

Plus you have the added bonus, that no one is really going to build up the kind of habits that are unsustainable because something like 2g of pure heroin, at say a tenner, would sustain even the most hardened tolerant smack head for several days (or put in another way, doing that much diamorphine would prove fatal to humans in that time span).

Sounds cold, but that's a basic fact, even the most heroin tolerant person, is going to die if they're doing two grams of pure heroin in a couple of days.

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
[Link]