 |
| Blog |
 |
| Archive |
|
|
|
|
| Blog |
| To find an archived article, simply click on Index and scroll the subject titles, or do a Ctrl-F search |
|
|
| Blog |
|
|
| Archive |
|
|
|
|
| Blog |
| To find an archived article, simply click on Index and scroll the subject titles, or do a Ctrl-F search |
Opinion & Analysis |
Wednesday, March 12, 2008 |
||
Time for 'war on drugs' to target usersTony Allwright NOT LONG ago, the Garda seized 32kg (77lb of heroin) worth €6.5 million, capturing one of Dublin's allegedly most notorious drug traffickers. That's 32kg that won't be injected into anyone's veins, and perhaps a drug dealer taken off the streets for several years. Surely, a major fillip for society. Except it's not; it's a total waste of taxpayers' money. Not a single heroin user will forego his/her fix. Meanwhile, others will step forward to take the captive's place and keep the criminal drug supply chain humming. That's the fallacy of the utterly fruitless global war on drugs, of which the only spin-off may be a slight rise in drug prices to offset the inconvenience of harassment by the boys in blue, which may marginally deter a few marginal users. The reason for the drug warriors' universal failure is simple: they are all aiming at the wrong target. Mistakenly, it's drug-peddlers who get attacked and demonised everywhere, from capitalist America to authoritarian Russia to socialist Venezuela to communist Cuba to Islamist Iran. Thoroughly antipathetic to each other, such countries make strange bedfellows when it comes to drugs, doing little to co-operate in their fights against the common enemy. The secondary mis-targeted target is the drug growers, those wondrously industrious and inventive developing-world farmers in such places as Afghanistan, Columbia, Laos. To feed their families, these hardy men find ever better ways of growing poppies, coca, cannabis, despite the attempts of international drug-busters to ruin their harvests while vainly tempting them to adopt less lucrative careers. You have to marvel at how stone-age Afghan tillers of the soil, in a desperately poor, war-torn, gun-happy, terrorist-ridden, land-locked, almost infrastructureless country, nevertheless meet over 90 per cent of the world's demand for heroin and other opiates. What other country produces - and exports - 90 per cent of the world's anything? The growers and pushers are the wrong targets because they're not the source of the world's drug problem. That dubious honour belongs to the customers, who alone create the demand and provide the money that fuels the drugs industry. Thus the only one way to suppress it is through relentless, merciless pressure on drug users themselves. While they continue buying, no amount of napalming crops or incarcerating traffickers is going to halt production and trade. New farmers and new traffickers will spring up to meet the demand. Two distinct attacks are needed. Firstly, users need to be hunted down in their thousands and punished, notwithstanding the huge strain on judicial systems. Of course this will become supremely unpopular, because whereas dealers are easily vilified, drug-takers are "victims", "addicts", "prostitutes". Or pillars of society, or celebrities, or just ordinary guys and gals enjoying a night out or a private dinner party. Yet the criminalisation of thousands, causing uproar as people see the law cart off friends and relations, will undoubtedly cut consumption and thus production and trafficking, a feat which no other "war on drugs" has come close to achieving. The second approach should aim to cut people's desire for drugs in the first place. Certainly, widespread TV advertising about the dangers would help, just as ads about the horrific effects of alcohol-fuelled car accidents reduce drink driving. But wholesale change in the drug-taking culture will not happen without targeting people so young their world-views are only forming. As already happens over things like global warming, nature conservation and bad driving, that means starting anti-drugs education at primary school, if not kindergarten. And keeping it going, relentlessly, throughout children's education, so that when they hit adulthood, drug-taking seems as ridiculous as driving without a seat belt or leaving all the lights on. The effectiveness, whether for good or ill, of such social brainwashing of the very young and upwards is well proven. Examples abound. Indoctrinating generations of Ireland's kids in the Catholic catechism maintained this country as almost a theocratic state until only a couple of decades ago. Instilling a huge sense of knowledge and pride in one's nation, history and - indeed - race, helped to create and fuel countless empires over the centuries, for better or for worse. Or, witness the tribal loyalties and hatreds, inculcated from the cradle, leading to conflicts such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Northern Ireland's 30-year war, the current violence in Kenya pitting Kikuyu against Luo. To this day, innumerable madrassas across the world teach Muslim children the alleged wickedness of Jews and the virtues of suicide-homicide. So whole generations are now growing up with such notions hard-wired into their brains, and hot for jihad. Brainwashing kids with anti-drug ideas will certainly cut the number of adults with a yen to snort or inject. But it is unglamorous, difficult to implement, pretty boring and will take 20 years to yield results. Compared to the fun of rooting out dealers and poisoning poppy fields, it provides few kudos for politicians and law-enforcers. Yet no battle against drugs can ever be ultimately successful until it confronts the true culprits, ie those who ingest the stuff, both today's consumers (adults) and tomorrow's (children). For both groups of citizens, the solution is the same: to conquer and bend that most powerful of mankind's attributes - the mind. This means declaring drug-war on both users and kids. Or simply legalising the wretched chemicals. ... Tony Allwright is an engineering consultant, and a blogger on international and national issues - www.tallrite.com/blog.htm © 2008 The Irish Times
|
|||
|
Further details in a blog post entitled “Declare Drug-War on Users and Kids” |
|||
|
None |
|||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Gift Idea |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Good to report that as at
FREED AT LAST, |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
BLOGROLL
Atlantic Blog (defunct) Blog-Irish (defunct)
Jihad
Religion
Iona Institute
Leisure
Blog Directory
My Columns in the
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
What I've recently
But it's not
entirely honest in its subtle pro-Palestinian bias, and therefore needs
to be read in conjunction with an antidote, such as See detailed review +++++
BP's ambitious CEO John Browne expanded it through adventurous acquisitions, aggressive offshore exploration, and relentless cost-reduction that trumped everything else, even safety and long-term technical sustainability. Thus mistakes accumulated, leading to terrifying and deadly accidents in refineries, pipelines and offshore operations, and business disaster in Russia. The Macondo blowout was but an inevitable outcome of a BP culture that had become poisonous and incompetent. However the book is gravely compromised by a litany of over 40 technical and stupid errors that display the author's ignorance and carelessness. It would be better to wait for the second (properly edited) edition before buying. As for BP, only a wholesale rebuilding of a new, professional, ethical culture will prevent further such tragedies and the eventual destruction of a once mighty corporation with a long and generally honourable history. Note: I wrote
my own reports on Macondo +++++
A horrific account of:
More details on my blog here. +++++
After recounting a childhood of convention and simple pleasures in working-class Aberdeen, Mr Urquhart is conscripted within days of Chamberlain declaring war on Germany in 1939. From then until the Japanese are deservedly nuked into surrendering six years later, Mr Urquhart’s tale is one of first discomfort but then following the fall of Singapore of ever-increasing, unmitigated horror. After a wretched journey Eastward, he finds himself part of Singapore’s big but useless garrison. Taken prisoner when Singapore falls in 1941, he is, successively,
Chronically ill, distraught and traumatised on return to Aberdeen yet disdained by the British Army, he slowly reconstructs a life. Only in his late 80s is he able finally to recount his dreadful experiences in this unputdownable book. There are very few first-person eye-witness accounts of the the horrors of Japanese brutality during WW2. As such this book is an invaluable historical document. +++++
This is a rattling good tale of the web of corruption within which the American president and his cronies operate. It's written by blogger Michele Malkin who, because she's both a woman and half-Asian, is curiously immune to the charges of racism and sexism this book would provoke if written by a typical Republican WASP. With 75 page of notes to back up - in best blogger tradition - every shocking and in most cases money-grubbing allegation, she excoriates one Obama crony after another, starting with the incumbent himself and his equally tricky wife. Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarett, Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Steven Rattner, both Clintons, Chris Dodd: they all star as crooks in this venomous but credible book. ACORN, Mr Obama's favourite community organising outfit, is also exposed for the crooked vote-rigging machine it is. +++++
It is really just a collation of amusing little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour and situations. For example:
The book has no real message other than don't be surprised how humans sometimes behave and try to look for simple rather than complex solutions. And with a final anecdote (monkeys, cash and sex), the book suddenly just stops dead in its tracks. Weird. ++++++
It's chapters are organised around provocative questions such as
It's central thesis is that economic development continues to be impeded in different countries for different historical reasons, even when the original rationale for those impediments no longer obtains. For instance:
The author writes in a very chatty, light-hearted matter which makes the book easy to digest. However it would benefit from a few charts to illustrate some of the many quantitative points put forward, as well as sub-chaptering every few pages to provide natural break-points for the reader. +++++
The author was a member of Britain's V Force, a forerunner of the SAS. Its remit was to harass Japanese lines of command, patrol their occupied territory, carryout sabotage and provide intelligence, with the overall objective of keeping the enemy out of India. Irwin is admirably yet brutally frank, in his descriptions of deathly battles with the Japs, his execution of a prisoner, dodging falling bags of rice dropped by the RAF, or collapsing in floods of tears through accumulated stress, fear and loneliness. He also provides some fascinating insights into the mentality of Japanese soldiery and why it failed against the flexibility and devolved authority of the British. The book amounts to a very human and exhilarating tale. Oh, and Irwin describes the death in 1943 of his colleague my uncle, Major PF Brennan. +++++ Other books here |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
After
48
crackling, compelling, captivating games, the new World Champions are,
deservedly,
England get the Silver,
No-one can argue with
Over the competition, |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
