To Start, Win or End the ‘War on Drugs’?
A crack-down on recreational drug users could help take the money and guns out of the hands of Irish gangs, according to commentator John McGuirk.
He was speaking after the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel urged senior police to “name and shame” middle-class drug users as part of a crack-down on recreational drug use.
She asked police to target cocaine use at universities and “make an example” out of recreational users to drive home the message that there are consequences for taking drugs.
On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, Gript Editor John McGuirk said he was in favour of taking things “a little bit further.”
‘Name And Shame’ Drug Users To Reduce Organised Crime – John McGuirk
“I think if you look at so-called middle-class drug use which is really just commercial drug use — the end-user of drugs, whether they be middle class, upper class or lower class — that person is essentially paying and providing the funding that places the weapons into the hands of people who shoot and kill in gangland and other murders that cause mayhem in parts of Ireland and parts of society that these users never reach,” he said.
“If you look at, say the gangland killings we have had in Ireland over the last five to ten years and you want to find out who is responsible, well, the first people who are responsible are obviously the people who pull the trigger — but the second tier of responsibility for that goes to the people who are funding it.
“The people who are funding it are the sons and daughters often of very wealthy middle-class bankers and judges and lawyers and politicians and there has to be some responsibility for that.”
He suggested drug users should be targeted in the same manner as drug smugglers.
“Ultimately the problem here is that we have one standard for the people supplying the drugs and an entirely different standard for the people using them,” he said.
For complete interview go to ‘Name and shame’ drug users to reduce organised crime – John McGuirk | Newstalk
This #DemandReduction strategy is a just and equitable one. Journalist and Author Peter Hitchens as back as 2013 made this exact complaint in his book, ‘The War We Never Fought — Drugs’.
The notion of going after ‘dealers’ whilst essentially giving a free pass to the users who are driving the demand is counterproductive and, Hitchens rightly claims, specious in its motive. The real culprits in all this are those creating the demand for supply. This Hitchens posits brilliantly in his lecture at Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2013: Peter Hitchens – There is No War on Drugs
In 2015 the U.K’s National Crime Agency put together a brilliant three minute video title ‘How to Make Cocaine’. The parody was not only clever and poignant in its humour, but very challenging in its message — it both calls out and calls to, the cocaine (and any other recreational user of drugs) to think how their ‘personal choice’ is not a ‘victimless crime’, and in reality is fuelling greater and greater community, family, environmental and economic harms to our nation.
It is time again, to Name and Shame! Our nations, communities, families, and most of all, children — all deserve much better than this.
Team @NoDecriminalize