A new report warns that the commercial cultivation of cannabis poses a “significant risk” to Britain linked to burglary, violence and the use of guns.

The number of farms detected has more than doubled in recent years to reach almost 8,000, with many now set up in homes or flats rather than factories in order to spread the risk.

More people are also growing their own drugs as a result of the economic downturn, according to the Association of Chief Police Officers study.

The ACPO lead on cannabis cultivation, Met commander Allan Gibson, said: “Commercial cannabis cultivation continues to pose a significant risk to the UK. Increasing numbers of organised crime groups are diverting into this area of criminality but we are determined to continue to disrupt such networks and reduce the harm caused by drugs.

The risks are caused by the damn stuff being illegal.

There are vast areas of agricutural (and even forest) land in the UK where you could grow the stuff without problem. Plus plenty of factories oop north that could be used for hydroponics.

The only reason there is any danger at all is that Plod will be chasing you if you do so. Stop Plod chasing and the “risk” goes away.

The consensus among health professionals yesterday was that there is something about people who take sleeping pills that makes them likely to die earlier – but it’s almost certainly a complex combination of factors. If they need pills to sleep, that might indicate an underlying anxiety caused by physical ill health. Alternatively, the anxiety itself could be eroding the body’s defences, causing any number of symptoms that can shorten your lifespan in subtle ways. But that’s guesswork.

And we’ve even a method of testing it:

Other benzos act faster than diazepam and do induce greater drowsiness; they’re more likely to be used only at night. But in the course of my research I don’t think I came across one sleeping pill that wasn’t also being used recreationally.

“Valium and zopiclone are very popular at rock festivals,” says Alice, 23, who works in publishing. “People want to come down and chill out after taking uppers. It’s absolutely normal.” And where do the pills come from? “Oh, somebody’s GP. Or through the internet from Thailand.”

The rise of internet pharmacies has helped to popularise tranquillisers among young drug-takers from all social classes. On the streets of the north-east of England, Z-drug pills circulate in strengths that are unavailable in the UK – evidence that they have been ordered online.

Given the massive effect claimed, as much as smoking, we should therefore be able to observe that effect among recreational takers of the same drugs.

Yes, obviously, it’s a difficult thing to measure, who has been taking it recreationally. But it is through that that we would be able to unscramble the effects. If it’s the drugs causing the deaths then we should be finding an elevated death rate among those who go to such festivals and take the drugs.

And if that elevated death rate isn’t there then we’d rather swing towards it being the underlying condition(s) which produce the prescriptions causing it rather than the drugs themselves.

Of course, I’m not going to do such a study and nor are you. But I have a feeling that someone is. Quite possibly the drug manufacturers. For I have a feeling that there’s going to be a lot of pressure from the plantiff’s bar in coming years off the back of that original paper. Pressure that the pharma companies would rather like to have some defence against.

Rilly?

The sheer scale of the bust announced late Wednesday drew expressions of amazement from meth experts. The 15 tonne haul could have supplied 13 million doses on the streets of the United States.

Umm, what?

$4 billion divided by 13 million is $307 a dose. That sounds a bit high for meth, given that the whole point of meth is that it is a relatively cheap drug. And they’re positing that the dose would be a little over a gramme (1 million grammes to a tonne).

Actual prices seem to be around $80 a gramme.

Or if we say that it’s 15 million 1 grammes doses then that’s 15 million x $80 or $1.2 billion.

Ah, but that’s US retail pricing. And this gear was in bulk in Mexico. Add in the smuggling value (yes, of course drugs are worth more inside the US than outside) and the wholesale discount and we’re probably looking at something in the $120 million to $500 million range.

Yes, sure, it’s still a big number. But just goes to show: don’t ever trust law enforcement numbers about drugs. They’re as crooked as the anti-counterfiters numbers about what is lost to counter-fiting.

Umm, yes? Rich young thing about town takes cocaine in 1990s Britain?

That’s it?

Clubbers don’t care whether a drugs is legal or not, just how it makes them feel, research shows

My word, that is a surprise, isn’t it?

We would just never have guessed this from the existence of vibrant markets in, easy supply of, high demand for, heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, pot, hash, crack, LSD, ‘rooms and all the rest.

Comes as an entire and total surprise that people will buy things they like even if they are illegal.

Astonishing.

Next week, an investigation into the slippery nature of dihydrogen monoxide.

But this is not just a war between narco-cartels. Juarez has imploded into a state of criminal anarchy – the cartels, acting like any corporation, have outsourced violence to gangs affiliated or unaffiliated with them, who compete for tenders with corrupt police officers. The army plays its own mercurial role. “Cartel war” does not explain the story my friend, and Juarez journalist, Sandra Rodriguez told me over dinner last month: about two children who killed their parents “because”, they explained to her, “they could”. The culture of impunity, she said, “goes from boys like that right to the top – the whole city is a criminal enterprise”.

Not by coincidence, Juarez is also a model for the capitalist economy. Recruits for the drug war come from the vast, sprawling maquiladora – bonded assembly plants where, for rock-bottom wages, workers make the goods that fill America’s supermarket shelves or become America’s automobiles, imported duty-free. Now, the corporations can do it cheaper in Asia, casually shedding their Mexican workers, and Juarez has become a teeming recruitment pool for the cartels and killers. It is a city that follows religiously the philosophy of a free market.

Eh?

Governments are spending hundreds of billions to prevent the drugs market being a free market.

And therefore the violence and murder of the drugs market is a result of it being a free market?

What?

Now, certain prohibitionists like to make much – too much – of the possible impact of cannabis on mental health. This, they say, is sufficient cause to ban the drug and punish its users “for their own good”. Since it has been moved back up to class B, against expert advice, the maximum penalty for personal possession is five years’ imprisonment.

The difference in penalty is staggering, and reveals the extent of prejudice against drug use. If one already has poor mental health and is a risk to oneself or others, maximum detention is only for a year, and as a patient. If one merely increases the risk of developing schizophrenia by 40% or so, it can result in detention for five years as a criminal. Punishment simply for risking one’s own mental health is more severe than the restrictions on someone already suffering from a mental illness and at serious risk of doing harm to himself or others.

Quite, they’re twats. Can we hang them yet?

Read the other two posts either side as well. Articulate case being made there.

Cocaine is the second most popular drug in Britain, after cannabis, with its use increasing markedly in the past decade from 0.6% of 16- to 59-year-olds reporting use to the British Crime Survey to 2.4% in 2009-10. This is equivalent to nearly 800,000 people reporting that they have used it within the last year. Among those aged 16 to 24, the increase in use has been even sharper from 1.3% to 5.5% in 2009-10 – or about 367,000 teenagers and young adults.

What horrors, eh? So, how dangerous is it?

The number of people who died after taking cocaine in England and Wales rose by 20% last year.

Official statistics released today showed there were 235 deaths linked to cocaine abuse in England and Wales in 2008, compared with 197 people in 2007. The figures include deaths related to crack cocaine.

So, what, a one in 3,000 chance of it killing you?

So you’d have to be taking it for a decade to equal the lifetime risk of death in a traffic accident?

The lifetime risk of dying in a transport accident is remarkably high – with most of the risk coming from road traffic accidents. While the risk of dying in a road accident in any year in the UK approaches 1 in 20,000, the lifetime risk is 1 in 240.

That’s without even considering the dosage or the method of ingestion (I would assume crack is worse than cocaine).

It’s hardly the sort of scary, scary, risk that justifies placing manufacture and distribution into the hands of the most violent thugs and criminals in our society, is it?

Quite apart from the probability that at least some of those deaths come not from the cocaine but from the impurities caused by the illegality.

Drugs were “readily available” at global financial company JP Morgan, the Old Bailey has heard.

PLAYBOY: Isn’t cocaine the currently fashionable drug in Hollywood?
NICHOLSON: I see it around.

PLAYBOY: Have you tried it?
NICHOLSON: Yeah, it’s basically an upper, but it doesn’t seem to do too much to me. I don’t think it’ll be fashionable for long, because it’s expensive and we’re in a depression; whether the world chooses to call it a depression or not, there’s no money around. Cocaine is “in” now because chicks dig it sexually.

H/T

So there’s two drugs, Avastin and Lucentis. They’re really rather similar: almost exactly the same you might say.

However, Avastin is the one licensed for use on bowel cancer and Lucentis the one licenced for use on blindness (wet eye advanced macular degeneration, AMD).

Doctors have noted that you can in fact use the Avastin to treat wet eye AMD. And that doing so is about one tenth of the cost of using Lucentis.

However, the drug company that makes both refuses to take part in the clinical trials (either Phase III or Phase IV) to prove that Avastin works just as well as Lucentis.

Now, at this point, opinions can differ. On the one side we’ll have the pretty usual screams of bloodthirsty profiteers trying to make a fortune out of those going blind, the rapine of the NHS drugs budget and so on.

On the other might be those who stop and think for a moment.

For you are allowed to use drugs “off licence”. If you note that sticking a bowel cancer drug into eyeballs stops people going blind then as far as the licence for the drug is concerned, go right ahead. But, and here’s the point, no Phase III or Phase IV trials will have been done on how well this works and what the long term effects on lots of people are.

And this is the very expensive part of drug testing. This costs the lion’s share of the $800 million it takes to get a drug approved and to market.

But here we’re in a very interesting situation: for the drug manufacturers have actually gone and spent this $800 million (or the lion’s share of it) in doing Phase III and IV trials on Lucentis. They must have done for they now have formal approval for using it to treat wet eye AMD.

So the current situation is that NICE is asking them to take part in Avastin trials for wet eye AMD: when they’ve already done that, spending all that money to get Lucentis approved.

Note that this is nothing at all to do with drugs coming from universities, from various forms of the public sector. This is all about the regulatory costs, costs imposed by government, on bringing a drug to market for an approved use.

So, what they’re really being asked to do is to help NICE make that $800 million (or lion’s share of it) an entire waste of money because NICE now wants Avastin approved for eye care, despite the fact they’ve already done this by getting Lucentis approved.

This might be best described as NICE both wanting their cake and eating it. If NICE actually wanted Avastin to be so used they could have turned around years ago and said so, before all that cash was used to get Lucentis approved.

And the real bottom line is that this is all an artefact of how the drugs licencing regime works. And yes, this does mean the blame is on the regulatory regime. Currently one must show that a new drug is both safe (to a certain level of safety: no one worries about heart attacks in 30 years if it cures terminal cancer today) and effective in order to get a licence.

And effectiveness of course depends upon which disease or problem the drug is being aimed at. If we changed the system to showing only safety then we wouldn’t have this problem at all. Avastin could be used on eyeballs and the drug company would never have spent the money on trying to get Lucentis approved for eyeballs.

But I’ll bet you that the way this plays out in the media is the “usual screams of bloodthirsty profiteers trying to make a fortune out of those going blind, the rapine of the NHS drugs budget and so on.”

But similarly, maybe legalisation is the answer. And what we;d really like to do, if anyone or any country is brave enough, is for someone to actually legalise drugs so that we can all find out.

For we don’t really know the most important things: will legalisation lead to more people taking drugs? Will mass taking of pharmaceutically pure drugs lead to less damage being done overall? Will, as Gary Becker posits, legalisation lead to a reduction in drug taking itself?

However, it’s not going to happen anytime soon, anywhere:

While some countries have experimented with decriminalisation, not one has proceeded with legalisation – partly because United Nations conventions prohibit states from taking that step.

This is (just one) of the problems with this world government idea. Just as with a planned economy, people cannot experiment as they can in markets, so with a one system of governance people cannot experiment with different legal systems, with different methods of organising parts of the society.

I’m, along with just about everyone else, happy enough that peeps can’t go experimenting with slavery but these rules of what can and cannot be done exend far beyond that. To, for example, this drugs thing.

Just as we need markets in matters economic so that we continue to get the economic growth desired, so too do we need markets in systems of governance so that through experimentation we can test new methods of such and, who knows, possibly even get the purblind idiots that rule us to pick up decent ideas that have been tested elsewhere.

No, don’t laugh, it does happen occasionally. The Swedish school experiment with what are essentially vouchers is being picked up here in the UK as “free schools”. The OECD has been able to study taxation systems in different places that manage them in different ways and show that different taxes do indeed have different deadweight costs. We should tax immovable property first, then consumption, then incomes and only last capital and corporations.

It’s only because Norway has successfully run a huge national oil fund that we now know what to do with the natural resource curse, how do we avoid Dutch Disease?

Unfortunately the world appears to be moving in the other direction. The EU now makes the laws about what is allowable in jams: to the detriment of experimentation in new flavours of jams. The UN runs the drugs laws, to the detriment of experimentation in how we should deal with drugs.

What we really want of course is to devolve power right back down, down to the level of the individual: and then, joy of joys, we get to shoot all the international bureaucrats.

In Argentina and Brazil, police seized a total of 3.4 metric tonnes of cocaine ready for shipment across the Atlantic. The drugs were wrapped in sealed one kilogram packets bearing Donald Duck logos, each worth £42,000 at street level – a total of £142.8 million pounds.

£40 a gramme sounds about right for the street value (as The Magistrate recently pointed out) but there’s two things here. First is that goods wholesale are worth rather less per unit than goods retail. For the obvious reason that goods need to be retailed.

The second is that drugs in Brazil aren’t worth the same amount as drugs in Spain. Because the very act of getting the drugs from Brazil to Spain adds a lot of value to them.

Now you can piece this together from that paragraph there. But the headline is simply wrong, isn’t it?

Police seize £143 million of cocaine in international operation
Cocaine worth more than £143 million – nearly half of it headed for Britain – has been seized in one of the biggest drug busts in history.

For if it was worth £143 million sitting in Brazil, the same amount as it would be worth retail in the UK, why was anyone going through the process of trying to smuggle it into the UK? Why not just sell it in Brazil for that £143 million?

Twenty years ago most people understood cocaine as a distant, almost mythical substance – prohibitively expensive and thereby restricted to either metropolitan high-rollers or those in the higher reaches of the entertainment industry: “God’s way of telling you you’re earning too much money,” as Robin Williams once said. I can well recall the first time I was aware of its use: at a 21st birthday party attended by a smattering of young aristocrats, whose possession of such a rarefied substance prompted awe-struck whispers.

For people lower down the social scale, the recreational pharmacoepia revolved around more affordable sources of enjoyment: cannabis, amphetamine sulphate; and, for those who had immersed themselves in Britain’s seemingly unstoppable club culture, ecstasy – an illicit substance whose creation of a kind of delirious sociability arguably did Britain a great deal of good.

Then something happened. In 1990, the average price of a gram of cocaine was about £90; five years later, it was closer to £60. Via such voices as the Gallagher brothers and the early Loaded magazine, it followed a standard enough route from some of the more celebrated parts of the culture into the population. Circa 2003, its price per gram came down to about £40; in 2006, it was reported that Gloucester – Gloucester! – had registered the UK’s lowest street price, at about £30. Now surveys suggest that some 6% of 15- to 16-year-olds have tried it. For someone of my generation, who recalls the acme of teenage experimentation being a weak joint scored from a helpful sixth former, even that relatively small proportion seems mind-boggling: proof of cocaine’s passage from yuppie land to somewhere remarkably close to the bike sheds.

New products start out howlingly expensive and are bought only by the wealthy. As the market expands economies of scale in production have their effect and the price falls thus making the by now not quite so new product available further down the income scale.

This has happened with cars, mobile phones, computers and cocaine.

Why do people therefore continually argue that trickle down economics doesn’t work?

There is a further group of nearly a million older problem drug users, including 122,000 in Britain aged between 35 and 64 who use heroin and crack, who first became dependent in the 1980s and 1990s. Many have tried detox and methadone substitution but have not managed to stop.

So you can be using these things, even while they are illegal and thus impure and of unknown composition, for 20-30 years and still be functioning?

That’s a little different from the one sniff and you’ll die horribly, immediately, of the propaganda, isn’t it?

Why would Democrats support a program that has such a deleterious effect on their most loyal constituencies? It is, in part, callous political calculus. It’s an easy and relatively cheap way for them to buy a tough-on-crime badge while simultaneously pleasing police unions. The fact that they are ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men and, by extension, the communities they belong to barely seems to register.

This is outrageous and immoral and the Democrat’s complicity is unconscionable, particularly for a party that likes to promote its social justice bona fides.

No one knows all the repercussions of legalizing marijuana, but it is clear that criminalizing it has made it a life-ruining racial weapon.

Tesco is to start selling Viagra over the counter at half price.

The pills were only available on prescription – or from dubious internet sources – until Boots began selling direct to customers last year, at £55 for four.

But Tesco will offer fierce competition by selling Viagra at £52 for eight of the blue tablets.

Not needed quite yet, thank you very much, but I understand that the patent expires in 2013.

I wonder what the price for generic Viagra will be when it’s actually legal to sell generic Viagra?

Will the internet be able to cope with the volume of spam?

We might also note that the number of deaths in the “War on Drugs” in Mexico is greater than the number of deaths from all overdoses in the US.

And something like 4 to 5 times the number of deaths caused by the major illegal, smuggled, drugs, cocaine and heroin. And this is in a population one third the size of that of the US.

So, the death rate from the War on Drugs in Mexico is 12 to 15 times the death rate from the use of drugs in the US.

Just stop this puritanical nonsense.