Post by Teddy Bear on Apr 19, 2013 16:26:06 GMT
You'll know when you read the following account from Melanie Phillips that the BBC are definitely pro the idea of opening 'shooting galleries', or havens for drug addicts to inject themselves without fear of prosecution.
Whether the impetus to run such a scheme comes from the government eyeing the prospect of eventually supplying drugs to users under the same excuse, of caring for their welfare. In the same way that the evidence and statistics supporting the AGW debate was flawed, we can see similar deceptions evolving about these shooting galleries. The BBC is a complicit part in this too as Melanie explains.
Whether the impetus to run such a scheme comes from the government eyeing the prospect of eventually supplying drugs to users under the same excuse, of caring for their welfare. In the same way that the evidence and statistics supporting the AGW debate was flawed, we can see similar deceptions evolving about these shooting galleries. The BBC is a complicit part in this too as Melanie explains.
The drug zealot I exposed a decade ago and how the BBC's promoting his plan for heroin 'shooting galleries
Yesterday's BBC Radio 4 Today programme informed us that Brighton's local public health agency may introduce what is euphemistically called a drug 'safe consumption room', otherwise known as a 'shooting gallery'.
The purpose of such places is to enable addicts to 'shoot up' on heroin and crack cocaine under supervision, without fear of prosecution.
Brighton has one of the highest drug-related death rates in the UK, and is where more than one in four has used drugs — double the national average.
Now it is being invited by a self-described 'independent drug commission' to consider becoming the first British city to open such a shooting gallery.
The commission claims this would reduce drug-related harm.
But this could not be more wrong. Successive governments have refused to sanction such shooting galleries because they have correctly judged that they would, in fact, create more harm.
Such places normalise, institutionalise and thus encourage the continued use of hard drugs.
Moreover, they risk turning whole areas into drug hot-spots. Brighton, already reeling from its drug problem, would instantly become a magnet for drug users and dealers alike.
Shooting galleries are also public health hazards, with increased rates of HIV and hepatitis.
More than 90 drug consumption rooms have been set up worldwide, including Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain and Canada. Those promoting such places claim they have achieved great success.
A frequently cited example is Vancouver, which established the first medically supervised drug injection site in North America and which proponents claim has greatly reduced drug harm.
But the evidence from Vancouver is, to put it mildly, ambiguous. As Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies has noted, the reports which gave this injection site glowing notices were written — and then further spun — by drug liberalisers, who distorted the evidence and downplayed the negative findings.
A subsequent study which analysed the data in 13 of these reports came to a very different conclusion.
In the Journal of Global Drug Policy, Dr Colin Mangham wrote that this injection site had made no impact on overdose deaths, led to little or no reduction in the transmission of blood-borne diseases or on public disorder, and had propelled few drug-users into long-term treatment and recovery.
Most devastating of all, addicts used the place only very sporadically. Only 11 out of 90 injections actually took place at this 'safe room'. Most drug-users still injected themselves most of the time elsewhere.
Similar results have been reported from other such places. In a shooting gallery in Sydney, Australia, just one in every 35 injections takes place there.
It is extremely naive to imagine that such supervision gives the authorities any control over drug-users' habits. Indeed, this betrays a lamentable failure to understand just what drugs do to people.
As Neil McKeganey, Professor of Drug Misuse Research at Glasgow University, has explained, drug treatment agencies are unable to control the behaviour of addicts because this is inherently uncontrollable.
So by their own lights, these supervised injection rooms are an utter failure.
And there is another somewhat significant obstacle. Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, it is a criminal offence for people knowingly to allow premises they own, manage or have responsibility for to be used for the 'administration or use of any controlled drugs'.
If Brighton does set up a shooting gallery, it will therefore almost certainly be breaking the law.
So who is behind this travesty of a proposal? Step forward the 'independent drug commission' — which actually possesses not a shred of credibility, being merely a group of ten people ostensibly aiming to reduce Brighton's drug problem, but actually providing a front for drug liberalisation.
This 'commission' was set up at the prompting of Green MP and would-be drug legaliser Caroline Lucas. Chaired by crime writer Peter James, its vice-chairman and leading light is none other than the notorious Mike Trace.
Mr Trace was appointed deputy drug czar under Tony Blair. In 2003, however, he was forced to resign from a key appointment as Head of Demand Reduction at the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime.
That resignation came about after this newspaper exposed his role in assembling a secret network of lobbyists to subvert the UN drug control laws — which underpin the use of criminal penalties for the drug trade — and pressurise governments into legalising drugs.
It was I who revealed him in these pages — in his own words — as a 'fifth columnist': an underground agitator who was supposed to be upholding the laws to reduce drug use, but was actually working covertly to undermine the UN conventions, and being secretly paid to do so by notorious international legalisers.
The British headquarters of this operation was to be financed in part by the Open Slociety Institute, funded by the billionaire financier George Soros, which openly campaigns for drug liberalisation.
Mr Trace's attempts to obtain additional funds from European sources disclosed a vast and intricate web of non-governmental organisations, all beavering away at drug legalisation.
Lo and behold, this disgraced individual has now popped up again to push the creation of a shooting gallery — on the grounds that he wants to find ways of 'managing' the drugs market rather than eradicating it. And it looks as though he has found a prize mug in Brighton to fall for it.
The chairman of Brighton's 'health and well-being board', Rob Jarrett, is sympathetic to the proposal because, he says, his principal concern is to make sure addicts don't kill themselves.
Excuse me? Shouldn't his principal concern be to try to stop them taking drugs in the first place, in order to avoid doing harm to other people?
The board he chairs is a council agency which has been given responsibility for public health under the Government's NHS reforms.
Mr Jarrett burbles about the 'health benefits of accepting drug use' in a 'place that can be monitored'. How can someone who is quite so clueless about the effects of drugs and the need to uphold the law to protect the community be chairman of a taxpayer-funded public health agency?
And what on earth was the BBC doing giving people such as Mike Trace a hefty boost on air?
Listeners to Today would have been wholly unaware of Mr Trace's previous antics from the BBC's interview of him — because the fact that he was forced out of his UN post was never mentioned.
Nor was the fact that his liberalising 'commission' has no authority or credibility. Nor was the contested nature of the research into shooting galleries.
Moreover, Brighton is not yet proposing to set up a shooting gallery. It is merely considering doing so.
This still entirely speculative idea was not surprisingly seized upon by The Observer and Independent.
But the BBC then provided it with a loud-hailer at prime time — and by failing adequately to challenge either Mr Trace or the validity of his evidence, thus helped promote drug legalisation as desirable and acceptable.
Actually, in the past couple of years, Brighton has slipped from being top of the drugs-related death-rate league to eighth.
This is apparently the result of a strategy of arrests and prosecution, diversion of those arrested into treatment, and the gathering of intelligence and targeted intervention in local drug markets.
In other words, concerted and intelligent law enforcement is the real way to reduce drug use.
So will the BBC broadcast that story on Today? Ha! I think we all know the answer to that one.
Yesterday's BBC Radio 4 Today programme informed us that Brighton's local public health agency may introduce what is euphemistically called a drug 'safe consumption room', otherwise known as a 'shooting gallery'.
The purpose of such places is to enable addicts to 'shoot up' on heroin and crack cocaine under supervision, without fear of prosecution.
Brighton has one of the highest drug-related death rates in the UK, and is where more than one in four has used drugs — double the national average.
Now it is being invited by a self-described 'independent drug commission' to consider becoming the first British city to open such a shooting gallery.
The commission claims this would reduce drug-related harm.
But this could not be more wrong. Successive governments have refused to sanction such shooting galleries because they have correctly judged that they would, in fact, create more harm.
Such places normalise, institutionalise and thus encourage the continued use of hard drugs.
Moreover, they risk turning whole areas into drug hot-spots. Brighton, already reeling from its drug problem, would instantly become a magnet for drug users and dealers alike.
Shooting galleries are also public health hazards, with increased rates of HIV and hepatitis.
More than 90 drug consumption rooms have been set up worldwide, including Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain and Canada. Those promoting such places claim they have achieved great success.
A frequently cited example is Vancouver, which established the first medically supervised drug injection site in North America and which proponents claim has greatly reduced drug harm.
But the evidence from Vancouver is, to put it mildly, ambiguous. As Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies has noted, the reports which gave this injection site glowing notices were written — and then further spun — by drug liberalisers, who distorted the evidence and downplayed the negative findings.
A subsequent study which analysed the data in 13 of these reports came to a very different conclusion.
In the Journal of Global Drug Policy, Dr Colin Mangham wrote that this injection site had made no impact on overdose deaths, led to little or no reduction in the transmission of blood-borne diseases or on public disorder, and had propelled few drug-users into long-term treatment and recovery.
Most devastating of all, addicts used the place only very sporadically. Only 11 out of 90 injections actually took place at this 'safe room'. Most drug-users still injected themselves most of the time elsewhere.
Similar results have been reported from other such places. In a shooting gallery in Sydney, Australia, just one in every 35 injections takes place there.
It is extremely naive to imagine that such supervision gives the authorities any control over drug-users' habits. Indeed, this betrays a lamentable failure to understand just what drugs do to people.
As Neil McKeganey, Professor of Drug Misuse Research at Glasgow University, has explained, drug treatment agencies are unable to control the behaviour of addicts because this is inherently uncontrollable.
So by their own lights, these supervised injection rooms are an utter failure.
And there is another somewhat significant obstacle. Under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, it is a criminal offence for people knowingly to allow premises they own, manage or have responsibility for to be used for the 'administration or use of any controlled drugs'.
If Brighton does set up a shooting gallery, it will therefore almost certainly be breaking the law.
So who is behind this travesty of a proposal? Step forward the 'independent drug commission' — which actually possesses not a shred of credibility, being merely a group of ten people ostensibly aiming to reduce Brighton's drug problem, but actually providing a front for drug liberalisation.
This 'commission' was set up at the prompting of Green MP and would-be drug legaliser Caroline Lucas. Chaired by crime writer Peter James, its vice-chairman and leading light is none other than the notorious Mike Trace.
Mr Trace was appointed deputy drug czar under Tony Blair. In 2003, however, he was forced to resign from a key appointment as Head of Demand Reduction at the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime.
That resignation came about after this newspaper exposed his role in assembling a secret network of lobbyists to subvert the UN drug control laws — which underpin the use of criminal penalties for the drug trade — and pressurise governments into legalising drugs.
It was I who revealed him in these pages — in his own words — as a 'fifth columnist': an underground agitator who was supposed to be upholding the laws to reduce drug use, but was actually working covertly to undermine the UN conventions, and being secretly paid to do so by notorious international legalisers.
The British headquarters of this operation was to be financed in part by the Open Slociety Institute, funded by the billionaire financier George Soros, which openly campaigns for drug liberalisation.
Mr Trace's attempts to obtain additional funds from European sources disclosed a vast and intricate web of non-governmental organisations, all beavering away at drug legalisation.
Lo and behold, this disgraced individual has now popped up again to push the creation of a shooting gallery — on the grounds that he wants to find ways of 'managing' the drugs market rather than eradicating it. And it looks as though he has found a prize mug in Brighton to fall for it.
The chairman of Brighton's 'health and well-being board', Rob Jarrett, is sympathetic to the proposal because, he says, his principal concern is to make sure addicts don't kill themselves.
Excuse me? Shouldn't his principal concern be to try to stop them taking drugs in the first place, in order to avoid doing harm to other people?
The board he chairs is a council agency which has been given responsibility for public health under the Government's NHS reforms.
Mr Jarrett burbles about the 'health benefits of accepting drug use' in a 'place that can be monitored'. How can someone who is quite so clueless about the effects of drugs and the need to uphold the law to protect the community be chairman of a taxpayer-funded public health agency?
And what on earth was the BBC doing giving people such as Mike Trace a hefty boost on air?
Listeners to Today would have been wholly unaware of Mr Trace's previous antics from the BBC's interview of him — because the fact that he was forced out of his UN post was never mentioned.
Nor was the fact that his liberalising 'commission' has no authority or credibility. Nor was the contested nature of the research into shooting galleries.
Moreover, Brighton is not yet proposing to set up a shooting gallery. It is merely considering doing so.
This still entirely speculative idea was not surprisingly seized upon by The Observer and Independent.
But the BBC then provided it with a loud-hailer at prime time — and by failing adequately to challenge either Mr Trace or the validity of his evidence, thus helped promote drug legalisation as desirable and acceptable.
Actually, in the past couple of years, Brighton has slipped from being top of the drugs-related death-rate league to eighth.
This is apparently the result of a strategy of arrests and prosecution, diversion of those arrested into treatment, and the gathering of intelligence and targeted intervention in local drug markets.
In other words, concerted and intelligent law enforcement is the real way to reduce drug use.
So will the BBC broadcast that story on Today? Ha! I think we all know the answer to that one.