Rightwing political activist, televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson (81) – a guy who is more conservative than the Dutch political parties of VVD, CDA, PVV and SGP combined times two, squared – has yesterday spoken out in favor of marihuana legalization.
That makes mr. Robertson – a Southern Baptist founder of, among others, the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), and 1988 Republican Party candidate – more progressive than the current cabinet in the Netherlands and the parties supporting them.
Well, join the club, Pat. You’re in good company, as former liberal conservative statesman Frits Bolkestein (VVD), is also an ardent support of marihuana legalization.
His argument is as clear as it is simple: treat marihuana the way we treat alcohol. Since marihuana is less harmful than alcohol, it couldn’t be more straightforward than that, could it?
Of the many roles Pat Robertson has assumed over his five-decade-long career as an evangelical leader — including presidential candidate and provocative voice of the right wing — his newest guise may perhaps surprise his followers the most: marijuana legalization advocate.
“I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol,” Mr. Robertson said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”
Mr. Robertson’s remarks echoed statements he made last week on “The 700 Club,” the signature program of his Christian Broadcasting Network, and other comments he made in 2010. While those earlier remarks were largely dismissed by his followers, Mr. Robertson has now apparently fully embraced the idea of legalizing marijuana, arguing that it is a way to bring down soaring rates of incarceration and reduce the social and financial costs.
“I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up,” he said.
(…)
For his part, Mr. Robertson said he was “not encouraging people to use narcotics in any way, shape or form.” But he said he saw little difference between smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol, a longstanding argument from far more liberal — and libertarian-minded — leaders.
“If people can go into a liquor store and buy a bottle of alcohol and drink it at home legally, then why do we say that the use of this other substance is somehow criminal?” he said.
Mr. Franklin, who is a Christian, said Mr. Robertson’s position was actually in line with the Gospel. “If you follow the teaching of Christ, you know that Christ is a compassionate man,” he said. “And he would not condone the imprisoning of people for nonviolent offenses.”
Redelijke mensen, vreest met grote vreze: het lang aangekondigde drugsdebat in de Tweede Kamer is aan de gang. Hét moment waarop alle leugenachtige rechtse politici hun op angst en onwaarheden gestoelde praatjes kunnen debiteren in hun queeste Nederland tot een land te maken waar één drug getolereerd is (de meest schadelijke van alle): alcohol, en de rest vanuit een vaag, ongemotiveerd en subjectief gevoel van burgermansonveiligheid VERBOTEN wordt.
Er is geen enkel ander beleidsterrein waarop conservatieve politiek zó door de mand valt als het drugsbeleid. Rechtse Kamerleden en hun aanhangers verliezen het vermogen na te denken – hun hersens te gebruiken – als het over dit onderwerp gaat. Hun meest recente wapenfeit, het paddoverbod van 2008, was een ongekend staaltje populistische emotiepolitiek waar geen empirisch feit aan te pas kwam. Hoewel het simpelwegniet waarwas dat de incidenten van destijds aan paddo’s te wijten waren – GGD en rechters hebben dit ontkracht – werden deze aangegrepen om tegen adviesorganen in tot een totaalverbod van een schadeloze en in de natuur voorkomende schimmel te komen. Had dat intelligenter gekund? Ja, natuurlijk, maar daar doen VVD en CDA het niet voor.
Hetzelfde patroon is nu te ontwaren rondom hasj, en uiteindelijk rondom alle “drugs” (behalve alcohol uiteraard): VVD en CDA zijn op weg naar een totaalverbod. Prohibition, drooglegging. Dit tegen alle globale trends in, in de wereld, in Europa en in de Verenigde Staten. Ze doen dit geleidelijk, maar met een duidelijk zichtbaar pad. Begonnen met het paddoverbod, met vervolgens de volstrekt idiote regel dat coffeeshops niet een paar honderd meter bij scholen vandaan mogen staan (leidend tot sluiting van de meerderheid van coffeeshops in Nederland), tot het verbod op zwaardere marihuana, het quatverbod, tot nu het hasjverbod. En tot, uiteindelijk, het is erop wachten: de afkondiging in Nederland door de rechtse partijen van een Totaalverbod op Alle Drugs, behalve die met koolzuur en waar “Heineken” op staat. Ik gok 2013 of 2014.
De feiten: er is inmiddels stapels wetenschappelijk onderzoek waaruit blijkt dat middelen als marihuana, hasj, xtc en paddo’s veel minder schadelijk zijn voor het individu en de maatschappij dan alcohol. In de V.S. is medicinale marihuana wijd en zijd verkrijgbaar. Aan topuniversiteiten over de hele wereld wordt onderzoek verricht naar de positieve en therapeutische effecten van middelen als lsd, xtc en paddo’s, met positieve resultaten. In Groot-Brittannië roepen voormalige hoofden van MI5, het Openbaar Ministerie, Hogerhuisleden, zorgorganisaties en wetenschappers op tot matiging van het repressiebeleid. Idem dito op wereldschaal, waar mensen als Javier Solana, Kofi Annan, George Schultz, Paul Volcker zich verenigd hebben in hun oproep aan Westerse politici hun antidrugsbeleid te herzien. In Portugal en Tsjechië is drugsbezit al meer dan tien jaar gedecriminaliseerd, met zeer positieve resultaten zowel in termen van dalend drugsgebruik als in aanpak van criminaliteit. De globale War on Drugs, daarentegen, waar VVD en CDA Nederland bij aan willen doen sluiten, kost miljarden, verwoest honderdduizenden mensenlevens, en is contra-effectief.
Dit zijn de FEITEN. Maar rechtse politici, en hun aanhangers, geven niet om feiten. Waar ze om geven is gehoor geven aan de veronderstelde wens van de angstige burger – die wel bier zuipt, de openbare ruimte vernielt en z’n vrouw slaat – tot een “cleane”, naar zijn subjectieve normen conformerende maatschappij. Daarbij schrikken ze er niet voor terug om leugens te gebruiken. Lees bijvoorbeeld dit stuk in De Groene, waaruit blijkt dat Opsteltens elitecorps de Taskforce Georganiseerde Hennepteelt cijfers over de export van cannabis naar het buitenland uit haar duim zuigt om de beeldvorming te manipuleren. Dit volgens het Trimbos Instituut, dat net als het ministerie van Volksgezondheid langzaam haar greep op het drugsbeleid aan het verliezen is. Een zelfde gemankeerde argumentatie vinden we rondom hasj, waarvan beweerd wordt dat criminele organisaties in Afghanistan en Marokko (hoe! eng!) ervan profiteren. Tell you what: in Marokko en Afghanistan rookt iederéén hasj! Dat is daar al eeuwenlang normaler dan alcohol. En dan nog: waar zijn de cijfers? En kan het wel als we het in Nederland telen?
Nederland heeft al veertig jaar een succesvol en pragmatisch drugsbeleid. De Nederlandse cijfers qua drugsgebruik liggen nu nog lager dan in andere landen (wat betreft alcohol liggen die overigens veel hoger!). Waar er een miljoen alcoholisten zijn, gaat de Nederlandse drugsgebruiker over het algemeen verstandig om met zijn middelen, die hij of zij met matiging en na testen gebruikt. Waar een groep over de schreef gaat, wordt ingegrepen met behulp van preventie en voorlichting, in de sfeer van volksgezondheid. Dát is rationeel beleid, en het wordt nu over de hele wereld gekopieerd. Met een thuisteler, en met een kleine coffeeshop, waar een volwassen persoon naar believen een middel van zijn keuze kan genieten (dat minder destructief is dan het overal gepromootte alcohol), is niets mis. Natuurlijk, echte criminaliteit moet worden aangepakt, maar dat doe je door juist de achterdeur te reguleren, en niet door een onhandhaafbaar, peperduur, hypocriet en immoreel totaalverbod. Dat bovendien nooit zal werken, omdat ongecontroleerde, ongereguleerde middelen de markt zullen overspoelen. Desalniettemin is dat waar rechts naartoe gaat. En waarom? God knows. Ik begrijp die mensen niet.
‘The freedom to explore your own consciousness’, dat is waar het om draait. Dit is tegengesteld aan mensen willen vormen en modelleren in een op particularistische, subjectieve normen gebaseerde mal, waar het in ieder geval de religieus-conservatieven van het CDA uiteindelijk om te doen is. Die vrijheid is een recht dat op een ongevaarlijke, onbedreigende manier uitgeoefend kan worden, met verantwoordelijkheid over eigen lichaam, met zorg en informatie, zonder dat daar groteske leugens of ideologisch gekleurd beleid op hoeven te worden losgelaten. Of zonder dat je productie en distributie in handen geeft van de criminaliteit. Het zou voor dit land een zegen zijn als dit kabinet, dat op allerlei terreinen maar vooral op deze, regressieve ideologie laat prevaleren boven op feiten en rede gebaseerde politiek, voortijdig ten val zou komen. Laten we behouden en uitbouwen wat we hebben, in plaats van het voor niets om zeep te helpen.
- Edit: Hier een mooi stuk op DeJaap over het hasjverbod.
- Edit 2: Boris van der Ham (D66) over het drugsbeleid: “Wij waarschuwen voor deze blinde ideologische benadering van drugs, die praktische oplossingen in de weg staat.”
Watch this moving video of an old man giving a speech while completely fried. Seriously: at certain points he truly sounds like The Dude, man. I can’t decide whether he’s drunk or high, though; it’s probably hard to distinguish with a Texan.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry raised some eyebrows Friday night with a speech performance in Manchester, N.H., that was unusually expressive. A Huffington Post reporter was in the audience for the speech but did not have a chance to review video footage of the Texas governor’s remarks until Saturday afternoon when a montage of moments in the speech surfaced on YouTube.
The video below is not a full version of his remarks. It is a carefully edited montage designed to highlight the giddiest and strangest moments of a roughly 25-minute speech. The owner of the YouTube account, CharlieJohnson1986, did not respond to a message sent to the account.
But while the video is designed to make Perry look bad, it does capture elements of his speech that were widely remarked upon in the crowd by those who saw the speech.
“It was different,” Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas told HuffPost after the speech.
Na de hele mediabombarie rondom het verscheiden van Herman Brood, vandaag tien jaar geleden, valt er eigenlijk nog maar weinig toe te voegen. Brood, een van de weinige écht non-conformistische, vrije geesten die bekend zijn geraakt in dit land. Het laatste decennium is Nederland opvallend veel van dat soort helden kwijtgeraakt… Simon Vinkenoog, Gerard Reve, Jan Wolkers, Ramses Shaffy, Sugar Lee Hooper, Brood, ja zelfs André Hazes. Iconen die, als je het maatschappelijk klimaat in dit land nu bekijkt, uit een hele andere tijd lijken te stammen. Een tijd dat Nederland nog wel vrij, origineel en individualistisch was. Het lijkt decennia geleden.
The Awl has a very cool and interesting interview with Eddie Einbinder, author of the book How to Have Fun and Not Die, about responsible drug use, which won the New York Book Festival’s grand prize in 2008. At the release of the second edition in May, Einbinder will also debut a related documentary.
For his book, Einbinder travelled across the US exploring various party scenes. He’s an advocate of drug use, but in an adult and responsible way: that is, measured, and one at a time (that is, never in combinations). How to Have Fun and Not Die is therefore full of tips and tricks for the ‘safe’ use (between brackets because to some extent it’s never safe) of several drugs, including the most tricky ones.
Einbinder does this proceeding from a public health perspective – you can’t prevent drug use, so you better make it safe (while of course not encouraging the use of the really dangerous stuff). For similar, older endeavours in Dutch, by the way, check out veteran psychonauts Gerben Hellinga’s and Hans Plomp’s voluminous website Uitjebol.net; and of course there are test centers in the Netherlands, which are lacking in the US, hence the need for such a book.
The interview with Einbinder is pretty entertaining, so here it is:
Tell me about this trip you just got back from.
I was in upstate New Hampshire, somewhere really rural, for six days at a gathering for people to just, well, do drugs in peace. There was a lot of DMT, MDA, acid, mescaline…
What are DMT and MDA?
DMT is as serious a hallucinogen as acid, but it only lasts ten to 15 minutes. MDA—also known as “sass rocks”—is like MDMA, but less emotional and more hallucinogenic and stimulating.
Sounds fun.
It’s hard to draw the line sometimes, you know, between work and play for me.
I can imagine. So did you do a little bit of everything while you were there?
No, no, no. I was watching a lot of people doing things. I did try Ether for the first time. Ether gives you a horrible headache. It’s useless. Don’t do it. Oh, and I numbed my gums with some sass rocks. Other than that, I was just drinking, getting high on hash, and playing dominoes a lot.
How old were you when you had your first drug experience?
That’s oddly not a common question. I tried cigarettes the summer I was 11. That was probably one of the more emotional drug experiences I’ve had. My 12-year-old girlfriend introduced them to me. That year I also started dipping. I was in that palace in the woods kids make for themselves as a retreat to hook up, do drugs, and eat deli sandwiches, when I packed a lip for the first time. I probably weighed 90 pounds and I was given no guidance, so I kept it in way too long—30 minutes maybe—and I passed out. I was totally unconscious. I woke up and thought, I’m definitely never dipping again.
Did you ever dip again?
Yeah. In the summer of 2003. There were 80 of us living in the woods in conjunction with a minor in Environmental Studies in the Northwest.
How’d take two go?
I remembered why I don’t like dipping much.
What other memorable drug initiation experiences come to mind?
Trying acid for the first time at 19 was a big deal. I tried coke at 20 in college at Lehigh. I have a pretty mindful approach to trying things. I believe in moderation, and knowing your limits. And doing something with a purpose rather than out of habit, or to get a fix.
Can pleasure be a purpose?
Sure. It’s about having good relationships with drugs.
So what inspired you to pursue your special brand of drug education?
It was on that trip to the woods in 2003 I mentioned that I realized that my friends and I were not putting the necessary amount of thought into our drug use. I thought to myself, why haven’t I Googled “most common ways kids are going to die today,” and put it up on my fridge? I was right that there are some blanket rules that can seriously up your odds of surviving. If you can take one sentence from the lecture I give, it should be that the vast majority of overdoses result from two or more substances at once in your body. That right there, on top of keeping in mind that what’s billed as either heroin or coke or ecstasy includes multiple substances—whatever they’re cut with for profit—is key. When people do a drug respectfully, in the way it’s meant to be done, they rarely die.
What have been the best resources for researching the new book and making the movie?
ER doctors are great. I realized that in 2006 when a girl I dated ended up hospitalized. She’d been doing a lot of coke that summer, as well as Ambien, and Valium. And drinking. I’ve since developed several relationships with ER doctors who keep me informed about what kids are overdosing on. Watching drug use firsthand is important, too. Oh, and dentists. You should talk to your dentist about meth mouth. They have the most horrible stories.
Are you ever treated like an outsider by the kids you observe?
Nope. I only ever get to observe because I’m welcomed in the first place. The participants are people who understand that my message is to educate.
And these people want to be on camera taking drugs?
They sign contracts six weeks prior to filming, when sober. This is not Girls Gone Wild. No one’s face will be fuzzy.
Are you ever an active participant during filming?
No, not while filming. Things would veer off track. It’s a more structured setting.
What do your parents think about what you do?
As long as I’m working hard, they’re fans. They realize—like most rational teachers and doctors and people I speak to—that this is absolutely necessary. I’m trying to promote honest, open health education. They understand that.
What are your thoughts on addiction?
I feel lucky I’ve never been addicted to anything. I think it’s probably genetic. Only 1.3% of Americans are addicted, though. It’s the minority. Most people are just casual drug users who might accidentally overdose, which is what we’re trying to prevent.
Do you get any backlash? If so, where from?
Institutions. It’s one of the most upsetting issues to me. Colleges are running businesses. They’re trying to ensure the safety of the school’s reputation more than the welfare of their student body by refusing to acknowledge that drugs are being done and refusing to educate kids on the safest ways to handle drugs.
Do you think people are naive to the differences between black market and prescription drugs?
People think prescription drugs are much safer. Though the misuse of prescription drugs is black market. There’s a dealer at most high schools nowadays. And kids steal them from their parents. Prescription pills have replaced weed in a lot of areas because they’re so accessible and there’s nothing easier than swallowing a pill. It’s like vitamins! It’s everywhere, and it’s causing a lot of problems. I talk a lot about how marijuana is not at all a transitional drug. People like to label weed as “the gateway” drug, but that’s a farce. I think it’s actually prescription pills that make for a smooth transition to other drugs. Adderall to coke. Oxycontin to heroin.
If you were charged with designing an effective drug awareness campaign, what would it look like?
It certainly wouldn’t have an awful, misleading slogan like “Hugs not drugs” or “Drugs are bad.” Those messages don’t work for the same reason abstinence sex-ed is ineffective. You have to be open and honest. Educate. I’d create a mandatory year-long course based on the lecture I give with a textbook version of my book. And I’d show my film, which depicts real situations supplemented with dialogue about safety measures. It also incorporates commentary from lawyers and doctors about legal and medical ramifications. We’re looking to get some interviews with people in positions of extreme opposition, too.
Like the dude who prosecuted Paris Hilton for cocaine possession and was then caught purchasing crack?
Yes. Exactly.
At what age would you educate your own kids about drugs?
Most professionals say by middle school it’s advisable, so at least by then. I don’t think I can say without knowing my child. It will have more to do with his or her behavior and level of curiosity.
What’s your favorite drug?
Alcohol’s the easiest thing to continuously have fun on and not get too crazy.
How about other than alcohol? Weed?
No. I’m useless on weed. Hash is a favorite. It’s an incredibly chill high and I’m still able to have a good time and be social. On the other extreme of alcohol, I think LSD can be one of the more rewarding experiences one can have.
How about uppers?
I’ve been into them before.
Is there a drug you haven’t tried?
Heroin.
Me neither! Want to do it together when we’re 75?
Maybe 90. After nicotine, heroin is the drug with the most potential to become addictive. And who wants to trust themselves injecting something?
So when’s the last time you purchased a drug?
Truthfully, since I’ve gotten into this work more formally, I haven’t purchased a drug.
Are they given to you?
If I am doing something, it’s because I’m going with the flow. So yeah, it’s usually given to me.
So you’re not a frequent drug user?
If you leave me alone to write for a week, the only thing I’d do is tea. I’m really into tea these days.
No coffee?
[Laughs] You’re mocking, but tea is a drug. And it’s a good one.
What do you think compels a person to try a drug?
Boredom, and because it’s the cool thing to do.
What’s the coolest drug to do right now? What’s trending on college campuses?
Alcohol will probably always be the biggest problem on college campuses because of its social acceptance. As I was traveling west in 2009, I heard more and more about Salvia and DMT. But your traditional popular drugs are still prevalent, like cocaine, mushrooms, and acid. And weed is absolutely everywhere.
One of the strategies you suggest to marketing representatives hired to sell your book at schools is to throw a Celebrity Overdose party where people dress up as dead celebrities. Who would you dress up as at such an event?
I’m pretty sure it’s never happened. But I think John Belushi would be the most fun to portray.
How come?
Cause he was a party animal. I’m just picturing Animal House.
Do you think you’ll encounter a problem continuing this work as you age?
I’m able to do whatever the fuck I want right now, which works well. But I’m well aware that as I get older, I might not be able to blend into the college crowds as much. I’ll figure it out. There’s a lot to be done.
Who funds your work?
The work funds the work. Speaking fees. The book. There are some private investors in the film.
Any parting words?
Yeah. I think cocaine’s a bigger issue for 20-somethings in finance than it is on college campuses. The social scene surrounding finance in general lends itself to those drugs more than any other environment I’ve witnessed. Like certain religions use psychedelics. Oh, and the people trying to pass legislature for random drug testing on campuses in New York state are moronic.
En toch, als we de politieke klasse moeten geloven, zijn andere middelen véél gevaarlijker en dodelijker en bovenal immoreler. Een biertje drinken daarentegen – of tien – is de normaalste zaak van de wereld.
Alcohol is verantwoordelijk voor bijna 4 procent van alle sterfgevallen wereldwijd, bijna 2,5 miljoen mensen. Dat is meer dan aids, tuberculose of geweld, liet de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie vrijdag weten. Alcohol is doodsoorzaak nummer één onder mannen van 15 tot en met 59 jaar.
Door stijgende inkomens zijn inwoners van Azië en Afrika meer gaan drinken. Daarnaast is overmatig drankgebruik een probleem in veel ontwikkelde landen, aldus de organisatie van de Verenigde Naties.
Volgens de WHO nemen de meeste regeringen te weinig maatregelen tegen de uitwassen van overmatig drankgebruik, zoals verkeersongelukken, geweld, kanker, verwaarlozing van kinderen en wegblijven van werk. Overal nuttigen mannen vaker gevaarlijke hoeveelheden alcohol dan vrouwen.
A dispute over the existence of God between four Russians, drunk on a litre of pure alcohol, resulted in two of them being killed, news agencies reported.
The disagreement began over the weekend when the female house owner, her son, a male roommate and undisclosed male relative drank the litre of pure alcohol, “which they downed with snow,” a police investigator told RIA Novosti.
“Soon after the drinking session, the suspect [the son] and the two other men got into a fight about the existence of God,” the police official in the western Siberia region of Tomsk reported.
The son ended up attacking both men with a knife, killing them both, the report said.
The suspect, who has a prior conviction record, faces life in prison if found guilty.
If you happen to be in London, this may be interesting. The Wellcome Trust has an exhibition running until February called High Society, exploring “the role of mind-altering drugs in history and culture”, which challenges “the perception that drugs are a disease of modern life”.
From ancient Egyptian poppy tinctures to Victorian cocaine eye drops, Native American peyote rites to the salons of the French Romantics, mind-altering drugs have a rich history. ‘High Society’ will explore the paths by which these drugs were first discovered – from apothecaries’ workshops to state-of-the-art laboratories – and how they came to be simultaneously fetishised and demonised in today’s culture.
Mind-altering drugs have been used in many ways throughout history – as medicines, sacraments and status symbols, to investigate the brain, inspire works of art or encounter the divine, or simply as an escape from the experience.
Exhibits will include: Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ manuscript, said to have been written after an opium dream; a hand-written manuscript by Captain Thomas Bowrey describing his crew’s experiments with Bhang – a cannabis drink – in 17th-century Bengal; a bottle of cocaine eye drops; and a hallucinogenic snuff set collected in the Amazon by the Victorian explorer Richard Spruce. The exhibition will also feature contemporary art pieces exploring drug use and culture, including Tracy Moffat’s Laudanum portrait series and a recreation of the Joshua Light Show by Joshua White and Seth Kirby.
With the exhibition comes a nice-looking book, High Society. Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture, by one of the curators, historian Mike Jay, that “explores the spectrum of mind-altering substances across the globe and throughout history”.
Every society on earth is a high society. As the sun rises in the east, caffeine is infused and sipped across China in countless forms of dried, smoked and fermented tea. From the archipelagos of Indonesia and New Guinea through Thailand, Burma and India, a hundred million chewers of betel prepare their quids of areca nut, pepper leaf and caustic lime ash, press it between their teeth and expectorate the day’s first mouthful of crimson saliva. Across the cities of Thailand, Korea and China, potent and illicit preparations such as ya’aba, home-cooked amphetamine pills swallowed or smoked, propel a young generation through the double working shifts of economic boomtime, or burn up the empty hours of unemployment, before igniting the clubs and bars of the urban nightscape.
As the sun tracks across towards the afternoon, the rooftop terraces of Yemen’s medieval mud-brick cities fill with men gathering to converse and chew khat through the scorching heat of the day. Across the concrete jungles of the Middle East, millions without the means for a midday meal make do with a heap of sugar stirred into a small cup of strong black tea. As the working day in Europe draws to a close, the traffic through the bars of the city squares begins to pick up, and high-denomination euro notes are surreptitiously exchanged for wraps of cocaine and ecstasy.
Aardig stukje van Thijs Kleinpaste (D66-deelraadslid in Amsterdam) over het voornemen van Minister van Veiligheid Ivo Opstelten om de organisatie van dance-evenementen mee te laten betalen aan de kosten van politie-inzet.
Flauw, aangezien dit soort feesten eigenlijk nooit problemen oplevert. De reden? Het type drug dat er doorgaans genuttigd wordt. Nergens zul je zo’n lieve, empathische groep mensen tegenkomen als op Awakenings of GZG. Gooi een zelfde aantal mensen vol met alcohol, en je hebt een geheel ander plaatje.
Minister van Veiligheid Ivo Opstelten zegt dit weekend in De Volkskrant dat hij organisatoren van grote evenementen wil laten meebetalen aan de kosten voor politie-inzet. Wat hem betreft gaat het niet om lokale evenementen, maar bijvoorbeeld wel om grote dancefeesten. Dat voorbeeld is slecht gekozen. Het slechte imago van dancefeesten is onterecht.
Dat juist dancefeesten zouden moeten meebetalen aan de politie-inzet is cynisch. Hoewel dancefeesten een slechte naam hebben, zijn het juist feesten als Sensation White die in vergelijking met de gemiddelde stapavond rustig verlopen. Elk jaar komen er ruim 40.000 mensen naar de Amsterdam ArenA, die dan tot de nok toe vol staat met duizenden feestgangers. Problemen zijn er vrijwel nooit. Op een paar verstuikte enkels en een incidentele danceliefhebber met uitdrogings- verschijnselen als gevolg van ecstacygebruik na blijft het gezellig. Dat lukt je niet als je 40.000 tot feestneuzen tot de rand toe gevuld met alcohol op een zelfde stukje grasmat loslaat.
Toch melden nieuwsmedia elke ochtend na een dancefeest met de regelmaat van de klok dat er enkele tientallen aanhoudingen zijn verricht. Dat die arrestaties vrijwel allemaal verband houden met het bezit van partydrugs zet het plan van Opstelten nog meer in perspectief. De fysieke veiligheid is op dancefeesten zelf is vaak nauwelijks in het geding. De politie-inzet buiten het vrijwel volledig te wijten aan de paranoia van de overheid ten aanzien van drugs, waardoor de roedels drugshonden bij feesten partygangers besnuffelen op zoek naar een handjevol ecstacypillen. Naast een enkele grote dealer is vooral de persoonlijk gebruiker hier de dupe van.
Nog los van de nadelige effecten die deze drugsparanoia die dit oplevert (de kwaliteit van drugs holt achteruit en partygangers gaan over op kamikazegebruik waardoor het risico op gezondheidsproblemen groter wordt), is het meer dan onrechtvaardig om de organisatoren van dancefeesten op te laten draaien voor de war on drugs van het kabinet. Dancefeesten zijn uitgesproken veilige evenementen, juist omdat er hier en daar weliswaar een ecstacypilletje wordt gebruikt, maar alcohol niet voorhanden is. Van ecstacy wordt je bovendien gezellig en vrolijk, van alcohol minder. Het is daarom niet gek dat de gemiddelde zaterdagavond in een willekeurige provinciestad meer knokpartijen oplevert dan een editie van Sensation White. Toch is daar de vraag of kroegbazen hun eigen politie-inzet zouden moeten financieren niet aan de orde.
Dancefeesten hebben te lang in een kwaad daglicht gestaan. De feesten zijn geen vleesgeworden sodom en gomorra, maar topevenementen met internationale allure die flink wat geld opleveren, ook voor de lokale economie. Een veiligheidsprobleem is er nauwelijks, maar of dat het effect is van politie-inzet valt te bezien. Organisatoren hebben zelf beveiligers in dienst die binnen een oogje in het zeil houden, en de politie beperkt zich tot drugscontroles buiten het stadion. Die inzet heeft vooral een nadelig effect op de gezondheid van de bezoekers. Dat de overheid het een probleem vindt dat sommige feestgangers ecstacy nemen is niet het probleem van de organisatoren.
Als de maatregel van Opstelten om organisatoren van evenementen op te laten draaien voor de kosten van politie-inzet er al doorkomt zouden dancefeesten daar misschien eerder een vrijstelling van moeten krijgen dan het volle pond betalen. Het is niet uit te leggen om de organisaties te vragen voor drugscontroles waar ze zelf niet om hebben gevraagd. Ze laten betalen voor de utopische streven partydrugs helemaal uit te bannen is daarom een onzalig plan.
David Nutt, one of Britain’s top experts on drugs and sacked last year because he advocated a rehaul of the British drug classification system to upgrade marihuana and alcohol and downgrade ecstasy, has published an update of his study in The Lancettoday.
Nutt’s group’s methodology consists of ranking the dangerousness of drugs along three categories, these being personal harm, addictiveness, and societal harm. If you review all available drugs (including alcohol, the most commonly used drug) along these lines, a whole other picture of the harm of certain drugs emerges than the media want you to believe.
In this new study, alcohol even turns out to be the most harmful drug today. Not a surprising find, if you take into account the millions and millions of alcohol addicts, the situation in inner cities in the weekends, the aggression and damage it causes. Now compare that to certain other drugs, although badly depicted in many media, that merely elicit empathy and goodwill in users while being hardly addictive nor physically harmful. According to the Nutt research group’s guidelines, in fact, even heroin is less dangerous and harmful than alcohol.
Now of course I’m not advocating heroin use. But research like this is something to think about when you have your innocent little beer… the one legalized and accepted drug.
Alcohol is the most dangerous drug in the UK by a considerable margin, beating heroin and crack cocaine into second and third place, according to an authoritative study published today which will reopen calls for the drugs classification system to be scrapped and a concerted campaign launched against drink.
Led by the sacked government drugs adviser David Nutt with colleagues from the breakaway Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, the study says that if drugs were classified on the basis of the harm they do, alcohol would be class A, alongside heroin and crack cocaine.
Today’s paper, published by the respected Lancet medical journal, will be seen as a challenge to the government to take on the fraught issue of the relative harms of legal and illegal drugs, which proved politically damaging to Labour.
(…)
The new paper updates a study carried out by Nutt and others in 2007, which was also published by the Lancet and triggered debate for suggesting that legally available alcohol and tobacco were more dangerous than cannabis and LSD.
Alcohol, in that paper, ranked fifth most dangerous overall. The 2007 paper also called for an overhaul of the drug classification system, but critics disputed the criteria used to rank the drugs and the absence of differential weighting.
Today’s study offers a more complex analysis that seeks to address the 2007 criticisms. It examines nine categories of harm that drugs can do to the individual “from death to damage to mental functioning and loss of relationships” and seven types of harm to others. The maximum possible harm score was 100 and the minimum zero.
Overall, alcohol scored 72 – against 55 for heroin and 54 for crack. The most dangerous drugs to their individual users were ranked as heroin, crack and then crystal meth. The most harmful to others were alcohol, heroin and crack in that order.
Nutt told the Guardian the drug classification system needed radical change. “The Misuse of Drugs Act is past its sell-by date and needs to be redone,” he said. “We need to rethink how we deal with drugs in the light of these new findings.”
For overall harm, the other drugs examined ranked as follows: crystal meth (33), cocaine (27), tobacco (26), amphetamine/speed (23), cannabis (20), GHB (18), benzodiazepines (15), ketamine (15), methadone (13), butane (10), qat (9), ecstasy (9), anabolic steroids (9), LSD (7), buprenorphine (6) and magic mushrooms (5).
How can you do almost every existing drug at once, drink yourself to near-death, get into traffic accidents, and keep living? The answer lies in the gene code of Ozzy Osbourne – the Prince of Darkness.
The former frontman for Black Sabbath and reality show star recently became one of only a few hundred people in the world who have had their entire genetic code deciphered and analyzed. Osbourne, 61, wrote about his experience in a column in The Times of London on Sunday. He says he was initially skeptical of the idea–”The only Gene I know anything about is the one in Kiss”–but quickly came around when the originator of the project, identified only as Chris, convinced him the results could help explain how he survived 40 years of intense drug and alcohol abuse and all the ill-advised antics that go along with it.
As the Black Sabbath frontman wrote in a column himself:
“Look,” said Chris, “you’ve said it yourself: you’re a medical miracle. You went on a drink and-drugs bender for 40 years. You broke your neck on a quad bike. You died twice in a chemically induced coma. You walked away from your tour bus without a scratch after it was hit by a plane. Your immune system was so compromised by your lifestyle, you got a positive HIV test for 24 hours, until they proved it was wrong. Yet here you are, alive and well.”
The results:
Bearing in mind what Dr. Nathan said about those odds being dodgy, here are some other interesting things he told me: I’m 6.13 times more likely than the average person to have alcohol dependency or alcohol cravings (er… yeah); 1.31 times more likely to have a cocaine addiction (this must be bollocks, because anyone who takes coke as much as I did gets hooked); and 2.6 times more likely to have hallucinations while taking cannabis (makes sense, although I was usually loaded on so many different things at the same time, it was hard to know what was doing what).
…”One of the unusual things we found in your genome was a spelling in the regulatory segment of your ADH4 gene, which metabolises alcohol,” said Dr Nathan. “It could make you more able to break down alcohol than the average person. Or less able.” I used to drink four bottles of cognac a day. I’m not sure I need a Harvard scientist to get to the bottom of that mystery.
If you ever only see one documentary about drugs, let it be this one. The acclaimed BBC series Horizon episode “Is alcohol worse than ecstasy?” examines the dangers of the 20 drugs most commonly used in the United Kingdom.
It does this based upon a qualification by a group of scientists, composed of Britain’s leading drug experts and members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). This group in 2007 published an article in The Lancet (to be found here), in which a rational scale for assessing the danger of drugs was developed. This scale took the form of a list, in which the 20 drugs were ranked according to potential harm.
In Great Britain, regulatory policy regarding drugs consists of a classification along three categories: Class A (most dangerous), Class B and Class C (least dangerous). Alcohol and tobacco are not included in the categorization. This approach, on the face of it, seems better than the Dutch system of ranking substances either as “hard drugs” or as “soft drugs”, as it allows for more nuance. There are, however, a number of problems with the British system. The system was invented in 1971, whereas a substance like ecstasy was added to it in 1977 – way before it was used the way it is today. This leads to a rather weird categorization: while lsd, mushrooms and ecstasy are ranked alongside heroin and crack in Class A, dangerous stuff like ketamin is ranked alongside sleeping pills in Class C.
The research group therefore wanted to develop a new method for assessing the danger of drugs. They did this by employing three criteria. The first of these is personal harm; what a drug does to you if you take it in. The second one is addictiveness; how fast you get hooked to it. The third one is societal harm; how much damage it can do to those around you and society at large.
Based on these criteria, and after consultation with other experts, the researchers assembled their list of twenty drugs, in order of harmfulness. And the results are remarkable. While, unsurprisingly, heroin and cocaine top the list as the most dangerous drugs, other results are counterintuitive (that is, if you base everything you know on media reports): alcohol and tobacco, for instance, turn out to be far more harmful than lsd and ecstasy, while marihuana is not the innocent drug it is often proclaimed to be.
Here’s the list (with some interesting graphs alongside it, click to enlarge):
1. Heroin
2. Cocaine
3. Barbiturates
4. Street methadone
5. Alcohol
6. Ketamine
7. Benzodiazepines
8. Amphetamine
9. Tobacco
10. Buprenorphine
11. Cannabis
12. Solvents
13. 4-MTA
14. LSD
15. Methylphenidate
16. Anabolic steroids
17. GHB
18. Ecstasy
19. Alkyl nitrates
20. Khat
So the place of ecstasy on this list, as the documentary has it, “massively conflicts with its reputation”.
Another report, this time by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs itself (from 2009, to be found here), based on a 12-month study of 4,000 research articles, addressed this particular issue. Ecstasy is a substance that has been the victim of a relentless media campaign. The report even addresses this: during the 1990s in Scotland, for example, every instance of a fatality involving ecstasy was widely reported on, while only a fraction of (far more frequent) fatalities with other drugs were reported on. Similar observations regarding media publicity can be made regarding Australia (see this report) and the Netherlands (see this report by the political party D66).
According to the researchers, however, ecstasy’s bad reputation is unwarranted. First of all, ecstasy is not physically addictive (it can, of course, like any drug, be psychologically addictive). Second, ecstasy is not harmful to society (ecstasy turns users into empathic softies, whereas alcohol and cocaine can make users prone to violence; the number of hospitalizations of ecstasy users is negligible, and nearly always due to combining it with other drugs; and just compare it to the million-wide addiction to alcohol and tobacco). The true danger is personal harm. Metastudies (pdf) reveal, however, that personal dangers predominantly arise in cases of chronic and excessive use.
All researchers in the BBC documentary make clear that media reporting about ecstasy has been biased and overblown. Quote:
It’s not a drug that’s hazard free, by any means. But having said that, many thousands of people in the UK have tried it, and a good proportion of those people derived pleasure and a good experience from it. So I’m not going to sit here and say that it’s a very dangerous drug.
The position of ecstasy near the bottom of the list was defended by Prof Nutt, who said that apart from some tragic isolated cases ecstasy is relatively safe. Despite about a third of young people having tried the drug and around half a million users every weekend, it causes fewer than 10 deaths a year. One person a day is killed by acute alcohol poisoning and thousands more from chronic use.
Thus, the researchers and experts of the ACMD in their 2009 report made the policy recommendation to the British government that the ABC-classification scheme needed revision: ecstasy needed to be downgraded to Class C, while alcohol, tobacco and marihuana needed to be included and upgraded to Class B and A. In addition, Prof. David Nutt, chair of the ACMD, wrote a paper for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies of King’s College, London (to be found here), arguing along the same lines.
The researchers’ conclusions, however, did not match the political considerations of their employers. Hours before publication of the ACMD report, the Home Office sent a letter rejecting beforehand two of three policy recommendations. When David Nutt published his paper, moreover, he was immediately sacked by Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary.
This, however, led to a great deal of protest, as the ACMD in response threatened with mass resignation. The Guardian(here’s more):
The government was at the centre of a furious backlash from leading scientists last night following its sacking of Britain’s top drugs adviser.
The decision by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, to call on Professor David Nutt to resign as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has thrown the future of the respected independent body into severe doubt. There were claims last night that many of those who sit on the 31-strong council – which advises ministers on what evidence there is of harm caused by drugs – may resign en masse, raising serious doubts about how ministers will justify policy decisions.
Several were this weekend seeking urgent reassurances from the government that it will not try to control their agenda and will allow them to speak out before they decide whether to quit. One is said to have already resigned.
That’s a lot of intro, but here’s the BBC documentary. While informative in its entirety, the remarkable conclusions are, of course, that ecstasy is not nearly the dangerous drug it is portrayed to be; and that alcohol, were it invented today, would immediately be listed a Class A drug. I think that’s something to think about.
(Voor de duidelijkheid: een “fuck drugs” t-shirt? Terwijl je bier zit te zuipen? Welke minister-president draagt een shirt met “fuck” erop? Waarom alcohol promoten terwijl je minder schadelijke middelen verkettert?
Blij dat deze fucker volgende week opgehoepeld is.)
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