Looking at the local paper the Isle of Thanet Gazette today I notice the lead article is about local grammar school children who got caught with the drug ecstasy.I hesitate to say from the scientific point of view, so I will say the shop assistants understanding of this drug is that it increases the amount of pleasure one experiences by causing chemical changes in the brain.
There has been a long argument between the government’s experts advisors and the government about the reclassification of ecstasy, mainly because when it was first classified it was very new and little was known about it.
In 2000, the UK Police Foundation recommended ecstasy should be transferred from Class A to Class B."
In 2002, the Home Affairs Committee of the UK House of Commons, recommended that it should be reclassified to a Class B drug.
In February 2009, the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs recommended that it be re classified from a class A drug to a class B drug.
The frustration here from the experts point of view being that if you are going to have different classifications for different types of drug that relate to how dangerous they are, it is important that you put the drugs in the right category.
Let us suppose we were to put weapons into classes.
A: nuclear; biological; chemical.
B: guns; conventional bombs.
C: Swords; bows and arrows.
Legal: cooking knives, gardening implements and cutlery.
Make no mistake all of them can kill people, but from the scientists point of view the situation prevailing within the government with ecstasy, is like taking a high-powered modern air gun and putting it in class A to prevent all-out airgun warfare from wiping out the population of continents and possibly causing the end of the world.
The result of all of this has been to make an important scientific expert state that ecstasy is no more dangerous than alcohol or tobacco.
So how does all this effect Thanet school children, I suppose the answer to this one that most secondary school children at some time or another have tried a cigarette, now over the last few weeks a senior scientific advisor to the government has been saying that ecstasy is no more harmful that cigarettes.
The children in question have lost their grammar school places, somewhere along the line the scientific advice that was supposed to read, “don’t play with guns and bombs,” got changed to, “don’t play with your cutlery.”
There were warrant raids some years ago in Thanet looking for a drugs processing activity which used two blackmarket anabolic steroids to manufacture "E" (or an "E" mimic)
ReplyDeleteThe raids allegedly failed and this resulted in an internal police inquiry into which police were associates of the suspects and the matter of advance warning to the suspects of the warrant raids.
This, I am afraid, illustrates the irrationality of the category approach. If all drugs processors belonged to a professional body and guaranteed their product met the classification spec ? Obviously a nonsense.
So we havea situation in which the health industry cannot make and market homeopathic remedies but any Tommy Ricky or Harry can push Lawd knowswhat as"E" knowing that the label alone guarantees a Cat 2 listing ?
By the way I think the new Licensing Officer Cruttenden (well done) was on the ball re a recent licensed premises warrant raid in Ramsgate.
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Pauline Terry the licensee is allegedly the aunt of Emma Terry the widow of murder victim David O'Leary Lydden Lodge 2008.
There is currently IPCC complaint against Kent Police re the hanlding of the David O'Leary murder case and a County Court action for damages about propertyy seized by police at the murder scene.
ReplyDeleteI find it strange that the murder victim car was not forensically tested. A Rolex found at his home with face damage was not forensically tested but a letter sent to police by the aunt of his widow, in a licensing matter, got forensically tested
Idiots no doubt.So detention?A lecture? Final warning?No let's see if we can screw up their futures.Very sad very predictable.
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