'Legal highs' are extremely fucking dangerous. Not like you might have a bad trip dangerous, but like might kill you or leave you with permanent organ damage dangerous. Properly fucking dangerous. They are dangerous because they are untested and unregulated. They are unregulated because they are sold as not fit for human consumption. It is in the best interests of the public at large that such substances are banned from sale.
But it won't work. And even if it did work to some extent, it will not address the problem. And addressing the problem wouldn't work if politicians tried to do that (which they won't) because it's actually not a problem at all. Thinking of it as a problem is the real problem. But we're not even looking at the first one yet, so...we're screwed basically. Allow me to elaborate. Human beings have been taking drugs for tens of thousands of years. We've been taking drugs since before religion. We've been taking drugs since before commerce. Way before agriculture. Yep, all the way back there in the darkest recesses of human history...can you see it? Yep, it's a guy gettin' high.
FACT #1: We take drugs because drugs work!
The human brain is an incredibly complex network and the communication within that network is done by neurotransmitters. They are chemicals that fit into neuroreceptors and make brain do thing. It's complicated and this is not the time for a biology lesson (and I'm not a biology teacher) but what you need to know is that drugs work by mimicking neurotransmitters and fitting themselves into the receptors thereby giving us the effect of the neurotransmitter without having to go through the normal procedure to get it. For example, heroin works because we already make a painkiller in our brain (some gland or something) that is way more powerful than any plant-based opiate. Opiates work because they have the same bits as our own stuff. It's just that to get our own stuff we have to be in a huge amount of pain. You can take heroin when you're not in pain, and it is, by all accounts, great. Same goes for cocaine, same goes for weed...FACT #2: We will always take drugs!
You cannot stop people from doing something that they want to do. You make murder illegal, that's fine, most people don't want to murder anyway. And you know what? The people who really do want to murder, they do it anyway. Most of them seem to get caught, but they've already done their murder. Whether you lock them up or kill them, they've still done their murder. Aside from retroactive punishment, the criminal law is totally useless. People commit crimes all the fucking time. Some are more serious than others. The overwhelming majority go unnoticed, let alone unpunished. I'm talking about the everyday 'crimes' that we all commit. You want to see everyday criminals, drive at 70mph on a British motorway. Fuck it, just drive around. You'll see plenty of shit that's both dangerous and illegal, and you'll see people getting away with it in their fucking millions. Cocaine is illegal, but does that stop people from taking it? No. If you popped out a gram of coke at a party and started chopping out a few lines, unless it was a particularly straight party (but those sort of people don't throw parties...), you will have people gladly relieving you of the drugs that you have generously supplied. Spark a joint, offer to pass it, someone else will almost always take it off you. I could go on, but I won't. The point I'm making is this: you murder someone and you're a murderer, you steal shit for a living and you're a thief; in theory, and by the letter of the law, if you pass a joint you're a drug dealer.FACT #3: Drugs should be legal!
If the powers that be had even a gram of pure common sense, then we wouldn't be in this mess. The law only functions as long as the majority of people don't want to break it. If too many people want to break it, then it ceases to be viable to punish them all. Somewhere, there is probably a formula for that... This is where unwritten laws, rules of thumb, if you like, come into it. The speed limit is 70, but you are unlikely to be done for speeding unless you're going above 80. Unless it's near the end of a quota period and the police are down on their fines targets in which case you'll get the book thrown at you (at an extra book-throwing cost) for doing 71... So, if the law doesn't make any difference to behaviour, then why should it matter that drugs are illegal? People are going to take them anyway and they're almost guaranteed to get by unnoticed by the law. Well, that's where the 'legal high' rears its ugly head once again. And it brings us nicely round to that real problem that we were talking about earlier. People take 'legal highs' because they want to get high. They want to get high, but are afraid that if they buy an eighth of weed then they'll get kicked out of uni, sent to prison and their life will be ruined forever. So they go onto some dodgy as fuck website and order some synthetic cannabis substitute that, while officially not fit for human consumption, will get them high without the inherent and implied risks of illegal cannabis.The fact that otherwise intelligent people will ingest a substance that is not fit for human consumption in order to get high should be a massive fucking hint that people are going to get high regardless of the risk factors attached to the process. Drugs should be legal because making them illegal does not work on any level in terms of reducing the number of people who take them. It just makes them more dangerous. It makes the whole process more dangerous. But here's the other thing, as dangerous as those 'legal highs' were that those students at Lancaster Uni took, they all survived. And for every one of the drug-related admissions to English A&E departments that day, how many alcohol-related admissions were there? My guess would be into the hundreds. I'm not going to get into the hypocrisy of having legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco and at the same time making weed illegal when it's less harmful to society than the former and to the individual than the latter... Because we all know that story backwards and forwards. We need to ban 'legal highs' because they are staggeringly dangerous, but we also need to de-criminalise recreational use of the real thing. If we did that, then our society would be safer and happier. Our police force would be unburdened of the responsibility of having to in some way wage an unwinnable war.
But what am I saying? That's never going to happen. It won't happen because none of our elected officials want it to happen. It won't happen because no one will ever run for parliament on a message of drug legalisation. That won't happen because they wouldn't get in if they did. So we're stuck with a government whose policies in no way reflect our wishes. That's democracy.
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