Substance abuse

Cue The Romanian Wingnut Tort Reform Demands

Bloody Lawyers, Europe, Substance abuse
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This may well have the potential to be Central Europe’s McDonalds scalding coffee case…

From Ananova;

Man complains after beer makes him drunk

A Romanian man has lodged an official complaint with the local trading standards agency after he got drunk on a single can of beer.

Iancu Boroi, 35, said he had bought the beer at a local supermarket in Arges in southern Romania but was so drunk after drinking just one can that he nearly passed out.

He said: “I am more than capable of holding my drink and it is ridiculous to think one can of beer can get me so drunk.

“There must have been something wrong with it and I am demanding compensation.”

He has written to Romania’s Consumer Protection Office demanding they investigate the case.

Ceiling Cat is On the Ceiling

Kittens!, Substance abuse
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Ananova:

Party animal

A Sydney man took his highly agitated kitten to the vet – only to discover it was high on cocaine.

The cat, which had been accidentally locked in a cupboard overnight, also had benzodiazepines in its system, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

The eight-month-old Himalayan cat arrived at the Double Bay clinic with dilated pupils and a racing heart.

The owner said it had trouble walking and was easily startled, according to a report in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery.

The cat was placed in a cage, began pacing incessantly and was too anxious for the vet to take a thermometer reading.

The vets and authors of the report, Dominic Barfield and Richard Malik, tried to take some blood but the cat was in no mood to oblige.

With no blood tests and no temperature to guide them, they questioned the owner again, who was adamant the cat had not been exposed to toxic plants, mouldy foods or drugs.

The vets rang the owner’s wife, who admitted the cat could have licked “plates of cocaine” after a weekend party two days earlier.

The red-faced owner was “remorseful” but, as there is no legal requirement in Australia for vets to report such cases to the police, he was counselled and allowed to take his party animal home.

What they should’ve done was tie him down and forcefeed him a kilo of catnip. See how he likes it.

Regulate The Smartshops By All Means, But Parents, Educate Your Bloody Young.

Amsterdam, Dutch politics, Economy, Europe, Substance abuse
Published on 2 Comments on Regulate The Smartshops By All Means, But Parents, Educate Your Bloody Young.

The media, in the US especially, is making much of the Dutch government’s moves to further regulate Smartshops and the sale of magic mushrooms, which are legal in NL if sold fresh but illegal if sold dried.

It doesn’t look good for the Smartshops:

AMSTERDAM – A 19-year-old tourist from Iceland jumped from a hotel window in Amsterdam last weekend after ingesting fresh hallucinogenic mushrooms. The boy suffered broken bones in both his legs and feet.

The Volkskrant reports this on Friday. This is the third serious incident involving hallucinogenic mushrooms in Amsterdam in a few months’ time.

In March a 17-year-old French girl jumped to her death from a bridge near the IJ tunnel after taking hallucinogenic mushrooms.

In June a 22-year-old British tourist lost control after taking the substance. He trashed his hotel room on the Martelaarsgracht in Amsterdam and threw items onto the street, injuring one passer by.

More…

Worse still, two smartshops in Amsterdam, Innerspace and Magic Mushroom Gallery, were found recently to have also been selling banned drugs like GHB and were shut down.

The Smartshops themselves, fearing a total ban on mushroom sales, propose strict regulation along the lines of that applied to coffeeshops:

VLOS, the National Association of Smartshops, now calls for regulation so that mushrooms will remain legally and safely available. The forthcoming points are proposed to the parliament.

1) No sale to minors.
2) Further professionalisation of the smartshops by means of a course for smartshop owners and staffs.
3) A general mushroom information flyer, in as many languages as possible.
4) Concentration of the sale of mushrooms in specialized professional shops that handle according to the rules, recognizable by a trademark.

All of which would be fine, if it weren’t for the bloody stupid tourists, none of whom seem to have the sense they were born with. They come to Amsterdam for a lost weekend of drink, drugs, dancing and hedonism and don’t seem to give a stuff about what they take with what and what the physical and mental consequences might be.

It’s as though they think because they’re somewhere foreign the normal rules about safety don’t apply. They’re on holiday! Nothing bad can happen! They are either totally irresponsible or woefully uninformed and ignorant. Who in their right mind takes hallucinogenics in the street anyway?

I don’t think mushrooms should be banned, although personally I don’t and wouldn’t take them. I’ve eaten them twice (long ago, I hasten to add), once inadvertently and once deliberately and I wouldn’t want to repeat the experience or the later flashbacks either.

Mushrooms strike me as something that should be taken only in very safe space in very specific circumstances, ie not at a Halloween costume party or busy streets full of bridges, cyclists and canals. Pirates+cutlasses+hallucinogenics=BAD, let me tell you.

Take it on holiday in the street? Next to an unfenced canal? On top of who knows what other intoxicants? That’s asking for trouble and trouble is what irresponsible 17 year olds do on the loose in a foreign city. Where were their parents anyway, and what did they teach her about drugs, if anything at all?

Personally I see it as Darwinism in action. Wise up about drugs and alcohol or die.

My condolences to the family, and 17 or 19 is no bloody age to die, but the teenagers in question could have just as easily fallen in a canal drunk as high. These are the sorts of things that happen when you let your irresponsible young travel unaccompanied: they do stupid things, some of them fatal. It could have happened to a hooray on a campsite in Cornwall, or a chav at a rave in Ibiza; youthful recklessness and stupidity knows no class or national boundaries.

But neither does the wilful blindness of doting parents when it comes to their children’s use of mind-altering substances. “No, not my little precious!”

What, they’d rather have them ignorant? And dead?

Athough there’s a chorus from the war on drugs folks for a prohibition, a complete ban on mushrooms is unfeasible: the genie is out of the bottle now and smartshops, drug tourism and the associated hotel and catering profits are big business. To ban the open sale of mushrooms will only push the trade underground and increase criminality The demand will still be there, someone will supply it, ban or no ban.

Strict regulation, licensing of sales and strong enforcement and public education will have to be the way forward, though any regulation will have to be a damned sight stricter than what the smartshops themselves propose if it’s to protect tourists agaisnt their own natural inclination towards being stupid bloody idiots.

The End For The ASBO, But Still No Sense On Drugs

Gordon Brown, Policing, Poverty, Race, Substance abuse, UK politics
Published on 1 Comment on The End For The ASBO, But Still No Sense On Drugs

The amusingly-named Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s former right-hand man and no Secretary of State for Children, Skills and Families says Antisocial Behaviour Orders have been a failure and appears to be trailing a u-turn in policy.

About bloody time. The ASBO, with drugs, poverty and a rampant consumer culture, has helped create a lost generation in Britain that’s way beyond antisocial and accelerating and no-one seens to care.

No-one knows what is to be done and the default policy is just round em up, stick a label on ’em and write them off forever. What’s resulted is a permanent population of excluded youth who live at the margins and pick off what they can, as the law-abiding, knowing the police are useless, pull up their metaphorical drawbridges against what they imagine is a ravening horde of feral youth.

It’s been way past time for a rethink. Could it be? Could a Brown government be prepared to not only dump the ASBO but to rethink their entire youth justice polcy?

I wish I could be that hopeful.

hen Jacqui Smith and 7 other minsitersd admitted their own dopesmoking youth there was an opportunity for a real public coversation and real change – but the cabinet has had a chance to entirely rethink its drugs policy in a radical way and has flunked it, saying to the nations’ youth ” We smoked dope and that was a youthful indiscretion – but you, you’re a criminal”. It then promptly proposied to reclassify cannabis upwards because it was shown that it might cause a propensity to mental illness in the still- growing brains of young Crispin or Emily and stop them getting into Durham or Bristol..

Well, yes, so does binge-drinking at Rock in August or alcopops round the back of the Aldi but heaven forbid Tesco or Sainsbury’s or Allied Domecq or whoever should stop making money from drink sales. This country’s whole public attitude to intoxicating subtsances and their regulation and use is a sick joke.

The most hypocritical thing of all is that the shadow economy of the whole nation is run on drugs money. The government in effect relies on drugs money to supplement the incomes of unemployed youth and stop them from rioting – why else would it expect a teenager living on their own to live on forty quid a week?

But the money that circulates in the drugs ecoinomy on the street doesn’t xtay there and enrich local businesses or families; in a neat reverse of Reaganesque economic theory the wealth trickles up.

I wonder how many of the neighbours in those posh gated communities in Cheshire or Surrey or wherever, that they’ve retreated to to get away from the crime and the druggies and the chavs, know how many of their neighbours are making money, albeit indirectly, from drugs? How many private schools or lucury car dealers, or estate agents are unwittingly laundering drug money when they accept fees from the new rich?

Drugs are the elephant in the roon when it comes to criime, and youth crime in particular. It’s insane the way British people use drugs in private and condemn them in public, all the while consigning a cohort of its own young to social nothingness for supplying them. Where do they think that twenty quid for a teenth went? Into the building society?

Even more insane is that there is a legal drug that does more damage to more people than any amount of drugs, and which is available 24hrs a day with the government even taking a cut of the proceeds.

Until the government gets to grips with the concept of the use, regulation and yes, taxation of intoxicants of whatever nature this growing divide in society between the young urban and exurban poor and the comfortable suburbans and metropolitans will only become even more marked.

But first Labour has to admit to itself, and the British in general have to admit to themselves, their own complicity in the drugs trade, even if it’s only a toke and a movie on a Saturday night or a couple of E’s at a Labour Party Conference fringe do. That joint came from somewhere, it didn’t just miraculously appear.

The nation as a whole has a substance abuse problem, it’s just that some substances are more illegal than others If we don’t want to become a fearful, locked-down society preyed upon by the armed young urban poor we have to stage our own intervention and work out a sensible decriminalisation, use, treatment and regulation policy that doesn’t turn a cohort of each succeeding generation of children into criminals with nothing to lose.

UPDATE

As if to prove my point….