We are veritably getting closer to an Anti-Drugs Free World. I read in the papers that parts of Southern America, Mexico and some other nook or cranny I forgot about entirely due to the abusive consumption of lucid substances (probably table-sugar), are legalising the use of Cannabis AND the possession of small quantities – and thus the use of – cocaine and heroin.
I also read that foreigners who come to the Netherlands to buy their Ganja, are no longer afraid of their governments. Without hesitation, they slap their ID’s on the counter of every coffee shop that wants to forge them a “members pass” on the basis of their personal credentials. This is, without a doubt, a huge progress in relation to the situation of only a few years ago. Drug tourists, who are flowing into our country in quantities, used to be very scared of the idea of getting ‘known’ by their dealers or by our police; but not any longer. It seems that the repression they anticipate as soon as they return home, has ceased to exist, or in any case, it no longer strikes its usual fear.
Way to go! Are we finally, but still very slowly, getting to understand that the “War on Drugs” is a lost one if not fought, or rather played out, within the setting of a private family? Are we losing our irrational fears for drugs while gaining true, practical insight as to how to keep their use in check?
What am I saying here? Indeed: if you want your kids to stay off the drugs, or if you want them to not even start playing with them, you must organise that within your own house, by educating yourself and your kids. Talk about it. Make it an issue that is open to discussion. Do not make it a taboo, or ignore it until it is too late. Only by taking it into the open familiar sphere, can you monitor more closely what your kids are up to. Just like the way any parent controls, or should control, the alcohol consumption of his child. A sane parent teaches his kids to not drink before they have reached at least the age of 18. And if one can extend that alcohol virginity into the regions of their 20-ties, it’s even better. Why? Because alcohol is at least as bad as those “other drugs” and we have been neglecting that danger for a long time.
A global prohibition of drugs or alcohol is no good for anything else but the cash-flow of criminals who are making loads of money on manufacturing, trafficing and dealing of drugs. If something is ‘illegalised’, a black market will spring up on the spot, to sell just that item. It looks as if governments all over the place are finally learning this very expensive lesson. They are abolishing one useless and money-devouring drug repression program after the other. And they are increasingly leaving the small, “Eigenbedarf” users alone. This change of focus is freeing up resources to go after the real criminals instead.
I see this liberalisation as a good sign; especially in conjunction with the Plummet From Grace which was so splendidly performed by the collective white-collar world during the global financial crisis of last year. “Them” – the big bankers, corrupt government officials, financial brokers and other riff-raff – are actually the ones who are running the world aground with their endless greed; certainly not the Small-time Pot Smoker. Besides, it is a public secret that cocaine use is highly proliferated in ‘High’-faluting circles. This includes parliaments, governments, the European Commission, company boardrooms and their adjacent cloakrooms, to name just a few notorious pools of filth. So who are they to tell the small man what to do?
I rest my case. Get lost and have a smoke, I’d say; and leave us to do our thing.
