God bless,
Kendall K. Down

   one day or a brief period of happiness does not
   make a man supremely blessed and happy.

Something for the recreational drug user to keep in mind, perhaps.

You appear to be responding to something I never said, and not
to what I actually said.

(I have no idea whether the way things have been done in Portugal
has, or could be expected to have, this sort of consequence;
I do know that they have decriminalized possession rather than
legalizing the drugs altogether, which suggests maybe not.)

But: if the amount of usage in Portugal has remained unchanged,
then I see no reason to think that there is more drug dealing,
so all you're saying here is that what they did in Portugal hasn't
fixed every drug-related problem there. Which of course it hasn't,
but no one ever claimed that it has or should be expected to.

What they've done is to make a change in how the end users are
treated, which happens to have improved some things and left others
basically unchanged.

There are probably other steps they could and should take to reduce
the harms associated with drug dealing. If you think that the first
such step is recriminalizing possession, then perhaps you should
explain why decriminalizing it doesn't seem to have led to an
increase in drug use, drug dealing, drug-related crime or drug-related
deaths.

snip

If end users were the priority then what we would see is more dealers being
prosecuted and more users being treated.

What we are seeing is less dealers being prosecuted.

One must always be wary of statistical proofs I know but I that is a
significant contradiction in the data.

As the prices increase there will more money made by street dealers and thus
more money to be laundered and used for the commission of other crimes.

The manufacture of illicit drugs could be carried out by legitimate
pharmaceutical companies ( as is the case for many drugs now). The farms and
facilities used would then provide the raw product (where it is needed) for
supplying the labs which would supply the outlets.

This would allow for clean needles to be supplied with all injected
products, the standard/quality of the drug would be clear to all and the
cost could be made stable.

If, for instance, a farm were established to grow Marijuana instead of Maize
where is the difficulty?

When we bring all our soldiers back home they could then be used to provide
security for the farms, labs and transport.

My friend Syd died in a Car crash, he crashed because he was stoned. The
death was not put down as drug related.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_Street_Station_rail_crash

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_Street_Station_rail_crash

I wonder if the Nutt counted that in the stats?

Surely it makes sense to treat properly those that get caught and
crack down on the dealers responsible.

I reckon we could empty half the prisons over a reasonable period of
time.  Far too may go to prison for 6 months or less and then go
straight back into crime.

I am an advocate of a return to shorter sentences for most crimes but for
the sentence for many of them to include hard labour and skills training.

It shouldn't take more that a year to train a person to a good level of
competence in a trade so that when released they have a marketable skill.

I'm also a fan of tagging offenders for a period equal to their sentence
upon release. I think such measure would reduce re offending.

In addition I support the idea that the sentence should reflect the
persistency of the offences. So a person convicted after imprisonment and
retraining etc should recieve a longer second sentence etc etc

As well as all that I think we need to build new and more sensible prisons
that isolate and thus protect the inmates. Each prisoner should have a cell
and facilities to wash and toilet without having to interact with other
inmates. There is far too much bullying and abuse in prisons and this needs
to be punished severely. I would install cctv and mics throught the whole
building so that there were no blind spots, no silent spots and no problems
of conflciting stories being the cause of no action.

On top of all this there needs to be a new number of mental health treatment
centres created so that those in prison with mental illness, and sadly there
are a large number of those, and also those on the streets with mental
illness issues can be properly helped to recover, cope and live a more
contented life.

I think that locking up more people, for a longer time for more and more
offences is not the way to go.

One last thing, all hate crime legislation should be scrapped. It is bigoted
nonsense to suggest that it is worse if a person kills another because they
are black than because they are a Goth or elderly or young or anything else.

These short sentences should be replaced by drug treatment centres
that are properly managed and the user given every support possible.

If that doesn't work and they reoffend, possibly on the 3rd offence,
then a 1 year prison sentence.

I may be wrong but my view is that the prison population would drop
considerably.

I really do not see the point in locking someone up for 3 months when
they actually come out in 4-5 weeks

Joe kills Fred because Joe wants to steal Fred's money.
Result: Fred dies.

Al kills Dave because Dave is homosexual and Al wants to rid
the world of homosexuals.
Result 1: Dave dies.
Result 2: Every homosexual person in the area is now living
          in fear of a similar attack.

The presence of result 2 seems to me to be highly relevant
in assessing the badness of the two crimes. Especially if
part of why Al killed Dave is that he *wanted* every gay person
for miles around to be terrorized, which is often the case
for this kind of crime.

(This suggests that some crimes that aren't "hate crimes" according
to current rules might properly be treated that way: for instance,
if one person kills another because s/he is a Goth or elderly or
young, that may very well also have, and may very well also be
meant to have, an effect like result 2 above. All these are quite
different from the case where Joe kills Fred for reasons that
have nothing to do with Fred's being a member of any group.)

  | (This suggests that some crimes that aren't "hate crimes" according
  | to current rules might properly be treated that way: for instance,
  | if one person kills another because s/he is a Goth or elderly or
  | young, that may very well also have, and may very well also be
  | meant to have, an effect like result 2 above. All these are quite
  | different from the case where Joe kills Fred for reasons that
  | have nothing to do with Fred's being a member of any group.)

Let me spell it out:

  - I think there is a useful distinction between crimes that
    affect only the victim, and crimes that (in fact or intention
    or both) are committed against the victim *as representative
    of some group* and thereby spread fear among other members
    of that group.

  - I think this is what "hate crime" legislation is aimed at.

  - I don't think the specific groups targeted by that legislation
    are the only ones that can be affected in this way.

  - It's possible that the laws defining hate crimes should be
    extended to cover more cases of this kind.

I'll add that it's also possible that there are adequate practical
reasons *not* to extend hate crime laws in that way. Clearly the law
can't enumerate every possible group that anyone might be attacked
for belonging to, so the choices are (1) give up on the whole notion,
(2) draw the line somewhere and make special cases of the groups most
egregiously affected, or (3) write the laws so that they apply to
every instance where someone is attacked for belonging to some group.
Perhaps #3 can't be done without making the law too broad in practice
(e.g., "Your Honour, I shall show that the accused attacked the victim
on account of the victim's membership in a group, namely the group of
people with a lot of valuables that could be sold on the black market.
After this foul hate crime, no one with valuables around the house
will feel safe.") As for #2, presumably the line gets drawn according
to how commonly a given group is targeted, how many people are likely
to be terrorized when that happens, etc., and I don't think it's clear
that the line is currently drawn in the wrong place.

  | 18-year-old Shaun Murphy, who reportedly bragged about attacking a
  | "fag".
..
  | Investigators found homophobic graffiti spray painted on the back of
  | the house.

And there are other cases in which the nature of the attack makes
it hard to believe that the attacker didn't have some such goal:

  | On September 22, 2000, Ronald Gay entered a gay bar in Roanoke,
  | Virginia and opened fire on the patrons
..
  | On February 2, 2006, 18-year-old Jacob D. Robida entered a bar in
  | New Bedford, Massachusetts, confirmed that it was a gay bar, and
  | then attacked patrons with a hatchet and a handgun

(And there are also several incidents described there which don't
look to me as if spreading fear was part of the attacker's purpose --
though it was likely part of the effect anyway.)