teenage son crashed into electricity pole

jeannieblue

vikingaero wrote: »

I thought you were already 739? :eek::D

Got a year and two and a half months and four days yet

RichyRich

MrsE wrote: »

Drugs wreak lives, FACT.

Drug abuse is dealt with in the mental health section under the social & health services, so that should give you a clue as to how the experts think it impacts of peoples mental health.

Drugs don't wreck lives. The attitude towards them, and the fact most of them are illegal, wreck lives.

If heroin weren't illegal, it wouldn't wreck lives, because it would be freely available and not prohibitively expensive, meaning people wouldn't need to turn to crime to finance their addiction.

The "experts" who place drug abuse under the Mental Health budget of the NHS are puppets of policy, who will cost various functions of the NHS to whichever budget or section the Minister for Health dictates.

I don't take illegal drugs, because my employer has an intrusive drug testing policy which I could be dismissed for failure to comply. However I do indulge in caffeine and alcohol responsibly. Note my employer doesn't test for useage of either of these two drugs. Does the fact that they are legal mean they are safer? No. But how many people do you see in your local "Mental Health" Hospital hooked on caffeine?

michaels

I suspect you will have to pay the excess on the insurance. Luckily you reported the accident at the time otherwise the subsequent insurance would be invalidated or you might be liable for the underpayment in premium

Did your son take a drink/drugs test at the time of the first accident?

Please do not support your son (with a car or insurance or whatever) to get back on the road until you are 100% sure he is no longer gong to cause another accident that might kill a child next time

tomstickland

MrsE wrote: »

Both abuses wreck lives, but the thread was talking about drug driving & the post I was responding to was about drug taking.

Abuse of the word "FACT" wrecks threads.
FACT!

jeannieblue

RichyRich wrote: »

Drugs don't wreck lives. The attitude towards them, and the fact most of them are illegal, wreck lives.

If heroin weren't illegal, it wouldn't wreck lives, because it would be freely available and not prohibitively expensive, meaning people wouldn't need to turn to crime to finance their addiction.

The "experts" who place drug abuse under the Mental Health budget of the NHS are puppets of policy, who will cost various functions of the NHS to whichever budget or section the Minister for Health dictates.

I don't take illegal drugs, because my employer has an intrusive drug testing policy which I could be dismissed for failure to comply. However I do indulge in caffeine and alcohol responsibly. Note my employer doesn't test for useage of either of these two drugs. Does the fact that they are legal mean they are safer? No. But how many people do you see in your local "Mental Health" Hospital hooked on caffeine?

Be grateful, very grateful to your employer - or you could be paranoid or a schizophrenic by now. And that would be just from the so called harmless little weedy stuff.

Stop talking out of your ar5e. Making hard drugs legal would stop crime? Yeah right. What Planet are you from?

MrsE_2

RichyRich wrote: »

Drugs don't wreck lives. The attitude towards them, and the fact most of them are illegal, wreck lives.

If heroin weren't illegal, it wouldn't wreck lives, because it would be freely available and not prohibitively expensive, meaning people wouldn't need to turn to crime to finance their addiction.

The "experts" who place drug abuse under the Mental Health budget of the NHS are puppets of policy, who will cost various functions of the NHS to whichever budget or section the Minister for Health dictates.

I don't take illegal drugs, because my employer has an intrusive drug testing policy which I could be dismissed for failure to comply. However I do indulge in caffeine and alcohol responsibly. Note my employer doesn't test for useage of either of these two drugs. Does the fact that they are legal mean they are safer? No. But how many people do you see in your local "Mental Health" Hospital hooked on caffeine?

I'm guessing you've never sat in an substance misuse best practice forum?

RichyRich

jeannieblue wrote: »

Be grateful, very grateful to your employer

For invading my civil liberties? Note that drug testing doesn't test for intoxication, but rather for evidence of use. None of my employer's business, until such time as it starts to affect my performance at wotk.

jeannieblue wrote: »

or you could be paranoid or a schizophrenic by now. And that would be just from the so called harmless little weedy stuff.

I could be a lot of things. Drugs may, or may not, be a contributory factor in what I am or am not. How do you know I'm not already paranoid? How do you know I'm not already a schizophrenic? And what makes illegal drugs any more likely to cause such a condution than legal ones?

jeannieblue wrote: »

Stop talking out of your ar5e.

Yes boss

jeannieblue wrote: »

Making hard drugs legal would stop crime? Yeah right. What Planet are you from?

That's not what I said. But it would undoubtedly reduce drug related crime.

Your comment implies hard drugs are illegal. Some are. But some, such as alcohol and tobacco, are legal but if they were introduced to the country now would be Class A Drugs. Why should they be legal and others not?

jeannieblue

Richyrich...

If you really believe all that you have said - then ......... well, I'm kinda gobsmacked. You come across as intelligent - the argument re alcohol and tobacco is not an issue in this. It is irrelevant to the points being made.

I'd argue with you - but you have your opinion - albeit wrong and I have to get up early in the morning for work.

Over to you MrsE or someone...

RichyRich

I like to think I am intelligent.

I choose to do my own research to give my beliefs a firm grounding, rather than believe what I am fed by the nanny government. Sometimes my research concurs with what the government tell us; other times it does not.

I do not wish to argue that there is no downside to drugs. That would be untrue. Saying that, a great deal of the problems associated with drugs stem mainly from their illegality and not the substances themselves.

Caffeine was an extreme example. The negative effects of the drug are minimal except for the odd headache and a bit of stomach upset. But I'll admit to being a crabbit git in a morning before my first cuppa. Am I addicted to caffeine? Probably. But it's so readily available and cheap that I can quite happily get my fix without having to resort to nefarious means.

But let's be more serious for a second. Tobacco is perfectly legal. Anyone over the age of 18 can legally buy and use it. It is has a myriad properties that make it undesirable. Yet millions of people around the world sustain a nicotine addiction - I used to be one myself (but stopped coming up to 2 years ago now). Remarkably few people turn to crime to maintain their nicotine addiction. Why? Because, despite the huge amount of taxation on the product, it's still relatively cheap - affordable, at least. It's also regulated. This has two main effects:-

(1) People can afford it
(2) It is rarely contaminated

These two points are where the majority of "problems" relating to drugs come from. I fully accept that having an addiction of any kind is unhealthy for the person concerned. However such an addiction has a relatively low social cost until (1) or (2) is breached. Breach (1) and maintaining the addiction becomes unaffordable, which is the main cause of drug-related crime (i.e. theft to purchase supplies). Breach (2) and the drug becomes dangerous: you don't know the strength or source of the drug, or any contaminants it may have.

So, whilst drug legalisation will not solve all the world's problems (I never suggested it would), it would at least bring some form of regulation to the market. It would drive dealers with few or no morals out of business due to an alternative legal source being available; it would generate tax revenue for the country, which could be used for healthcare provision for those subject to an unhealthy addiction; it would mean that drugs were less likely to be contaminated and thus reduce the burden on the NHS; and it would lower the cost of an addiction to a level whereby users would not need to turn to crime in order to sustain their habit. Combine this with a truthful and accurate education programme about the effects of narcotics and let people make up their own minds about what is and isn't acceptable to them personally.

Unfortunately, the mantra of drugs are bad is a far too simple attitude to take towards this complex subject.

RichyRich

MrsE wrote: »

I'm guessing you've never sat in an substance misuse best practice forum?

You guess correctly, and nor would I sit in on such a forum. Its name immediately tells me that such a forum would not be an open exchange of ideas that welcomes different views, but rather the meeting already has an agenda and a consensus that drugs are bad: the word misuse implies this.

On a purely semantic point, I have never understood why people refer to drug misuse and not drug use. A drug, by its very nature, is designed to be used in some way (drug being defined as a substance that has some kind of effect on the body), so by taking a drug you're doing what you're meant to do with it...only by doing something other than taking it would you be misusing it - otherwise you're using it as intended!