Townsville man says synthetic drugs nearly killed him

[qualia]

Anyway, it’s just a waiting game in Australia at this time. We just have to wait for the US federal government to legalise cannabis, which will be years, rather than decade’s imo.

just cos the us does it doesn't mean austraia will. i would expect things to get much, much more draconian over the coming years.

[Torsten]

That’s actually completely untrue. Just look at what happened when England flooded china with cheap opium, or the detrimental effect of having an unregulated pharmaceutical industry in the US at the beginning of the 20^th century.

WTF? why would you bring up an issue from a time that has little to do with our current situation? Things are a little different now than they were in the 20th century.

There is a huge amount of scientific and state produced data that solidly underpins my statement, including the increase in availability and the drop in prices. the dutch model caused prices to drop to under 25% of comparable markets that maintained prohibition, price is usually the best indicator of availability, but for those who think that seizures are, you can also see that seizures in those countries increased dramatically. Holland was until a couple of years ago the biggest source of mdma and LSD and was a major transit point for cocaine [before west africa got in on the game]. Holland is awash with cheap drugs [you'd know that within days if you visited there], yet consumption by locals is the same as in prohibition countries.

In fact, 2 decades of research in Holland, Switzerland and Portugal has ‘in no way’ shown conclusively that increased availability of drugs does not increase consumption, personally I doubt there even has been a significant increase of availability of drugs in those countries.

Both availability and price drops have been demonstrated clearly. And there are literally dozens of papers outlining how consumption has stayed steady or as in the case of portugal has dropped.

What the research has conclusively shown, is that regulating drug use is a far more effective solution than prohibition.

Rubbish! There is no country in the world that has a regulated use or supply of all recreational drugs, so how could there be any such research. regulating just one drug does not give reliable data as there are too many other dynamics that determine market preferences.

Prohibition just creates a ‘free for all’ and can actually end up causing more problems than the drugs themselves.

agreed.