COM 0819.001 2008-2010 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

The Senlis Council, has come up with a sensible policy that will assist drug producing nations with their loss of income after drug prohibition has ended, while creating better conditions for millions of suffers of chronic pain. Step 3: There are many possibilities for how drugs may be distributed once they are make legal. They could be sold in package stores such as those selling alcohol in some states; stores with no advertising, where drugs are sold only to adults, and highly taxed. Hard drugs might be distributed via prescription by doctors. My personal favorite would be to set up clinics where maintenance doses of drugs could be distributed on a sliding monetary scale to any adult requesting them (including free to those users with no money). This is the most important point, the one that actually removes the profit motive from drug dealers. This sounds radical but it really isn't. We have been giving drugs to addicted people for over 25 years, in what is called the methadone maintenance programs. Methadone helps some heroin users stop using that drug. The trouble with the methadone maintenance programs is that methadone is about ten times more potent than heroin and about ten times more addictive than heroin. There is a reason we call it "methadone maintenance." For the most part, those who start it will be maintained on it forever. Those problems are avoided by treating heroin addiction with heroin. Canada's British Columbia Medical Health Officer Perry Kendall asserts, "Heroin, if it's used on a maintenance basis, in pharmacological doses without any risk of overdose or contamination, is actually a very safe drug." The North American Opiate Medication Initiative, known as NAOMI, recently started offering hundreds of heroin addicts "haunting the slums of Vancouver and Montreal the chance to join a research study that provides free heroin. ,46 Can giving free drugs to addicted people help end those addictions? The answer is YES! In Switzerland, Holland, Germany, and Denmark heroin users have been treated by giving them heroin. The country with the longest record (14 years) is Switzerland. In 1994 the Swiss decided they were tired of treating their children as criminals because they made the mistake of using heroin. They decided to treat heroin use as health problem. Switzerland set up 23 clinics around the country where users were allowed to come in and inject government heroin up to three times a day, with clean needles, under medical supervision. But there are also social workers there, educators and job specialists, trying to wean their clients off heroin. They saw the heroin users three times every day of the year and they quickly became trusted friends. We know how much power a friend has in modifying someone's behavior certainly a lot more than a judge has when ordering that person to rehabilitation. With the heroin - assisted programs, they also offer drug substitution programs, such as methadone and buprenorphine. The outcomes of those policies are nothing short of amazing. In Switzerland, thanks to the quality- controlled drug production, there hasn't been an overdose death related to this project since in 15 years. Because heroin users are now "fixing" with clean needles Switzerland and The Netherlands registers the lowest per capita rate of AIDS and Hepatitis of any country in Europe. Cocaine use among those heroin addicts has also plummeted from 35 to 5 percent. Crime was slashed by 60 percent. The heroin is provided on a sliding monetary scale but if a user has no money the drug is free. That means users don't have to prostitute themselves or steal goods to pay for their drugs. If these clinics were available to everyone there would be no heroin dealers on the streets because you can't beat free; who would buy from a street dealer? That means drug dealers would no longer be shooting each other to protect their turf, no longer killing cops charged with fighting this useless war, no longer killing children caught in crossfire or drive -by shootings. And even more 14