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Benjamin Melançon's Reporter's Notebook

 

UK 2-year Study calls for Harm Reduction, Not Demonization

Posted by Benjamin Melançon - March 10, 2007 at 10:37 am
The Royal Society commission on drugs declared "The use of illegal drugs is by no means always harmful any more than alcohol use is always harmful."

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, or RSA, commission on illegal drugs judged that together with alcohol and tobacco other drugs should be dealt with in public policy as a "matter of health, not just crime."

A Press Association report carried by the Guardian, pulled out these excerpts from the report released March 9:

"The evidence suggests that a majority of people who use drugs are able to use them without harming themselves or others. They are able, in that sense, to 'manage' their drug use ... The harmless use of illegal drugs is thus possible, indeed common," it said.

(The report's statement of the obvious is likely to be controversial, the Guardian wrote.)

"Drugs policy should, like our policy on alcohol and tobacco, seek to regulate use and prevent harm rather than to prohibit use altogether," the report concludes.

About Benjamin Melançon

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http://www.mlncn.com/

Biography

Student-on-hold, ex-stocker and failed union agitator, ex-white-collar consultant and now co-founder and developer at Agaric Design Collective, making web sites with open source free software.

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Comments

Point of Curiosity

Submitted March 11, 2007 - 12:52 pm by Kimberly Dieser
I'm curious what people think about the morality of drug use.  

Is it a moral issue, or simply a matter of legal policy, potentially faux-moral for political expediency?

Morality of Drug Use

Submitted March 12, 2007 - 7:48 pm by Christopher Hyde
I am in favor of harm reduction; the morality, or lack thereof, of drug use is simply a red herring. As an old-fashioned American, I believe that we should be free to ingest, smoke, read, say or look at anything we want, without the slightest interference from government. The puritans among us will of course bring in the children as their big guns. Whether children should drink or smoke should be up to their parents, not the state.
The so-called drug war, in Latin America and in our inner cities, is simply a convenient method for control of the "lower classes," and is completely political in nature.

The morality is in the application, not the tool

Submitted March 13, 2007 - 11:04 am by Sean Donahue
Drugs are technologies for changing consciousness.

For me the moral and ethical questions revolve around the ways in which people use those technologies, the reasons they choose them, and the intentions they hold while using them.

The technologies themselves are, for the most part neutral.  The circumstances and consequences of their use determine the morality of their use.

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