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Published: 29 September 2016

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The United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, constitutes more than 30 percent of the global demand for illegal drugs, according to my calculations.

Yes, there are addicts, but experts estimate that eight in 10 users — more than 20 million people in this country — take drugs recreationally. They come from all walks of life — artists, bankers, engineers, and high school, college and graduate students…That’s why Americans must recognize that every time they buy illegal drugs they reward the cartels. If you think one person’s consumption is too small to make a difference, consider that $100 — what a recreational cocaine user might spend on a single weekend — buys the cartels 500 rounds of ammunition; $500 buys a new AR-15 rifle; $700 covers the monthly salary of one of their gunmen.

Without the vast profits from the drug trade, cartels would be infinitely less powerful, and our governments could neutralize them.

If you use illegal drugs, even just occasionally, please reconsider. Lives are at stake. Go for legal vices if you must. Even if you never use illegal drugs, you probably know people who do. Tell them about the trail of blood that led to their night of partying. If they had seen it firsthand, as I have, they wouldn’t buy those drugs.

We can shatter the misconception that recreational drug use is a victimless crime. We must put an end to the hypocrisy that allows people to make purchases based on their concerns about the environment, workers’ rights or animals — but not about killing people in Mexico.

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Published: 10 June 2011

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We need more cliches' and quick fixes! We really do! True, don't you listen to the 'consensus peddlers'?

Yeh! Like a whole in the head! But who is going to make the tough call. I attended the Thinking Drinking 3 Conference in Brisbane in August 2009 and one of the many poignant statements made was 'All the easy things that can be done, have been done!"That means we've done all the things that really don't challenge an individuals core values and beliefs, but that's gunna be the next step... But hey, we, for the most part are pretty gutless and don't seem to want to make tough calls, maybe we really need to start doing just that?

Read on...

One in Four Teenage Girls Have STDs
By Deborah Huso

("Check out the full article by Deborah Huso featured on AOL Health." Click Here

No Brainer Comments:

Now this is scary stuff! Really scary! Why, some clueless entity may ask? Well, it's the life changing impact these disturbing realities bring…and it's the ladies who wear the brunt of it! These diseases have the very real potential to damage you for life, particularly young women's ability to get pregnant later on into adulthood! Some of these diseases are incurable! That's right… can't fix it, you can merely control the symptoms, but you will infect anyone you have unprotected sex with! So, basically you can never, ever have sex without at least using a condom….ever!

We want you to pay particular notice to the 'timing' of these events… '…infected soon after their 'first sexual encounter!' The statistics tell us that most young teenager girls fist sexual encounter is alcohol related, that's right, getting wasted at parties and being taken advantage of. In fact there is a new 'tag line' for such events and it's called 'regrettable sexual incidents'.

There is very recent data coming out of one municipality on the Melbourne fringe, a YSAS team (Youth Substance Abuse Services) told a public meeting that around 1/3 of the teenagers who were tested in their premises for STD's were shown to have an STD… the link is clear!

Now to the clueless adolescent whose 'bible' is 'cosmopolitan' magazine and their role model some try hard, sell out skank, and who has also bought the well spun lie that 'doing' alcohol or other drugs is harmless and all fun; and who may even think 'screwing' makes them 'grown up' - then warnings of potential stuff ups and future grief, don't register on the 'watch out' radar!

This is why YOU need to be looking out for the people you give a damn about! No, I'm not just talking about havin' a condom ready for the moment… reality is that when girls are hammered, they're randy, they aint thinking straight and whatever frail boundaries they may have, are easily breached by any predator male. In the heat the of the moment, the condom rarely materializes or if does, it's used poorly!

Hang on, why predator? Well let's face it, no caring human being who gives a damn about their friends would let them get into that state, let alone be abused – so let's call a spade, a spade, and stop trying to sanitise this crap behaviour with care-less political correctness!

Come on! Give a damn, stand up, if not for you, then for your friends! NO Brainer Team

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Scotty's' Story!(name changed to protect the innocent)

I've been a youth and childcare worker in a multitude of settings for well over 25 years. In that time I have been involved in some wonderful, but sadly, mostly tragic scenarios. The following is one such story…

I recall just one of many stories in my journeys. I was working for the Dept of Community Welfare Services. I was employed as a youth and childcare worker on a casual basis whilst concurrently working as a Youth Pastor in a local church. The Department had asked me repeatedly over a 12 month period to work with them in a short-term accommodation units.

I had a regular gig in one such accommodation unit. Typically the clients housed in this unit came from unsafe or crisis situations and the house was meant to be a temporary respite before finding them more suitable arrangements. However, more often than not the house was their home for much of the time.

All our clients had varying degrees of behavioural issues/problems and anger, violence and substance abuse was a regular part of the activities of the kids on the house. With few exceptions, pretty much every young person in the house had a tale of woe… Scotty was one such kid.

Unlike many of the young males in the unit Scotty was a pretty amicable kid – you know everyone liked him, he was fun cheeky and good mannered for the most part. All the staff and most of the other kids really liked him too. He was a 'cool' looking kid with the wildest 'dreadies' I'd ever seen and a cheeky smile and disposition to match his look. For the most part Scotty was a well behaved kid and I often wondered what such a decent guy was doing in a place with mostly bad-attitude and angry young men an women? Well one Wednesday night I found out.

Scotty had been out during the day, as most clients were expected to be, looking for work or going to school—Scott did neither. This particular evening he came home and he was no-where near his buoyant, chirpy self, in fact he was not only surly, but 'dopey', disoriented and running at the nose. I knew he had been 'chroming' and tried to help him get something to eat and get him to bed… he was pretty wasted. I had even found empty hair spray and fly spray cans in the yard! The next day (he was feeling pretty crap) I asked what was going on and why he was chroming? He shrugged off my question with his usually cheeky deflection and said that there wasn't much wrong, he was just messin' about! I knew there was more to this than he was saying and time revealed just that.

One day I came on shift and expected to see the happy smiling Scott that we all knew, but this day it was not to be. He was angry, very angry. I tried to talk to him, but he was throwing things around and just stormed off. A couple of hours later he came back, and yep, you guessed it, he was trashed. He wasn't angry anymore, just staggering, lethargic and incoherent.

I soon found out some of the tragic history of this great kid.

Scotty came from a dysfunctional broken home, but worse, when he was only a little boy, he had been sexually abused by a family member. Even with some counseling that 'PAIN' never left him. Scott didn't want to take drugs, but how could he stop the horrible feelings of betrayal, abandonment, fear, depression and anger? Inhalants are easy to get and relatively inexpensive and they stopped the horrible 'emotional noises' in his head and heart, even if only for a very short while.

After some on-going work we managed to get Scott, almost completely free of using inhalants and that was a real win for Scott.

But then we heard the devastating news.

He had left our care some time back and was living independently and was beginning to get this life together with both school and work. He was doing OK. However, one weekend he was convinced by a couple of his 'wayward' mates to take a train trip, for no reason other than just get out of Melbourne and go north for some fun.

They stopped at a station in a small country town and were waiting for another train, when one of the gang said…'l'm bored let's get wasted!' They simply grabbed a aerosol can, and as Scotty had done most days earlier on he joined in.

This time Scott inhaled and died. Right there on the station platform, he fitted, and then died. The ambulance was called but could do nothing to save him.

What an incredible waste! What a shocking tragedy! After breaking the habit, and being clean for so long Scott fell victim to SUDDEN SNIFFING DEATH SYNDROME. It was never going to happen to him, after all he'd done it heaps of times before and besides, he'd been off it for ages.

I can still here the same echo I've heard from scores of kids ringing in my ears…It wont happen to me! It won't happen to me! It wont happen to me! I'm sure, it won't happen to me! By S.V.

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Published: 01 January 1980

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-25/calls-for-drug-rehabilitation-to-replace-criminal-punishment-qld/12588392

Anti-drug laws were always meant to be a vehicle to protect Community, family and our most important asset, children, from the harms caused by permission models that ‘grown ups’ believe they have the right to exercise around the use of psychotropic toxins.

These protective laws have not been used in any real punitive context for years.

It’s time we tasked these protective laws again in their most proactive framework – As the ‘Judicial Educator’.

The law used (not in a punitive context) but as with Problem Solving Courts, to facilitate not only exit from drug use, but entrance into productive, safe, health and community benefiting narratives, that are drug free.  You don’t have to change laws, but you can task that legislation to facilitate rehabilitation and recovery, as is being done more and more to great success.

The pro-drug lobbies completely fallacious meme of ‘war on drugs has failed’ only has traction for the uniformed. There has been now ‘war on drugs’ in this nation since 1985.  However, the ever growing ‘war FOR drugs’ continues to look to remove genuine tools that can bring best-practice drug use exiting outcomes, by mislabelling and propagandizing.

The Judicial educator is the perfect bookend for the other bookend of health and education. Together these will see, not further ‘permission’ for drug use and the ensuing uptake that always precipitates, but rather, as with Tobacco, a community with One Voice, Once Message and One Focus – the cessation of humanity, dignity, agency and family devastating drug use. That should be the agenda of all drug use reduction vehicles. The excising of any vehicle that can assist with that proactive and productive end, is not only non-sense, it is only adding to the harms that drug use does to our communities.

Once psychotropic toxins are an intrenched part of the behavioural mechanisms of an individual, whether it be short-term intoxication, or long-term dependency, the risk to health, safety and well-being of that individual and more concerningly, those around them requires more than a ‘doctor’ for change. Secure welfare engaged for rehabilitation continues to prove the safest and healthiest vehicle to assist that change.

We seem to care more for Tobacco users, than illicit drug users – Don’t the latter deserve the same passionate enabling to exit drug use, with no voice of permission or approval in the marketplace?

Rather there must be a thorough enabling, equipping and empowering of drug users to exit drug use, even more importantly before the inevitable dependency takes hold.

Any permission model – decriminalisation, legalisation or depenalization – does not add to that capacity of drug users to move out of drug use. However, it has and will continue to do so, if the only proactively coercive vehicle – The Law – is removed, further normalizing drug use.

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Published: 01 January 1980

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The road to hell was paved with victimology

Michael Shellenberger, 14th August 2021,

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I worked with a group of friends and colleagues to advocate drug decriminalization, harm reduction, and criminal justice reform. I helped progressive Congressperson Maxine Waters organize civil rights leaders to advocate for needle exchange so that heroin users wouldn’t get HIV-AIDS. I fought for the treatment of drug addiction as a public health problem not a criminal justice one. And we demanded that housing be given to the homeless without regard for their own struggles with drugs.

Our intentions were good. We thought it was irrational to criminalize the distribution of clean needles to drug users when doing so had proven to save lives. We were upset about mass incarceration, particularly of African Americans and Latinos, for nonviolent drug offenses. And we believed that the approach European nations like the Netherlands and Portugal had taken to decriminalize drugs, and expand drug treatment, was the right one.

But it’s obvious now that we were wrong. Over the last 20 years the U.S. liberalized drug laws. During that time, deaths from illicit drugs rose from 17,000 to 93,000. Two and a half times more people die from illicit drug use than from car accidents; five times more die from drugs than homicide. Many of those people are homeless and die alone in the hotel rooms and apartment units given away as part of the harm reduction-based “Housing First” approach to homelessness. Others are children found dead by their parents on the floors of their rooms.

What about mass incarceration? It’s true that nearly half of the people in federal prisons are there for nonviolent drug offenses. But there are eight times more people in state prisons than federal prisons, and just 14 percent of people in state prisons are there for nonviolent drug offenses and just 4 percent for nonviolent possession. Half of state prisoners are there for murder, rape, robbery and other violent offenses.

While it’s true that both Netherlands and Portugal reduced criminal penalties, both nations still ban drug dealing, arrest drug users, and sentence dealers and users to prison or rehabilitation. “If somebody in Portugal started injecting heroin in public,” I asked the head of drug policy in that country, “what would happen to them?” He said, without hesitation, “They would be arrested.”

And being arrested is sometimes what addicts need. “I am a big fan of mandated stuff,” said Victoria Westbrook. “I don't recommend it as a way to get your life together, but getting indicted by the Feds worked for me. I wouldn't have done this without them.” Today Victoria is working for the San Francisco city government to integrate ex-convicts back into society.

But people in progressive cities are today shouted down for even suggesting a role for law enforcement. “Anytime a person says, ‘Maybe the police and the health care system could work together?’ or, ‘Maybe we could try some probation or low-level arrests,’ there’s an enormous outcry,” said Stanford addiction specialist Keith Humphreys. “‘No! That’s the war on drugs! The police have no role in this! Let’s open up some more services and people will come in and use them voluntarily!’”

Why is that? Why, in the midst of the worst drug death crisis in world history, and the examples of Portugal and Netherlands, are progressives still opposed to shutting down the street fentanyl markets in places like San Francisco that are killing people?

And the core motivation of the people I worked with was ideological. Many people, including many progressives, were libertarian, and fundamentally believed the government did not have a right to tell able-bodied adults what drugs they could and could not use. But many more, myself included, were upset by mass incarceration, and the ways in which incarceration destroys families, disproportionately African American and Latino ones.

Our views were too simplistic and wrong. Many things undermine families and communities, of all colors, well before anyone is incarcerated, including drugs and the crime and violence associated with them. And, violent communities attract the drug trade more than the drug trade makes communities violent, both scholars and journalists find. 

The problem is that, in the process of valuing care so much, progressives abandon other important values, argue Haidt and other researchers in a field called Moral Foundations Theory. While progressives (“liberal” and “very liberal” people) hold the values of Caring, Fairness, and Liberty, they tend to reject the values of Sanctity, Authority, and Loyalty as wrong. Because these values are so deeply held, often subconsciously, Moral Foundations Theory explains well why so many progressives and conservatives today view each other as not merely uninformed but immoral.

At the Sites the city isn’t providing drug treatment; it’s providing easy access to drugs. That includes cash in the form of welfare payments with which to purchase drugs, and the equipment with which to inject them. As such, progressives cities like San Francisco are directly financing the drug death crisis.

Is this Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is when a parent deliberately makes their child sick so they can feel important? In San Fransicko, I consider this possibility, and ultimately conclude that while the progressive approach to drug addiction and homelessness can be fairly described as pathological altruism, it would be unfair to call it sadistic. Many of the drug-addicted and mentally ill homeless are, in fact, sick, and most progressives have good intentions. 

But it is not unfair to point out that the city’s approach of playing the Rescuer is resulting in worsening addiction and rising drug deaths. Nor is it unfair to point out that we limit people’s potential for freedom by labeling them Victims and “centering” their trauma, rather than viewing victimization as an opportunity for heroism. Nor is it unfair to point out, as I have attempted to do by describing the history, that San Francisco’s political, business, and cultural leaders should all know better by now.

Progressives justify their discourse and agenda in the name of preventing dehumanization, but the effect has been the opposite. In defending the humanity of addicts, progressives ended up defending the inhumane conditions of street addiction….

For complete article

For further Reading

Social Determinants and Substance Use

OPEN LETTER on Decriminalization of Drugs 2020  

Also see

• Re-tasking the Judicial Educator to Rehabilitate Not Incarcerate
• He Lost Nearly Everything To Addiction. Then An Arrest Changed His Life
• ‘Tried & Tested’ Drug Court Moves to Dubbo
• Woman who fought meth addiction says Drug Treatment Court saved her life.
• Alternatives to Incarceration
• Drugs courts: Justice system that aims to rehabilitate
• AOD Primary Prevention Primer
• Drug Use & Stigma