"All the Serious Crime in This Country is P-Related"

I didn't say that.  Greg O'Connor of the Police Association did, on NewstalkZB this afternoon.

To me it begs the question:  "Why is methamphetamine illegal?"

The price we pay for banning meth is high.  We have robberies, shootings and violence galore, all because the government has made P a valuable and scarce commodity.  It makes related crime inevitable.

What would happen if we legalised P?  Would more people try it?  Possibly.  Would more people become addicted to it?  Maybe.  How many?  Probably not many.  You see, people who are inclined to experiment with hard drugs are exactly the sort of people who would try meth regardless of its legal status.  To say that legalising it would damage society is to assume that there are significant numbers of people out there who have thought about trying it, but wouldn't, simply because it is illegal.  But how many people out there are seriously like that?  And even if they are like that, how many people would become addicted to it simply because you legalised it?  I doubt many would.  99% would try it once for the novelty value, stay awake for the next two days, and that would be it.

So lets assume that we legalise P, and, despite the complete lack of logical sense it makes, all our worst fears are realised - "meth dens" are set up all over the country and it becomes the recreational drug of choice for the masses.  Even then, would we get the same level, or greater, of crime as we see now, while the drug is illegal?  Of course not.  If you can pay five bucks for a hit, the motive to rob a bank, the motive to set up your own lab and blow yourself up, the motive to shoot undercover cops and liquor store owners all disappears.  You'd still get people going crazy from staying awake for a week and you wouldn't stop tragedies like the death of Coral Burrows, but would those problems increase enough so as to make prohibition a viable preventative step over and above what we know the fruits of prohibition to be?  The answer is an emphatic no.

For a safer society, we must legalise drugs.  Too many innocent people are getting hurt to retain the status quo.

Comments

[Gooner]

I agree Blair.

I am going to a lecture at the AUT tomorrow night titled "Drugs and Crime". It should be interesting. It is being given by some Canadian Judge I think. He advocates decriminalising drugs I think.

[Blair Anderson]

P (meth) and its prevelance is a product of the policy that it set out to solve. Judge Jerry Paradis put the problem square in the lap of media.

/Blair Anderson, LEAP tour facilitator.
0272657219

[Nigel Kearney]

It is an unfortunate truth of politics that an approach that makes an existing problem worse will always be more popular than doing nothing.