War, on drugs

Paul Flynn castigates the idiocy of the Afghan policy - the result of eight years of war is that 95% of heroin in Britain comes from a country flooded with Western troops, the same proportion as when the Taliban ran the country. The only difference is that heroin is now massively cheaper than it was then. A victory for capitalism, at least.

How much are the police snorting?

I meant to rant about this yesterday, but had so much to do that I forgot.

The police and their shady friends were all over the press yesterday proclaiming their amazing success in restricting the flow of cocaine into the country, increasing the wholesale price. Paul Flynn rips this PR bollocks apart over on his site. Also, the Ministry of Defence claimed that they'd seized £50m of heroin from the Taliban a while back: Bad Science's analysis reveals that actually, this was PR-speak (i.e. lies) for $126,000 of opium, or $250,000 of heroin, and so on.

What interested me was that the boys in blue said that the street price hadn't changed because dealers were mixing the coke with any old shit they found lying around.

Well, that's OK then. What a result. Lots of stupid people are being poisoned because they're snorting rat poison, Persil or whatever, as well as a little bit of coke. It seems to me that the cops have got totally the wrong end of the wedge on this one. We're always going on about the NHS becoming a health service rather than a sickness service. In the 'war on drugs', we should be reducing demand for drugs (mostly through education and treating addiction as an illness) rather than by firebombing Peruvian peasants and encouraging dealers to poison their customers.