Tim Worstall

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into [...]

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If you’d like to know why the world is in such an awful state try reading this article. From the head of the UN’s office on drugs (no, sadly, the office about drugs, not the one actually taking them, the consumption of which would do much to explain this godawful logic) we get the following: [...]

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The idea that the best way to deal with amazingly profitable and slightly addictive substances is to let the most thieving and murderous people in our country sell them, and kill anyone who’d mention this to the regulators, also doesn’t strike me as top notch. Sadly, it was also one of the lines that Sunny [...]

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Colour me sceptical: It hopes the so-called “drugalyser” will make it easier to catch and prosecute offenders and help reduce accidents. The drug testers will be able to screen for an array of illegal substances, including cocaine and ecstasy. A positive result would mean that police would no longer have to wait for permission from [...]

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At the Guardain. Yes, idiot foolishness. A slightly different thought occurs. The homeopathic pills are, quite literally, sugar pills. Ain’t nowt else there. Now they say that they’re made by diluting down. Take a solution, dilute it 100 times with water, shake, take a bit, dilute again 100 times down with water and so on [...]

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Reduce the number of things which you define as crimes for which you might people in prison of course. Dumbass. You know, like legalising drugsn’stuff.

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Another, Dr. Reefer — it’s the name of the dispensary and the trade name of the owner — is proudly ramshackle, in part because it hasn’t been thoroughly renovated since a restaurant moved off the premises. “This used to be a hot dog place called What’s Up Dog and my place was in the basement,” [...]

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Oh good grief Polly. If the Tories were really brave, they could end the drug prohibition that is so costly in cash and lives. The previous government’s strategy unit estimated that current drugs policy costs £20m – £15m of that in crime, courts and prisons. Some 40% of prisoners committed crimes to support their habit; 95% [...]

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Clubbers continue to use mephedrone despite ban After all, no one uses heroin because it’s now banned, no one smokes dope, crystal meth consumption is zero, cocaine never graces the nostrils of would be politicians and booze consumption in the US was entirely nothing throughout the 1920s.

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I notice that right-wing critics of the nanny state never call for the legalisation of drugs on the grounds that adults should be free to choose to be addicts or not.

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Cocaine use is up: His letter cites recent British Crime Survey statistics showing that 6.6 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds used cocaine last year, compared to 1.3 per cent in 1996. Thus: The professor wrote: ”Cocaine is a very harmful drug to individuals and more broadly society and evidence of the continued increasing prevalence [...]

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NHS patients are being put at risk because profiteering pharmacists are selling prescription drugs to Europe. The fall in the pound re the euro has made things worse but: Richard Ascroft, director of corporate affairs at drug maker Lilly UK, said: ‘We are definitely concerned about this. Drug prices in the UK are among the [...]

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Well, yes, this is indeed a good thing. The chief executive of the world’s second biggest pharmaceutical company will today announce that he is putting into the public domain thousands of potential drugs that might cure malaria. Andrew Witty, the British boss of Glaxo-SmithKline, will say in a major speech that multinational drug companies have [...]

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I know the answer, I know the answer! A senior analyst at the FSS, the largest provider of forensic services in the UK on behalf of police forces, says traces of the drug can be found on any bank note regardless of its geographical location. It takes just two weeks for a new note to [...]

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As more women come out of the woodwork alleging affairs with Tiger Woods, and details about his mysterious car crash two weeks ago continue to emerge including that he may have been under the influence of alcohol and subscription drugs at the time, Subscription drugs? Sort of a “Drug of the Month Club” thing? Sign [...]

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Another attempt to show that skunk is causing the entire population to go nuts. Skunk, the powerful form of cannabis dominating the street drug market, is seven times more likely to cause psychosis than ordinary cannabis, scientists say. Someone else will have to dig into that particular story but I do note this: Most cannabis [...]

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DRUG DEATHS Tobacco 114,000 Alcohol 5,000 to 40,000 Heroin, morphine, methadone 944 Cocaine 147 Ecstasy 48 Aphetamines 83 Solvents 45 Cannabis 16 Source: Office for National Statistics, Department of Health and Ash. Figures refer to 2004, where substance is mentioned on the death certificate, except alcohol and tobacco which are annual estimates. DRUG ADDICTS 280,000-500,000 [...]

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Professor Nutt was told to resign as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse Drugs (ACMD) after a series of controversial outbursts including accusing ministers of ignoring scientific evidence to distort the drugs debate. You hire the scientists to tell you the scientific truth. Sure, what you do with it is politics after that, [...]

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Funnily enough, the most fiercely anti-drugs people I came across there were the Dutch. They didn’t think dope was evil, they just thought that it was pathetic. For them, it was the dull, conversation-killing, boring thing that their parents did, or their parents’ loser friends, sneaking off to their coffee shops of an evening, like [...]

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Oh dear, another myth destrouyed by actual statistics: Nick Ross, chair of the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, commented: “There is no evidence of widespread use of hypnotics in sexual assault, let alone Rohypnol, despite many attempts to prove the contrary. “During thousands of blood and alcohol tests lots of judgement-impairing compounds were discovered, [...]

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