They go on to explain in the news article, the price of cocaine has dropped into a price band which absolutely everyone in Irish towns, cities and rural Ulster - rich and poor alike, can easily and readily afford, down from £40-£50 per gram, to a bargain-basement £10 per gram.
Of course, trying to explain the reasons for this huge 80% price drop to the young users is a modern day "Mission Impossible."
No one is listening, but is there any wonder why?
Radical
In the name of public health as well as the health of many millions of our young party people who are exposed to this menace every single Friday and Saturday night, something radical and drastic needs to be done, to regain the confidence of a generation who are killing themselves, and regardless of what the "elders" of society tell them.
Killing themselves by pumping who knows what chemicals the drug dealers use to "cut" the cocaine, into their young bodies.
Chemicals such as rat poison, paracetomol and aspirin, talcum powder and bicarbonate of soda, as well other, cheaper controlled substances such as veterinary anaesthetic ketamine, and phenobarbitone, which is a long lasting sedative, a substance which gives the polar opposite effect than that which a euforia seeking cocaine user wants when he or she scores a £10 deal. They would be better of buying "Coca-Leaf teabags".
This isn't rhetoric, or pro-drug propoganda lies. This is whats happening down at "ground zero".
Reclassification
Since cannabis was reclassified back in 2004, apparently in a bid to free up already over-stretched enforcement resources, cannabis user figures have gone down.
Its a fact, and to confirm as much, the Minister responsible for the downgrading of cannabis, ex Home Secretary David Blunkett said recently when speaking of the period since reclassification, ""There has been a marked fall in cannabis use since it was reclassified." Is he telling lies?
In the meantime, the use of cocaine and heroin has shown a meteoric upsurge as a result of a historical phenomena with regard to Great Britain.
For the first time ever, cocaine and heroin, sold in every region of the UK, are both now cheaper and more widely available, than cannabis, and there's a very good reason for this.
Net-Works
There exists a network within the UK.
The cannabis community is representative of every level of UK society. From the poorest of the poor living on our housing estates, to the richest pop and rock stars, and they all can be found, regularly communicating with each other, by way of the multitude of online community forums which have sprung up since broadband became more widely available.
So as soon as a bad batch of cannabis, or something purporting to be cannabis, starts to do the rounds it doesn't take long for the jungle drums to broadcast the fact throughout this community and not long after, the dealers who are attempting to peddle this street shit, realise they are onto a lost cause, and as they can no longer sell it, it's taken off the market.
Over the last few years we have seen a couple of high profile instances of this, which the press have actually picked up on and started to report themselves.
For example, there was the case of the hashish-like substance which became popular around the turn of the century.
Soapbar
In much the same vein as cocaine is "cut" with adulterants, to make it go further, organised criminals behind the widescale distribution of cannabis came upon a technique of carrying out similar practices with cannabis. Whilst this is nothing new to those in the know, it only really became widespread knowledge when people started to talk about it online, and in their thousands.
Illicit drug manufacturers were extracting the active ingredient from the plant material, (the THC "glands" which provides the "high) in a similar process to the way pure Morroccan or Lebonese hashish has traditionally been made (rubbing or scuffing), but with a few cultural differences as a result of the advancement of technology.
Its very simple to either buy, or manufacture a DIY "tumbler." A small drum, which works in a similar way to how a washing machine works.
By fitting up an external power supply like a power drill with variable voltage, its possible to set the drum rotating at just a couple of hundred revolutions per minute or less, and the micro-mesh screen which is fitted over the outside of the drum, seperates the plant material (which is useless without the trichomes), from the trichome glands which contains the active ingredient. The bit that gets the user "stoned".
But its not a very efficient way of making money from cannabis, as all of the plant material is thrown away, and thats where the weight is, (contrary to popular belief, smoking cannabis leaves will give you no more than a bad taste in your mouth).
So the unscrupulous organised crime rings took to "bulking up" the harvested trichomes with all sorts of other, distasteful stuff and if you have ever spent any time consuming hashish in the UK by eating it, you may wish to look away now as the material used to bulk up the hashish was a public health risk all of its own.
As well as human and animal faeces (poo), substances used included boot polish (for colour), diesel (to give a hashy "oily" texture), crushed pharmaceutical drugs such as apirin and paracetamol (gives a pain killing "numbing" effect when ingested orally) as well as industrial grade silica sand (it "twinkles" like trichomes should and is heavy) plus any number of other dangerous substances, and all in the name of profit.
Internet Police
This practice soon came to light around the Internet message boards and the product was shunned "en masse". People simply refused to buy it, and its prevelance quickly became less and less as the networks broadcast this information far and wide, amongst its tens of thousands of members.
A ten pound bag of cannabis is enough for probably two or three "joints", if that. But a ten pound of cocaine has a far higher perceived worth, especially in the eyes of a new, or naive user. A ten pound deal of cocaine is equivelant to a 6 or 8 hour "rush" - plenty of time to see out an evenings partying.
When in actual fact what the cocaine user has bought could be as little as 2% cocaine, and 98% adulterants, and by the time the user finds out its not doing what it should, it could already be too late as an overdose of phenobarbitone pulls them into a coma they may never wake from!
But if the enforcement agencies were to cut the cannabis community some slack. Bring them "onside" as it were, they could actually utilise this self-policing network of responsible cannabis users, a lot of whom, know people who use cocaine, or heroin.
By distributing information through these networks, honest and factual information (because anything else is soon found out for what it is), literally thousands of lives could be saved over the coming months and years.
By being truthful for once, regarding the health risks regarding cannabis perhaps the younger generation may start to take notice of what governments are saying with regard to the risks involved with clogging your veins with rat poison or talcum powder and in closing here's another fact or two you may like to digest.
The Coming Year
In 2008 more people will be harmed as a result of a peanut allergy (1% of the population) or a natural latex allergy (between 1% and 6% of the population - a bugger if you wish to practice safe sex) than will be harmed by consuming cannabis.
In Leicestershire alone, a single English county, there have been three children who have died from nut allergy in the last five years but do we ban nuts because of a tragic and unfortunate few? Of course not!
Tobacco and alcohol will hospitalise hundreds of thousands. This we already know, so simply repeating the same old guff about "possible" cannabis psychosis issues, simply isn't good advice, as it causes more damage from class A substances as a result of the history of lies drug users have been fed a steady diet of over the years.
If the Labour party were to legislate, and regulate cannabis, no doubt the Tories would whinge like banshee's but to be honest who really cares, when a lot of them already admitted to using cannabis in their past anyway?
The fact is, millions of cannabis users in the UK would doubtless put their X in the Labour box as a result of them no longer being persecuted at the behest of big business.
Which is the real reason cannabis remains illegal, so essentially the Conservative party, as a long standing "opposition" party, the leader of which actually admitted to using cannabis as a student, would doubtless remain in opposition, for at least another term, if not longer. In the meantime, Prime Minister Brown is duty bound to answer the calls from the society he serves, by stopping the deaths from dangerous substances which have absolutely nothing to do with heroin or cocaine apart from using them as a delivery vehicle! For the sake of the people of Northern Ireland, as well as the rest of us in the United Kingdom, we can only hope he is "up" for the job in hand. Set up in February 2007, the Canna Zine is the first-in-the-world news agency dedicated to the global issues surrounding cannabis, hemp and illicit drugs in general. To post your press release, sign up for a free account on http://pr.cannazine.co.uk , post your news release, and the Canna Zine will do the rest. Canna Zine - more 'evolution' than revolution! A new era in postitive response communications. http://cannazine.co.uk |
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