Drugs

This is a long comment I posted on Tom Harris MP's blog in response to the 'raving Dave Cameron' pics...

I’m pro-liberalisation of the drug laws. Having looked at the evidence, its clear to me that Prohibition does more harm that good. It’s prohibition that puts, for example, £6bn through the black economy because it’s banned Cannabis. Its prohibition that fosters an environment of criminality around drug use - from smuggling and production through to stealing to fund use. Not to mention the fact that prohibiton directly funds Taliban-allies in Afghanistan as they produce 90% of the world’s heroin (a drug that after living in Glasgow and Brighon I can tell you is not glamorous, may keep you thin, but is a monster waiting to eat all but the very luckiest of users). We pay for all that through illegality.

With that in mind, do I care if Dave got off his face in the 90s? I have to say no as at the time almost everyone I went to school with was playing about with pot and ecstasy (although of the latter it was expected that some amount of permanent depression/brain structure changes - damage - should be expected through over induldgence, whether this was ‘real’ or ‘true’ or not…

More interestingly, I’m open that my drug use has included Cannabis, LSD, Speed, Coke and E. This would, for a 35 year old Uni Grad be pretty unremarkable. Where it gets interesting is in the preparation it’s given me for the drugs I now have to take for MS. If I have a relapse I get a steroid (mis-spelt) Methylprednisolone which can have psycho-active effects. If I’d not taken acid, I’d not have known how to approach such a 3-day trip, not understood how to recognise how thesubtle effects altering personality, ramping up intemperateness or aggression. I’d, in particular, not have known that (like Acid), an awful lot turned on the state of mind you have when you take it - fear is death.

And with respect to Multiple Sclerosis, LSD gives an excellent grounding in the position that you tend to find yourself in - that reality may not be presenting itself to you entirely accurately. I get holes in my field of vision that, becuase of the way the visual cortex functions, are mapped over by the brain’s VR until my attention is confronted with something (like a car - which is why I don’t drive despite having a medically restricted 4 year license) pops out of the blind spot. Which, philosphically, challenges your experience of perceptual reality in ways that, frankly, ONLY LSD had prepared me for.

I’m not recommending drugs but if you dabble, it would be wrong to dismiss you for those experiences. In a world where reality is not always what you perceive it to me, like it or not, but drugs can give you a good store of simulated experiences for handling that.

And don’t get me started on Medical Marijuana or I’ll start up about Sativex, Thames House and the GW factory in Portod Down…