Zacs - // Yep I deffo have and I think Naomi has. How anyone can conclude that making drugs more prevalent in society would lower the number of people attending A&E is completely illogical. //
The notion that 'making drugs more prevalent in society' is automatically going to lead to a catastrophic rise in drug use is a flawed assumption in my view.
If the government added a proper education programme about the effects of all drugs - tobacco and alcohol included - it could start to steer people away from the mystique of drug use, which would certainly lose its mystique if it was suddenly not 'dangerous' any more.
The A & E numbers are caused because of the effects of illegal drugs - they are cut with any number of poisons, the strengths are variable, leading to overdosing.
If the government produced drugs under licence, then every drug would be pure and measured, and the overdose issue would dramatically reduce.
You can't eliminate overdoses, any more than you can eliminate drink-driving, a section of humanity are simply too stupid to live with the rest of us.
But that is how the world is.
We don't have perfect solutions, and contrary to the view of one poster, I do not live in a fantasy world where everything is wonderful.
We as a country, live with a health service that is vastly overstretched by the abuse of drugs - ironically, abuse of legal drugs is by far the main issue, but that can only be solved by education, and that will take several generations to filter through.
As it stands, we are spending billions of pounds on a 'war on drugs' that has, and is, utterly failing to come close to its objective, because its approach is entirely backwards.
If you remove the criminal elements caused by addicts robbing, and you make drugs safely available, at a cost, you will move society towards a situation where it can oversee and regulate something which has the potential to harm its population.
We manage to do it with cars, guns, and to a far lesser extent alcohol, but the systems prove that some control is better than no control.
As for the idea that everyone will suddenly rush off to experiment with drugs because they are available, I believe that to be a nonsense.
The vast majority of the population are simply not interested in drugs at all, and would not magically become so simply because they are available in the high street.
We would simply control and regulate currently illegal drugs in the way we do with legal drugs - alcohol and tobacco, and that allows people who wish to use them the freedom to do so safely, and earns an amount of revenue for the government.
Not a huge amount, because the number of illegal drug users is microscopic compared to the users, and their attendant problems and drains on the health service, of legal drug users.
We have drugs, they are here, they are not going away.
We have two choices, we can behave like sensible people, and assert some control over the situation, or we can carry on with our heads in the sand and pretend that the 'war on drugs' is actually going to be won.
I have argued my view for which of the options I would take, but I stress that this is hypothetical, I do not expect to see it in my lifetime, but change for the better comes eventually for most things, and it will here too.