drugs - the big lie - eFestivals

eFestivals comment

Each year, government ministers send letters to all those involved in festivals, informing them of the dangers of ‘legal highs’ and that they should not be tolerated at music festivals. In essence, “legal highs” have long been banned at festivals, meaning that festivals are being legally penalised more-so than Joe Public who is able to buy on the high street.

(A more intelligent govt might join the dots up better with regard to what makes something legal or illegal, but expecting intelligence from govt is like expecting Glastonbury tickets for all).

That legal penalisation of festivals goes much further. No city centre would be cordoned off on a Saturday night with all entrants into that area searched for drugs, and yet this happens at some festivals – and the festivals are forced to pay for their customers to be harassed way beyond what happens in the wider world.

A number of festivals, both large and small, yesterday made a “statement” against “legal highs” by blacking out their websites. And yet each of these festivals allows the biggest killing legal high of all onto their festival sites, and each one of them profits from the sale of that legal high.

In case that’s passed you by, the biggest legal high goes by the name of alcohol. In 2012 there were 8,367 directly-caused alcohol-related deaths in the UK (source: ONS), with tens of thousands of other deaths having alcohol play a major part. Alcohol continues to be freely available at every festival, while drugs that have never been deemed to have directly caused any death and never will sees people arrested.

The new ‘legal highs’ can of course be dangerous. There’s been a growing number of deaths caused by them in recent years, including some at festivals. It would be far better if these unnecessary deaths didn’t happen.

What causes them to happen is that, as new drugs, the risks are not known or not widely known just because they’re new substances. There can also be quality issues, simply because suppliers of these substances are forced to operate in the criminal sphere.

The reason people take these new substances is because of government action against the more traditional illicit highs, making them one or all of poor quality, expensive, not-easily available, and possibly detrimental to future life via a conviction for possession.

Meanwhile, the reasons for the specific legal classification of any drug and the legal consequences for possessing drugs are not based in science, logic or rational research but instead in ignorance and prejudice.

Since the dawn of time mankind has been taking and enjoying intoxicants of all kinds. Today the major part of the western world’s social life is carried out around the use of alcohol. Recognition of the facts of human lives will save many more lives than the proven failure of prohibition.

We need more than the sticking plaster of a mostly-pointless publicity campaign, that’s probably more about trying to have the policing costs of festivals reduced than it is anything else.

It’s time for a new attitude towards drugs, based in science and sense. Anything else is condemning someone’s child to unnecessarily die thru govt decreed ignorance, and the next one might be your own.