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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Wipe out a lucrative trade by legalising it
Dan O'Neill South Wales Echo
Monday 09 Oct 2006 Amazing, eh? Pensioners being persecuted by yobs (whoops, 'misunderstood young men'?) can't find a copper when they need one. While across most of the country in these dark and dismal days police confess that they rarely respond to 'minor' crimes even when victims are traumatised. But last week no problem in finding 52 of the forces's finest, all done up in protective gear, to make early-morning raids on two Cardiff shelters for the homeless. Yep, they found some gear but no drug arrests made. Meanwhile, I can report - exclusively - that no city pubs or restaurants were raided even though they sell a helluva lot more drugs than our local lawmen's dawn raid discovered. What's that? Drugs? In our respectable pubs and restaurants? Well, what else are alcohol and tobacco? The difference is that they're legal, the official take that though they may be harmful it's not really the state's business to bang up blokes simply for ruining their livers and lungs. So how come the state bangs up the users of far less harmful drugs? Checking the figures for 2004 I find that of the UK's 40,000 known heroin users 744 died, along with just 147 of the 800,000 with a cocaine habit. There were an estimated three million smoking or swallowing cannabis: 16 died. And those other, legal drugs? In 2004 the lives of more than 114,000 smokers were stubbed out while 22,000 drinkers died. So there you have it. Booze wrecks more lives than all the hard drugs combined. Tobacco is even more lethal. Yet our leaders will never criminalise cigarettes an' whisky and wild, wild women (remember that song?). They banned booze in the States in 1919 and as more people than ever swamped the speakeasies crime became as big a business as General Motors - and I didn't say that, Lucky Luciano, Boss of all the Bosses, the ultimate Godfather, did. Police and politicians, judges and customs officers were bought by the Mob, Luciano alone paying more than a million a year in 'grease,' and the US has never recovered. Prohibition of drugs has already brought Chicago-style gun-wars to our cities, a worldwide problem with warfare on the US-Mexico border so apocalyptic that Arizona and New Mexico last year declared states of emergency. For our own drug barons, for the narco-states of Central America and for the warlords of Afghanistan where our troops are dying, it's a battle worth fighting. For this is an international trade estimated to generate maybe £2,000bn a year. Only because it's illegal. Legalise it and we would cut down the drug-based street crime that cost £16bn last year. It would also free-up 52 Cardiff cops to get to work making our streets and neighbourhoods safer.
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