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Child Item

Psychoactive bill will become (psycho) active from monday

Hammered hippie

As of 0:00 monday the 23rd of august the psycho active substances bill will become active as decided by our minister for prosecution, D. Ahern.
This bill is so vague that even the gardai don't know how to interpret it, so its effectiveness and implementation will be up to the mood and discretion of the guard that is imposing it.
It is actually not really a law but more a propaganda statement from the government that whatever bothers them in the field of the trade in mind altering substances can instantly be made illegal and branded dangerous. It is the head shop hysteria fuelled by tabloids cast into a 'law' by a spineless coward of a government that prefers to appear tough and further their own carreer than to act in the interest of the people whom they represent.
Since the ban of most legal highs in may A&E deparments have been flooded by people being fed deadly concoctions by the old reliable dealer in the street (http://www.independent.ie/national-news/docs-warn-headshop-ban-has-little-effect-2297957.html) and gang wars have now started to take the lives of innocent people (http://www.herald.ie/opinion/andrew-lynch-ahernrsquos-bluster-has-done-nothing-to-deter-gangs-2273908.html). All of this doesn't bother the government one bit, as long as they can be seen to appease a small group of people they deem more worthy of their democratic rights than the majority that enjoy legal highs.
As this piece of personal propaganda for D. Ahern is supposedly designed to protect the public from 'bad' psychoactive substances we can conclude that the government is telling us that tobacco and alcohol are safe, as they are exempt from the psycho active substances bill. So go out, get drunk, smoke your lungs into tarpits and then come back to sue the government...because they said in a way it was safe to do so...didn't they?

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beagle001

penguin88 wrote: »

Must have missed those studies. Could you point me in the right direction if you have any evidence for this?

Alcohol related diseases are the cause of far more deaths in Ireland yearly and the dog on the street knows this,no need to back it up with a report.
Many of the substances being banned are less harmful than alcohol,for f-cks sake the banning of weed in general is farsical and a medieval attitude exists in this country to it.
Only people who benefit from the head shops going under are illegal drug peddlers and publicans(fianna fail cronies).

Kurtosis

seensensee wrote: »

The theory says that by closing head shops and ensuring all recreational drugs are illegal ensures that only illegal drug suppliers will service the nations recreational drug demand, the dealers have just became more popular and rewarded as a result of government legislation.
The dealers now have a greater influence in communities and they also have heroin for sale. If some one has money to spend on drugs now the only source is to go to the dealer.

If that was the point you were trying to make then why were you linking to those newspaper articles? With these links, you seemed to infer that while headshops were open, younger children were exposed to heroin and numbers of heroin users increased...so by the same wacky logic, we should now see fewer young children using and fewer people overall?

The stories you are linking to have nothing to do with these (former) legal highs.

Kurtosis

beagle001 wrote: »

Alcohol related diseases are the cause of far more deaths in Ireland yearly and the dog on the street knows this,no need to back it up with a report.
Many of the substances being banned are less harmful than alcohol,for f-cks sake the banning of weed in general is farsical and a medieval attitude exists in this country to it.
Only people who benefit from the head shops going under are illegal drug peddlers and publicans(fianna fail cronies).

These headshop products contained an unknown number of unspecified substances in unknown amounts. Any labelling they did have was largely unreliable and there was no apparent quality control. Then factor in that the substances in these products were also full of unknowns, no proper toxicological data or information about potency was known.

How anyone can say these are safer than alcohol is beyond me. They might well be a whole lot safer than alcohol, they might be exactly as safe as alcohol, or they may be more dangerous - however it remains an unknown.

landsleaving

Nearly an hour... I'm gettin' the shakes already...

beagle001

Wake up penguin
How many people died from alcohol directly or indirectly last year and compare that to recorded deaths from head shops and their substances.
While it is true regulation was needed for the headshops not a knee jerk reaction and banning something that we did not understand or try to understand.
Typical of the clowns running claiming to run this country,protect the drinks industry and ban the new threat outright.
Alcohol is a lethal drug a lot worse than 90% of the products that were sold in these shops

jimmycrackcorm

So the bill prevents people easily getting drugs from a shop. Instead if they want to try them they have to find a drug dealer.

Are those guys in the golden pages then?

Kurtosis

beagle001 wrote: »

Wake up penguin
How many people died from alcohol directly or indirectly last year and compare that to recorded deaths from head shops and their substances.
While it is true regulation was needed for the headshops not a knee jerk reaction and banning something that we did not understand or try to understand.
Typical of the clowns running claiming to run this country,protect the drinks industry and ban the new threat outright.
Alcohol is a lethal drug a lot worse than 90% of the products that were sold in these shops

I'm wide awake thanks. There's more to the harm a substance can do than the number of deaths it causes. I won't get into the vast difference in numbers of users involved.

I was actually hoping a system of regulation would have been introduced, where these products and substances were studied properly and then issued a licence, while the premises which sold them also be subjected to a licensing procedure. The thing is had this been done there would not have been an overnight switch, it would have taken months or years to complete the required work and the money to do so was not going to grow on trees. Even if such a system had been implemented and the issue of financing resolved, we would effectively be in the same situation as now, with the headshops not selling these products (albeit on a temporary basis).

seensensee

penguin88 wrote: »

If that was the point you were trying to make then why were you linking to those newspaper articles? With these links, you seemed to infer that while headshops were open, younger children were exposed to heroin and numbers of heroin users increased...so by the same wacky logic, we should now see fewer young children using and fewer people overall?

The stories you are linking to have nothing to do with these (former) legal highs.

There is no wacky logic to it, people should be free to source their drugs of choice in a legitimate regulated manner (head shops, coffee shops) places where there are no illegitimate suppliers.

What has transpired is that joe's warriors and government policy have given the nation no choice but to visit and pay the illegal dealer for their drugs.

the_syco

penguin88 wrote: »

I was actually hoping a system of regulation would have been introduced, where these products and substances were studied properly and then issued a licence

If this had happened, the shops would still be open. As opposed to the invention of new drugs every so often, with (it would seem, most of) the old drugs getting banned after a year when the long-term effects begin to pop up.

poisonated

In a way, I'm glad. Been there done that. I don't want to go down a bad road. That being said, I am a strong believer of personal choice. I believe that they were lazy and should have tried to legislate it before they did this.

lila44

seensensee wrote: »

Banning psychoactive's outright probably has been a big mistake. The government should have worked with the headshops and come to some arrangement in regulating supply and quality.

I can see where alarmed parents would want to restrict access of research chemicals to their children, it's no longer a case of white doves but more the Ivory wave...

"The coughing got worse with every bump. The two of us made more horrible gagging / coughing sounds than a Russian whooping cough ward from the 1940s. I also should mention here that by now I had started to feel completely insane. People who are too scared to do acid always think that acid will make you feel completely insane but that’s not necessarily true. Acid generally gives you an hilarious world of weird and funny stuff that borders on feeling insane sometimes but it is nothing compared to the really unpleasant insanity that good old Ivory Wave provides its punters."
http://nellnews.com/another-terrible-legal-high-reviewed-by-somebody-who-feels-not-very-well-today-viceland-com.html

The critique is written by an experienced drug user and well worth reading in full. If headshops were selling the above substance then it's no surprise that "something?" had to be done.

A quote from that article: " It’s like crystal meth without any of the good bits."

Having done Ivory Wave many times when it was legal, I found it was all about pacing yourself (as in, not snorting an entire bag in one night - only idiots do this). Granted, it made me hyper, extremely talkative, and slightly paranoid, but I mean, doesn't coke do all the very same things? (that's actually a question, i've never tried coke!)

I always had a great laugh while on the stuff, really brilliant nights and brilliant chats!

thinking back the following morning you sometimes feel like a bit of a dick, but sure the same comes from a night on the booze. The comedown for was just like a hangover with an edge, probably cos I didn't snort 3grams in one night! :P

on a side note...I can see this turning into the usual debate about head shops...which has been done people. To death.

Overheal

wheres the Duffy Rage about alcohol?

Jev/N

Overheal wrote: »

wheres the Duffy Rage about alcohol?

After the LC/JC results nights

Einhard

IvySlayer wrote: »

If only Joe Duffy and co can look past their blind ignorance.

It must be wonderful living in a world where all those who have the temerity to hold a contrary opinion to your own are are hysterical, blindly ignorant Joe Duffy listeners.

Einhard

beagle001 wrote: »

Wake up penguin
How many people died from alcohol directly or indirectly last year and compare that to recorded deaths from head shops and their substances.
While it is true regulation was needed for the headshops not a knee jerk reaction and banning something that we did not understand or try to understand.
Typical of the clowns running claiming to run this country,protect the drinks industry and ban the new threat outright.
Alcohol is a lethal drug a lot worse than 90% of the products that were sold in these shops

Oh FFS, I'm sick and tired of this nonsense cranked out about the hypocrisy of banning headshops but not pubs. The simple reason alcohol hasn't been banned is because it would require a massive upheaval in social attitude to do so. It would require a government to tell the 95% of adults who drink that they can no longer do so anymore. It's the same with cigarettes which most governments would love to ban but can't, because so many of their citizens use them. Headshops though, and drugs in general, are different because a comparatively tiny proportion of the population are regular users.

Also, the reason the negative health stats for alcohol are so much more higher than other substances is because so many more people consume alcohol than those other substances. You can't compare the two in that way because there's such a massive disparity in consumption.

Furthermore, the average person consuming alcohol at a reasonable rate over the entirety of his adult life, will not experience a significant impact on his health , whereas just one evening using drugs can lead to massive internal damage. And that's without any external factors being applied.

And last but not least, the fact that headshops were on the main street made the drugs they stocked far more accessible to people who would not otherwise have used them. That's where most of the concern lay. And it's an eminently reasonable concern, and one that deserves to be properly debated, and not patronisingly dismissed as the rantings of a Joe Duffyesque rump.

Kurtosis

the_syco wrote: »

If this had happened, the shops would still be open. As opposed to the invention of new drugs every so often, with (it would seem, most of) the old drugs getting banned after a year when the long-term effects begin to pop up.

Yeah it would have stopped the cycle of new alternatives emerging every few years. I was saying the shops would still be closed now (or at least not selling any legal highs) was to allow testing, research and licensing of products to take place. If legislation had been passed requiring such products to be licensed before being sold, then it's likely they would not be allowed on the market while the licensing procedure was ongoing.

I still think that this down period would have been difficult for the headshop operators to accept, and in addition the capital required to carry out testing/trials with these products and to obtain a licence - if it was anything like medicines licensing, serious amounts of cash would be required and it's unclear who would have footed such a bill.

Our man in Havana

The manufacturer of the product would have to pay the costs of licensing. Same as for medicines.

Hammered hippie

Just so people know where our dear minister for justice gets his information on which he bases his policies:

Go to the TRIS site of they european union (http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/tris/index_en.htm)

Check the last two months submissions from Ireland. (click the search the database link)
Look at the one that was rushed through with the name 'psychoactive substances'
Then for fun check the references...have a good look at the sources this minister for justice actually uses for his legislation.
No..its not research or proper rapports (apart for some very old ones that just stress the need for monitoring)....dermot ahern used....news paper headlines...mostly from the examiner.
Now people..be honest...that does sound like a joke doesn't it.
Our minister for justice passes hefty legislation curbing our civil rights...and his sources are the headlines from the examiner.
The man actually believes the headlines and heads above opinion pieces in the newspapers and uses them as a basis for his policies. O MY GOD !:eek::eek:

So if joe duffy gets hysteria going and it makes it into the headlines...then our ministers create legislation based on it.
This means that in essence joe duffy, or any other populist sensationalist, is the policy maker of Ireland, as the government does not conduct its own research or uses its own intelligence. The government just copy paste the head lines from the newspapers. Very very disturbing all together.

Kurtosis

Haddockman wrote: »

The manufacturer of the product would have to pay the costs of licensing. Same as for medicines.

I suppose the question is would they be willing to pay for it. Could they justify a significant amount of expenditure to gain entry to the small market that exists here in comparison to the global demand? Also take into account that being a new regulatory system, it is possible that subsequent governments could alter the controls on the industry and make it less viable at any time. Even now, some medicines manufacturers choose not to license their products in this country due to the costs involved, and this would be with the clinical trials, research and other ground work already completed.

It's all hypothetical though and we'll probably never see such an eventuality arising.

The_Minister

Hammered hippie wrote: »

All of this doesn't bother the government one bit, as long as they can be seen to appease a small group of people they deem more worthy of their democratic rights than the majority that enjoy legal highs.

The majority do not enjoy legal highs.
Far more people want to ban these drugs than keep them legal.
This 'small group of people' are the majority, you are the baked minority.

Hammered hippie wrote: »

As this piece of personal propaganda for D. Ahern is supposedly designed to protect the public from 'bad' psychoactive substances we can conclude that the government is telling us that tobacco and alcohol are safe, as they are exempt from the psycho active substances bill. So go out, get drunk, smoke your lungs into tarpits and then come back to sue the government...because they said in a way it was safe to do so...didn't they?

Funny all those government warning labels on cigarettes, and safe drinking campaigns, they would seem to indicate that the government knows that alcohol and tobacco are dangerous.

Hammered hippie wrote: »

I could write down what happens when you down a bottle of whiskey in less than two hours time. It is very very unpleasant, if you survive to tell the tale.
Yet no one thinks that would be reason to close bars and off licences. People will just think it is silly to drink that much that fast.

It think you will find the point is that it is far easier to overdose on these drugs; it's a absolute chore to drink an entire bottle of whiskey; popping a few extra pills is much easier to do, especially by accident.

Hammered hippie wrote: »

It is the same with certain head shop stuff...with the big big enormous exception that when complaints arise..head shops self regulate and stop selling certain bits and pieces.
When will off lincenses stop selling hard liquor due to its negative side effects when over dosing.....that's right...never!

Actually, have you ever noticed that our off-licenses don't sell 60%+ alcohol generally.
Alcohol is not a free for all in this country.

Hammered hippie wrote: »

As for that utter fool d ahern. I have seen drug dealers dancing for joy outside my local head shop when they heard the news of this new law.
That's right folks....d ahern makes drug dealers dance for joy. The man himself made things 1000% better for drug dealers over the last 12 months. Minister? ...my arse!...for justice?...**** off d ahern!

I pity you.
You've obviously taken so many illegal highs that you now believe that Dublin is now in the West Side Story universe.
Doubtless the Westies will now fight the other gangs to get revenge on them for their actions against a gorgeous Polish woman.

Look.
I support keeping head-shops legal, and regulating them.
I am a member of an organisation that supports the same.
I want to legalise weed. I want to legalise ectasy. I want to legalise mushrooms.
I want to legalise every drug currently out there, and either have them in designated shops with careful restrictions on them, or have them supplied by the government to the addicted, in combination with treatment programs and addiction counselling.
I want to stop the drug dealers here, and I want to end the sheer amount of suffering and well, evil, that occurs in so many countries to feed the West's undeniable appetite for these drugs. Even weed, often seen as the most benign legal drug, has a mountain of corpses and pain behind it by the time it gets here.

The thing is, it's very hard for organisations that want to be taken seriously to come out in favour of legalising when the most high-profile advocates of legalisation are condescending, arrogant users who give the impression of being willing to say anything to get a fix.
You aren't helping things, the only people you will get to agree with you are people who already agree with you.
The key to actually legalising drugs in this country in a sensible, intelligent and rational manner is not to have half-baked users making self-serving arguments while madly gesturing at alcohol and going 'look, look, people die from that, therefore let us maybe die from this'.
People have been conditioned for years to believe that drugs are evil, to convince them of legalisation you have to undo all that.

The key to getting drugs decriminalised is having an intelligent, articulate, trustworthy, and most importantly non-using person to go on the Late Late Show and acknowledge that there are dangers, those dangers can be reduced be legalisation of some drugs (some of your favorite brands may go in favour of safer alternatives), and careful regulation, tied into criminal liability for head-shop owners if they provide drugs without proper information on safe usage, or tainted drugs.

Instead we get a noxious concoction of wild exaggerations, spurious logic and pathetic whining.

Herbal Deity

Einhard wrote: »

Furthermore, the average person consuming alcohol at a reasonable rate over the entirety of his adult life, will not experience a significant impact on his health , whereas just one evening using drugs can lead to massive internal damage. And that's without any external factors being applied.

Source?

Herbal Deity

The_Minister wrote: »

The key to getting drugs decriminalised is having an intelligent, articulate, trustworthy, and most importantly non-using person to go on the Late Late Show and acknowledge that there are dangers, those dangers can be reduced be legalisation of some drugs (some of your favorite brands may go in favour of safer alternatives), and careful regulation, tied into criminal liability for head-shop owners if they provide drugs without proper information on safe usage, or tainted drugs.

I agree with a lot of what you've said, but why should an advocate be non-using?

Personally I think that those who use drugs and are also intelligent, articulate, trustworthy and have respectable jobs or are dedicated, high achieving students need to come forward. People's perception needs to change. It is possible to be using drugs in moderation while also being an upstanding, contributing member of society.

Unfortunately, most users who are vocal about legalisation/decriminalisation tend not to be in this category. It really irritates me too.

However, personally, I would not be willing to publicly announce that I use drugs and support their legalisation, as I would be incredibly worried about damaging my employment prospects, shocking/disappointing my family and identifying myself to the Gardaí.

I firmly believe that there are many in this situation also. There still exists a huge stigma against drug use.

kjl

Hugh amount of research has been done into marijuana and the results found that its is harmless. 1 in 10,000 people suffer from psychosis for smoking it, but discontinued use stops all psychotic symptoms. It has only been illegal for 1.5% of the time it has been used by mankind. Head shop substances are great and all, but the fact of the matter is there has been no medical research in the the production and effect of these drugs. Now lets be honest, a couple of bumps of anything, unless it was poison is not really going to do much to you, but still I feel proper research is needed.

The head shops did show the way for future distribution of recreational drugs. If we legalised weed, ecstasy, acid, mushrooms and methodrone (following more research), and then used the head shop model as a way distributing them, we would be fine. I know we have all been told so many scare stories about these drugs, but the truth is that these drugs are used all the time, but you only rarely hear of people getting into trouble with them. If one was to follow safety usage and have an untainted supply, then we would see the fatality rate go to <.1%. As many people have mentioned here, alcohol is more deadly than all of these products combined, yet the death rate is quite low because people do follow some guidelines.

The answer is not to just hand the business over to the drug dealers. People are going to buy products anyway, and you never get even close to clean, pure and safe drugs from dealers. The tax revinue would also help out a lot.

food for thought.

Einhard

Herbal Deity wrote: »

Source?

Life experience.

The experience of the hundreds of people I know who also drink.

Common sense.

Do you require a source when someone claims that the sky is blue?

Herbal Deity

kjl wrote: »

The head shops did show the way for future distribution of recreational drugs. If we legalised weed, ecstasy, acid, mushrooms and methodrone (following more research), and then used the head shop model as a way distributing them, we would be fine

The head shop model was awful. It was not "the future". The majority of those working in them were not qualified to give advice. They often did not know what the substances they were selling were, were not able to recommend dosages, were not able to warn of any possible dangers etc. There was no regulation as to what they could sell. They did not commonly impose restrictions on minors entering their premises or even buying products.

Pace2008

Einhard wrote: »

Also, the reason the negative health stats for alcohol are so much more higher than other substances is because so many more people consume alcohol than those other substances. You can't compare the two in that way because there's such a massive disparity in consumption.

The most likely reason reason negative health stats are higher, percentage-wise as well as overall, is because alcohol is more harmful than a lot of the currently illegal psychoactives.

If you've been on Boards for any length of time I'm sure you're painfully familiar with the Lancet and ACMD papers detailing the relative harm associated with a range of commonly used drugs. Now, unlike some people I realise these papers are not infallible and we can't simply use their findings as axioms in future debates - in the case of the Lancet paper, they researchers admitted that it was difficult to draw accurate comparisons between alcohol and illegal substances and that the conlusions drawn were possibly imperfect - but the fact that both papers judged alcohol to be significantly more harmful overall than cannabis and ecstasy can't simply be disregarded.

Furthermore, the average person consuming alcohol at a reasonable rate over the entirety of his adult life, will not experience a significant impact on his health , whereas just one evening using drugs can lead to massive internal damage. And that's without any external factors being applied.

Really? All drugs? Would you expect to see massive internal damage from one evening using cannabis, alkyl nitrates, salvia, or nitrous oxide? You cannot simply lump all mind-altering substances under the banner of "drugs," they are a massively diverse group of compounds with vastly different effects and potential health risks.

I don't believe there is such a thing as a "safe" drug; they all have the potential to be harmful in one way or another, but the assertion that the most popular psychoactive in the world happens the only one amongst thousands which can used in a "safe" manner is completely absurd. The only special quality I've seen alcohol exhibit is the ability to completely obliterate the judgement of normally sound-minded people.

It's possible to use heroin safely, but realistically it's one of the ****test drugs imagineable.

Look, I agree with your original point as to why alcohol can't be accurately compared to most other drugs. It's an intrinsic part of our society and I don't think we'll be shifting the social paradigm any time in the near future. In addition, I realise the ubiquity of alcohol in our society complicates the drug issue, because it is likely that people will be taking alcohol along with other substances, and alcohol, reacts with a huge amount of compounds in a dangerous and sometimes fatal manner.

But don't try to act the apologist for drink, whether or not you can use it safely, there's no denying it's **** for our country in a way most other drugs couldn't hope to compete with.

Herbal Deity

Einhard wrote: »

Life experience.

The experience of the hundreds of people I know who also drink.

Common sense.

Do you require a source when someone claims that the sky is blue?

Ah now, come on. You seem reasonably intelligent. You're honestly saying that that one time use of "drugs" is much more likely to have serious health implications than a lifetime of alcohol consumption? You're honestly happy to accept purely anecdotal evidence for this?

Let's start with your use of the word "drugs". By this do you mean absolutely every illegal drug? That doesn't make much sense. Weed is the obvious one that most certainly has zero potential to cause "massive internal damage" with a single use.

Now, I'm not going to go individually into each commonly used illegal drug and discuss its potential to do significant harm with one, well measured, moderate recreational dose, but I will make one request of you, and that is that if you are to make a statement like the one I quoted from your earlier post, that you do not use the catch-all term "drugs". It's a sloppy and misleading generalisation and it's bad form.

Where you may have a point is the fact that it is arguably easier to overdose on something which is more potent than alcohol and comes in powder or tablet form. There is also the fact that many people using drugs have no idea about dosages, come up times etc., they just keep taking the stuff until they feel something. I would argue that in a regulated system with information widely available, you'd have less people ODing and doing damage to themselves as they would be able to be certain of the exact quantity of a substance they were ingesting and would know the dangers of ingesting more than a certain quantity.

AAAAAAAHHH

poisonated wrote: »

In a way, I'm glad. Been there done that. I don't want to go down a bad road. That being said, I am a strong believer of personal choice. I believe that they were lazy and should have tried to legislate it before they did this.

You're clearly not a strong believer of personal choice if this gladdens you.

Hammered hippie

@ so called moderator
300.000 people used to visit head shops in ireland on a daily basis.
That's more people than there are on the world that can actually stand joe duffy or that wan't head shops gone.

The story of these people have never ever been highlighted by any media outlet, just the sobbing what about our children story, which is utter bull**** and a lie as nearly all headshops had an self imposed over 18's policiy. I am not even going to start about the democratic rights of these 300.000 customers.

There has been so much lies and mis information about head shops that it is going to be impossible to start countering it.

Lets put it like this...most people came to head shops because they liked getting a mild smoke that made them relaxed and didnot want to get drunk or have to go to a dealer to get that smoke.
The government pushed those people back into criminality
Well done for the government...turning 300.000+ people into criminals overnight.

Hammered hippie

@minister

I like to call upon other moderators to moderate you.
He is personally attacking me and accusing me of all sorts, just because of my user name.:mad: