Drugs - Methamphetamine -aka P
Why Legalising Will Help
The main arguments to making it legal are:
Reducing addiction: This is purely a health issue and keeping it illegal only prevents addicts from asking for help.
Crime - theft: The cost of P is the reason for crimes of theft. Making P affordable to addicts reduces the need to steal
Crime - violence: Sure, P does seem to make some people over stimulated and "pumped up", but when you look at the people committing the violent crime you can see personality traits that would identify these people as violent or anti-social anyway, they are ofetn time bombs awaiting anything to trigger them.
Gangs and Organised Crime: While there is big money to be made in illegal substances, gangs will proliferate. As Napier CIB Detective Emmett Lynch said, "nowhere was immune as the trade was lucrative to too many people." There is also the violence associated with gangs protecting and enforcing their business (look at the rise of Mafia during alcohol prohibition). An example is "Inmates of New Zealand's maximum-security prison ran a multimillion-dollar drug ring which made P with drugs smuggled from China..." Do we really want gangs in control of this problem?
Prohibition Doesn’t Seem to Work
Community task forces on crystal meth give a prominent role to police. We all appreciate that the American and Canadian experiment in legal prohibition a century ago was a failure. Similarly, in towns where authorities have crushed the small ‘mom and pop’ crystal meth operations—the focus of community task forces—organized crime has often filled the vacuum. And organized crime doesn’t rely on local retailers for ingredients; they import them, or crystal meth itself, in bulk from ‘superlabs’. My clients who used to sell crystal meth in Maple Ridge tell me that their stocks almost always came from large criminal enterprises.
In recent years even Conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Jr., George Shultz, and Milton Friedman, and in Canada socially conscious citizens such as Nobel-Prize laureate John Polyani, have publicly condemned prohibition (O’toole, 1998). They have argued that not only has the war on drugs failed, but also that it no longer has a moral basis.
The Meth Epidemic: Hype vs. Reality
The facts about how the drug affects child welfare
and how agencies have coped.
By Martha Shirk
While some child welfare agencies are struggling with growing caseloads and new challenges stemming from parental meth use, experts on meth addiction and child welfare say the recent coverage promulgated some myths: that meth-related child abuse is worse than it is, that meth addicts are harder to treat than they are, and that the nation’s child-welfare system is overwhelmed, when many ag
encies are coping well.
The Facts
"The number of new users of stimulants generally increased during the 1990s, but there has been little change since 2000. Incidence of methamphetamine use generally rose between 1992 and 1998. Since then, there have been no statistically significant changes."
Source: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2004). Results from the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings (Office of Applied Studies, NSDUH Series H-25, DHHS Publication No. SMA 04-3964). Rockville, MD, p. 46. Also available on the web at http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/nhsda/2k3nsduh/2k3Results.htm#ch5, last accessed Aug. 31, 2005.
The Evil Drug
Paul Holmes blames P for his poor job raising his daughter
However, he thought it important to "get across the message of the sheer blinding evil of the drug P. I can't run away from it, as much as I'd like to."
The Capri Clinic :
Paul talks with "experts". One is the Capri Clinic (rehab with religious links), who charge $5062.50 a week. Good to see P is good for business.
An Auckland counsellor said a lot of treatment programmes don't support Capri.
Among people who refer patients to it is Life Education Trust founder Trevor Grice.
Mr Grice, who still works part-time for Life Education at the age of 75, confirmed that he was one of about five people in Wellington who assess and refer clients to Capri, and provide follow-up care when they return to the capital, for a fee.
Asked whether the referral fee was $1000, he said, "It would very easily be. Doctors refer them and doctors charge a fee. They are not going to do the base work without being paid." (taken from here)