LEGALISATION OF DRUGS CUTS CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT

Sir - Regarding your editorial on methamphetamine, psychiatrist Fredric
Polak, MD, on merits of health arguments in the legalisation debate, says:

" it is precisely because of the health risks that it is so irresponsible
of governments to forbid drugs and thus offers as it were this lucrative
trade to criminals.

The arguments in favour of legalising cannabis apply all the more to other
illicit drugs; their prohibition only increases the health risks and puts
the market in the hands oc criminals"

Having expensive weight-watching pills, cold tablets and other pre-cursers
so sought after in a criminal context amplifies deviancy generating social
mayhem.

Crime and justice sells newspapers but this prohibition in name only cannot
account for victims of drug related events, the harms and unintended
consquences maximised by policy.

One only need look to Uncle Sam to see poverty of justice, health and
racial/social equity in its moral, expensive and unwinnable war on green
and white agricultural substances yet more people die daily from aspirin
than all illicit drugs combined.

Blanket prohibition is on the table at the UN Vienna meeting in April.

Ministerial heads, the signatories of the Single Conventions and Covenants
will hear Great Britain's Home Secretariat reign in the INCB for fiction
told at a March 7 cannabis conference in Stockholm.

It will hear the Honourable Secretary General of Interpol, explain how "The
conventions are the problem" along with Canadian, South and Central
American, EU Members of Parliament (200) and importantly, New Zealand
voices in this drug policy initiative.

The community could do well to evaluate Mr Cottons "Lock em forever"
editorial, post Vienna.