Release – the national centre of expertise on drugs and drugs law – have launched a bus advertisement campaign with the simple, but overlooked, slogan that NICE PEOPLE TAKE DRUGS.
They say, quite rightly:
“It is time that we demanded that politicians and the media have a realistic and honest discussion about drugs. It’s time to shift the debate – we need laws that are fair, information that is accurate and a debate that is meaningful.”
And also point out the following facts:
* Over a third of adults in England & Wales have used illicit drugs
* More people have used cannabis than voted for Labour at the last election
* 13,000 children were arrested for drug offences in 2006/07
* Over 1 million adults used class A drugs last year
This country is desperately in need of an overhaul of its drugs legislation. The fact that legislation comes down to a woman who spends taxpayers money on pornography telling us that ‘cannabis is bad’ is a sad state of affairs, especially when decisions seem to be based upon political posturing rather than medical evidence. Not to mention against the recommendations of the government’s own advisors.
I could go off on a rant, but I always boil it down to the same question: ‘would you prefer commonly used dangerous substances to be under the control of criminals who put profits back into criminal activity that kills people and damages lives, or would you prefer them to be controlled, taxed, where the purity and safety of substances can be regulated, and the users can have access to help without persecution?’
Thanks, too, to Transform, another magnificent organisation doing tremendous work in this area, from who I pinched this story.
Fleeing from Pigeons Records 
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