Doobleydoo:
Drugs should be legalised, particularly if you oppose their use. Clearly i'm talking about "recreational" drugs here such as Cannabis/hash/mariajuana, cocaine, heroin and acid, and actually one thing i forgot to mention is that some drug use is self-medication and some is due to the fact that it's illegal making it taboo and therefore attractive to some. However, that can wait.
Organised malevolent drug pushers, and those are not the only kind of course, have the most to gain from drugs being illegal, because they then have complete control over prices and quality control. This leads people to commit crime to feed their drug addiction, and also to act immorally in other ways. The freedom to adulterate the drugs also means dosage is unreliable and a lot of harm can be done to the body as a result of adulteration in drugs, particularly if they're injected.
I am emphatically not in favour of drug use in most circumstances. I have known people who have become aggressive and violent under the influence of drugs, i've seen drugs take over people's lives and kill them, for instance through sharing needles, and in most cases drugs are purified even if they're adulterated, and pure drugs are much more likely to be bad for you. The same kind of thing happens with alcohol and caffeine, and to a much lesser extent tobacco, but that's a subject for another video. However, Prohibition was notoriously counter-productive and it seems entirely clear that the situation with drugs which are currently illegal is very similar. Keeping them illegal does far more harm than legalising them would. There is more organised crime, rape, violent crime and more harm to the health this way, and it can actually encourage people to take drugs.
The other aspect of this is the strong tendency of government policies and laws to be made in spite of strong evidence to the contrary, which is very much the case here. Therefore, this is a much broader point, and politicians and civil servants often do not seem to make the right decisions because of an apparent lack of familiarity with such things as the scientific method and statistics.
I admit this is not a particularly original or sophisticated opinion, but there are limits to what you can manage in four and a bit minutes, and on that topic this is a fairly careful attempt at being topical. It's missed the actual report by the House Of Lords itself by a couple of days, as is typical of me, and i failed to anticipate the report, but one thing i have succeeded in is to make it more general as well as topical, something which failed with other things because i focussed too much on the specific incident. We shall see.
The views stats seem not to filter through very fast for some reason, which reminds me of the "301" phenomenon.
This was quite a simple video to make as it just involved getting raspberry leaves and washing powder and putting them in polythene bags. The hardest parts were getting the pose at the start right so that both "drugs" were clearly visible in front of me, and i only partly succeeded even there because the raspberry is out of focus.
There are a lot of white powders in the world, incidentally, and many of them are dangerous when you put them in your body. Alkaloids such as cocaine and opiates are only one category. It's a little like sweet things, which usually seem to be dangerous. One reason they might be dangerous is that in order to be white, they are quite likely to be pure. This harks back to colour spaces again, believe it or not, but this time it's the CMYK model:
Finally, theintrostealer has holpen me with black-bordered letters, so i can now do this:
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