We are urging Suella Braverman and Chris Philp to listen to the Psilocybin Access Rights campaign, part of a wider discussion about a fundamental human right to access medicine.
Basic services – the NHS, policing, schools, road maintenance, refuse collection, you name it – have gone to rack and ruin. Life expectancy has fallen sharply. We still have, to our shame, by far the worst drug death levels in Europe.
An evidence-based overhaul of the classification system would be a worthwhile proposal, but this proposed crackdown would make a joke of it.
Scarce resources need to be targeted at the real evils of the trade, not squandered in performative crackdowns.
In memory of the author of “Republican Party Reptile”, who showed why our economic system won the Cold War.
The absurd spectacle looms of police freeing up resources only to waste them trying to crack down on very similar substances.
What are people trying to “escape” from? And is the Government able to fully tackle these things?
But prisons policy won’t gain more priority from politicians without doing so from the rest of us.
Simply letting the police issue warnings for possession of Class A drugs is an inadequate substitute for proper reform.
Having been so focused on Covid health outcomes, we have lost sight of our nation’s terrible rate of drug-related deaths.
Whilst the First Minister flirts with illegal ‘shooting galleries’, the Government can step in to support the rehab beds Scotland really needs.
It now needs to get real. This is clearly the plan in the next few months, starting with the Queen’s Speech tomorrow, leading to the Levelling Up paper.
It’s welcome that we’re investing much more in services. But we need to tackle the causes too.
We should double down on Product Development Partnerships, which are alive and well in the field of public health.
Criminalising an activity more than a million people each year engage in will create huge new taxpayer-funded costs for our already overstretched police, courts and prisons system.