Urban Health and Drug Policy intersect at Lies Police tell.

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The latest social (urban health) research suggests the Police complicity in 'creating crime' makes NZ's  BERL report on measureing drug harms  and subsequently the National Drug Intelligence Bureau, look like anus heads.


" legal interventions to disrupt the drug market may actually boost rates of drug-related violence"...



see http://uhri.cfenet.ubc.ca/images/Documents/violence_summary-eng.pdf

(full report at http://uhri.cfenet.ubc.ca/images/Documents/violence-eng.pdf )
 
This of course is not the only supporting evidence that drug policy is skewed. New Zealands appearance in the 'murder rate' runoff should be no surprise.
 
And as for Greg O'Conner's dismisal of the United Nations reports on TASERS, "look at yourselves, Greg." When you lie and cheat in court and out, dont expect the public to fawn at your feet. They hate you and yours for your double dealing ways.... Get honest with drug policy in particular alcohol and cannabis and redeem yourselves.  Bad policy causes dead cops.

Would Len Snee be alive or dead today if cannabis was a regulated and controlled 'class D' drug...

Instead we get "D" for not thinking about it... D for Dead.

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• UHRI Report: More enforcement leads to more violence (cssdp.org)
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• Shapelle Corby on LawFuel (mildgreens.blogspot.com)
• Ignorance, A Licence To Kill. (mildgreens.blogspot.com)
• Amanda Feilding: Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond Stalemate (huffingtonpost.com)

Seattle Mayor Thinks It's Time To Talk, Christchurch's Doesnt.

Seattle Mayor-elect supports marijuana legalization

Seattle Mayor-elect Mike McGinn as quoted in a recent radio interview on NPR:   "If every elected official who ever smoked marijuana voted to legalize it would probably be legalized in an instant. We recognize that, like alcohol, it's something that should be regulated not treated as a criminal activity and I think that's where the citizens of Seattle want us to go." 

Perhaps he should invite Mayor Bob Parker to come over and see what a  'SAFER CITY'  really looks like.... 

Could there be an honest admission in the future of our incumbent?

/Blair

Sniffer dog checks bite into our civil liberties

Following the broader issues relating to civil society it is increasingly seen as acceptable that 'dogs' are able to give evidential 'cause for suspicion' based on the inherent quality of its nose, the efficacy of its training, the enviroment it is in, the ability of its handler to not give cues, and of course... as we are all paying the bill here, the cost benefit that demonstrates any outcomes.

It authored by a chap that I know through my work in drug policy [· Sebastian Saville is executive director of drugs charity Release.]

However, while the core initiative is about targeting drugs and drug users and it is another jurisdiction, the increasingly 'get tough' calls for more police and resources to catch 'neer do wells' will inevitably bring up policy and actions that are being 'seen to be doing something'. This is one such case. A case I would argue that the 'end does not justify the means', it was published in the British newspaper, the Guardian. see http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/%20…%20andalcohol

I welcome feedback from readers. What is your thoughts on this use of dogs?Sniffer dog checks bite into our civil liberties. Replies can be made either here via the bloggers comment box below, or the at the popular NZ website 'doglinks' forums link (requires registration... good if you have a dog)

http://www.doglinks.co.nz/myforums/viewtopic.php?pid=376#p376

The Side-Effects of Abstinence-Only Education

One in three teenage girls in the US becomes pregnant. Recent media hype and movies like Juno give teen pregnancy a certain kind of treatment.

If sex education impacts the rate at which men impregnate teenage girls, then these results are effects. Calling them side-effects is equivocation.

RE: Side-Effects? / Posted by: MildGreens on Jul 7, 2008 2:36 PM

The appearance of prejudices fails to do justice to the debate. Men impregnate woman, true enough, but woman can only be impregnated by men.

The inference that men are DOING THIS to teenage girls carries baggage, firstly because it misrepresents the facts and secondly it stereotypes men.

Teen pregnancy AND STD's is for the greater part a teen issue for BOTH males and females.

Both suffer consequences.

It represents a larger systemic failure in health promotion as evidenced by the bio-psychosocial health indicators in jurisdictions where age of consensual sex is much lower.

Where the rules say 'you just cant, its not allowed' (ie: zero tolerance with disproportionate punishment) the harms are maximised. With rules like these we may as well line them up and shoot some of them arbitrarily.

Intolerance sets up failure as 'proof we have a problem, justifying more inevitable failure'. The corollary with youth drug policy is also useful in this case.

There are impediments to [sex ed and other stuff] health promotion, the Ottawa Charter (the bible of Public Health) says where these can be identified, remove them.

There is no place for artificial red-lines in the dynamics of teen angst. This creates a climate dishonesty and mistrust that masks what is really going on. It creates a perception of safety without delivering.

The teen health data correlated to age of consent makes for revealing reading.

The 'shocking' (ie moral panic) driven data set is completely unsurprising to educators who think about this problem. It is almost a determinate outcome. We, by 'doing nothing' to change the policy base are guilty of creating the problem we set out to solve. We are as it were, collectively responsible making girls pregnant. And that requires an adult maturity to 'see'.

Ipso facto, teen pregnancy is a symptom of a larger problem adults as instruments of change are just not talking about.

Thus, it is more accurate to say older Men AND Woman are making teens pregnant and saddling teens AND society with unnessary burdens.

We have to, as adult rule makers, realise no policy is going to solve all the problems and that an optimal policy has to embrace harm minimisation in a reality based education paradigm.

Those for whom this reality check is objectional... are witness to the harms they are creating and the evidence, in this case, is on my side.

To get significant change one has to make significant change. It is long overdue.

--
Blair Anderson ‹(•¿•)›

Social Ecologist 'at large'
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com
http://blairformayor.blogspot.com
http://blair4mayor.com
http://efsdp.org

ph (643) 389 4065 cell 027 265 7219

The war on drugs has failed:Conference of Mayors

"NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the United States Conference of Mayors believes the war on drugs has failed and calls for a New Bottom Line in U.S. drug policy, a public health approach that concentrates more fully on reducing the negative consequences associated with drug abuse, while ensuring that our policies do not exacerbate these problems or create new social problems of their own; establishes quantifiable, short- and long-term objectives for drug policy; saves taxpayer money; and holds state and federal agencies accountable..." U.S. mayors call for end to drug war

Mayoral debate "burgled" by Christchurch Star

With the 'front page' publicity given to a Christchurch Mayoral candidate's house having been burgled it has brought into perspective 'acquisitive crime' and public safety. (see Christchurch Star, 11/07/07 Even mayoral candidates can't escape the burglars )

While the media focused on this one incidence of burglary, no one asked the critical questions. What is the driver behind burglary? What encourages this income-producing crime?

The core factors not being identified are alienation from rule of law (rejection of social values) and expenditures on drugs (not the drugs themselves) in a context of constrained licit earnings.

There is some irony then that Dr Megan Woods PhD (History) and education spokesperson for the Progressive Party headed by drug czar and local MP Jim Anderson is the one burgled. Jim has long been critiqued for his long held beliefs that it is the illicit drugs that cause these crimes. The issue here is not that there is empirical evidence Megan's unfortunate experience was caused by a drug taker/consumer (though likely) rather that it brings into perspective salient issues surrounding community safety and perceptions of crime.

The Christchurch Star newspaper in its front page news item and enclosed Mayoralty analysis (pretending this writer/candidate didn't exist) quoted candidate Bob Parker "There is a feeling of real insecurity, especially at night. That is not the way it used to be. The crime figures are at a reasonably high level, there are some real examples of violence and intimidation, but it is about perception".

Bob is right, it is not the way it used to be, and Megan as a student of history would likely agree. Crime data evidences that the wheels started to fall off about 40 years ago, around the date of the adoption of the Misuse of Drugs Act (1975). That is why this mayoral candidate calls for a full and unfettered engagement on civic ALL drug policy, to “spark an open and honest discussion about the criminal justice system’s inability to create the result that we all want: reducing the damage done by drugs while not creating more harm than the use of the drugs themselves.”

It is contingent upon all of us to resolve these tensions. It is the stuff of social capital.

Drug policy, covering both alcohol and the currently illicit drugs, ought to be a major component of a rational crime control strategy, and crime control ought to be one of the dominant themes in designing drug policy. But none of the slogans now dominating the drug policy debate is adequate to the complex reality linking drugs, drug policy, and predatory crime. Only if we start to think more clearly can we start to act more wisely. / Mark Kleiman, Professor of Policy Studies at
UCLA

Drug Use Among the Young Caused by Politics & Policy Failure

Drug Use Among the Young Caused by Politics & Policy Failure or another case of anthropomorphic mess, 'its the rules stupid' - mildgreens

Government attempts to persuade thousands of young people to stay away from drugs have failed and done nothing to curb the soaring popularity of illegal substances, a devastating report will warn this week.

UK: Britain's Fight Against Drugs 'A Total Failure' / by Denis Campbell, 15 Apr 2007, Observer

The study, 'An Analysis of UK Drugs Policy', has been written by two internationally respected experts, Professor Peter Reuter of Maryland University in the US and Alex Stevens, senior researcher at the European Institute of Social Services at Kent University.

Their findings are a scathing indictment of decades of education, prevention and awareness-raising campaigns intended to warn youngsters about the perils of narcotics. The three main strategies into which successive governments have ploughed tens of millions of pounds - mass media campaigns such as 'heroin screws you up' in the 1980s, initiatives in schools aimed at pupils as young as seven and targeting of vulnerable groups - have made little or no difference, it says.

'Prevention is cited as the main policy area aiming to reduce drug initiation and continued use. The policy is predicated on the assumption that prevention efforts reduce drug use, but there is as yet no clear evidence showing that prevention has had this effect in the UK,' the authors conclude.

The National Institute of Clinical Excellence recently drew similar conclusions about the usefulness of drugs prevention campaigns.