Daily Archives: June 26, 2017

Sens. Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein recentlyintroduced the Stop the Importation and Trafficking of Synthetic Analogues (SITSA) Act of 2017. This act would create a Schedule A classification, banning importing new synthetic drugs deemed substantially similar to existing illegal drugs before testing their safety. If passed, the SITSA Act will be another step down the unfruitful path of prohibition.

Prohibiting a drug causes more problems than it solves. When a substance is banned, people can no longer rely on the government to enforce contracts for the sale and transport of the substance. This means that the only way to protect property and selling rights is through violence. Drugs dont cause violent crimeprohibition does.

Two years after Colorado legalized marijuana, the stateexperienced a 12.8 percent decrease in homicide rates. Colorado prosecutors charged 11,000 people with marijuana-related crimes in 2011 and charged only 2,100 people for marijuana crimes from January to October of 2015. It seems obvious that the number of charges would decrease when the drug became legal. What is less obvious, though, is the time, energy, and money saved when police arent wasting time on victimless crimes.

Prohibition often makes drugs stronger and more dangerous. In 1971, just before President Richard Nixon started the official War on Drugs, overdose deaths rates in the United States were slightly above one in 100,000. By 2008, this number jumped to 12 in 100,000.

If possession of a substance is a federal crime, many dealers and users cease using the drug in low concentrations. The more potent the drug, the more worthwhile the risk, versus potential profit. This is why we saw aspike in hard alcohol consumption during prohibition while beer and wine consumption dropped significantlyand why all these consumption rates returned to normal after the 21st Amendment was ratified. The War on Drugs makes drugs deadlier.

The SITSA Act is an attempt by Congress to ban substances before the government can even identify them. Substances could be banned for a predicted physiological effect on the human body. Grassley and Feinstein want to restrict drugs that they think might have an adverse effect on human health with no substantiated evidence.

The governments role is not that of an overprotective babysitter or frightened parent. Americans should be able to decide for themselves what substances to use if no federal testing has found them to be harmful.

This is reminiscent of the hilariously frightening pass it to see whats in it Obamacare debacle. Government officials want the power to ban substances without even knowing what they are. Dont worry, though, the government will figure out how harmful the drug is after its off-limits for an indefinite amount of time. Federal regulation has stopped U.S. scientists from researching medical uses for marijuana, MDMA, LSD and other illicit substances. Prematurely banning the transport of new drugs will keep them unavailable for private medical testing.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the man who just asked Congress to let him prosecute medical marijuana companies, claims the U.S. is in the throes of a historic epidemic of drug use. He predicts more violent crime and a huge public safety risk if medical marijuana operations arent shut down. Sessions doesnt understand that the danger, violence, and public health crises caused by drugs is not in their use but in their prohibition.

Portugal faced a similar situation in the late 1980s. At first, the country tried a rigorous conservative approach to drug use including social vilification and harsh legal penalties. It didnt work. By 1999, almost one percent of the population was addicted to heroin.

In 2001, the country decided to tackle the problem in a different way. Portugal decriminalized all drugs and focused on harm reduction measures. Since then, drug-induced deaths, AIDS diagnoses, and overall drug use have fallen significantly.

The U.S. government is actively harming its citizens with its predatory drug policy. The SITSA Act insults Americans, implying that the government knows what we should and shouldnt put into our bodies without any research to back up its claims. To curb the drug problems in America, we need to realize that prohibition invariably makes things worse.

Dylan Moore is currently a Young Voices Advocate.

Read more:

Congress Proposes Outlawing Drugs Before Knowing What They Are - Observer

The Scottish Borders has joined a national two-month campaign to help prevent child sex abuse.

Police Scotland and local authorities have launched the initiative with the charity Stop It Now! Scotland.

The charity provides confidential support to people who are having sexual thoughts about children and young people, supporting them manage these and control any associated behaviour.

1,600

people sought help to stop looking at sexual images of children online in 2016.

14

crimes of possessing indecent images of children in Scottish Borders between 2015/16.

The campaign is being supported by the City of Edinburgh Council, West Lothian Council, Scottish Borders Council, East Lothian Council and Midlothian Council with partners in NHS Lothian and NHS Borders.

Stop it Now! Scotland has worked with hundreds of men arrested for viewing sexual images of children.

For many, being arrested was a real wake-up call. Many knew what they were doing was wrong, but struggled to change their behaviour on their own. Thats where our work comes in.

We make sure these men understand the harm they have caused the children in these images, and also the serious consequences for them and their families if they dont get to grips with their online behaviour. Once they understand this, they become far less likely to reoffend.

But there are thousands of men out there viewing sexual images of under 18s. We need to get to them too, to help them understand what they are doing is illegal and incredibly harmful to the children and young people in the images and to get them to stop."

Stuart Allardyce, National Manager of Stop it Now! in Scotland

Our ultimate goal here is to protect children.

Accessing these images is not a victimless crime. A child is re-victimised every time an image of them is viewed and this creates further demand for these appalling materials.

We have a highly experienced and dedicated Cyber Crime Unit with access to extensive investigative techniques to pursue perpetrators of these crimes.

The consequences of this behaviour for an individual are life-changing and can include losing your job, being imprisoned and registered as a sex offender.

Id urge anyone who is having inappropriate thoughts about children to seek help from Stop It Now! Scotland. Otherwise, expect a visit from officers.

Detective Chief Inspector Brian Stuart of Police Scotlands Cyber Crime Unit

To get help, call Stop It Now! Scotland confidentially on 0131 556 3535 or visit get-help.stopitnow.org.uk where further advice, including a self-help section, is available.

Last updated Mon 26 Jun 2017

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Borders joins national campaign to stop child sex abuse | Border ... - ITV News

Let us speak then of victimless crimes, the pretense that somehow by expunging certain acts from the criminal justice system we are in fact advancing civilization, casting aside the repressions, the myths, the lies our churches told us for centuries upon centuries that those acts were evil when of course we the educated sophisticates know ever so much better that they are not evil merely pleasures that do no harm to no one else. If I choose to smoke a little dope, wheres the victim? Well there are one or two or several dozen victims you know, the ones exploited and yes occasionally killed by the higher levels of the drug trade. Then legalize it, you say and I will agree but lets not pretend that getting whacked out of our skulls leaves no fingerprints on anyone elses soul.

Perhaps the word soul makes you uncomfortable, makes you wish that this what is this, a book review or a sermon? piece of writing would just move along and get to the plot and sentence structure, leaving this talk of souls behind. Oh no, I beg your pardon but we cannot speak of this novel Harvesting without a few good words about souls.

I actually believed for a good many years that prostitution was a victimless crime. That position was very much part of the values in the home I grew up in; all other parties being long since dead, I am not causing anyone any blush of embarrassment, no averting of the eyes when the Priest speaks from the pulpit at Sunday Mass. No, both my mother who was a journalist and my grandfather who was a properly progressive MP felt that prostitution fulfilled a need in society. After all, men who were single or men who were (much worse than single) in unhappy marriages or (much worse than unhappy marriages) married to women who because of frailty could no longer satisfy mans need for sexual pleasure, why those men require somewhere to go. Otherwise, just think of what the rape and abuse statistics would be like!

Then of course if one studies enough or actually listens to the women in ones life, the realization dawns finally that if one out of three women and there are higher estimates than that have been or will be sexually assaulted at some time in their lives then how does that justify the supposed noble purpose of prostitution? And there too, why is the focus on the needs of the men? Kingsley Amis might have said that male virility is like being chained to the devil, but hold on a minute. People quit smoking, heroin, drinking and eating meat and they seem to survive. Are you really telling me that a period of abstinence is all that hard (or pardon me, I suppose I might have said difficult)?

What of the women? Ah well, theyre paid for it so thats no bother. Its just business dealings, a commercial transaction, everybody knows what theyre doing so there is no victim there. After all, if we didnt have prostitution we wouldnt have the stage musical Sweet Charity or the movie Pretty Woman. How bad can prostitution be when it inspires romantic comedies?

The Irish novelist Lisa Harding makes an incredibly wise choice in Harvesting. The story of two young girls, one Irish and one Moldovan, thrown together as captives in an under-age sex trade prison, has no description of sex in it whatsoever except for only the most allusive. At first, I thought that Harding had made this choice for literary, character-based reasons; by not including the specifics of what these grotesque clients did to these girls that would so reflect the effects of repressed memory, willed amnesia and so forth. Now while that may have entered into Hardings consideration, I suspect that she had a much, much more chilling reason to leave the sex on the cutting room floor. She did not want this novel to be at all titillating. Think about it. Harding clearly did, and I imagine it was a chilling thought imagining a book about exploitation of children for sexual purpose being passed about with the hot bits dog-eared and highlighted. Well done to the author in avoiding that.

Without ever being pedantic or at all lecturing, Harding builds a case step-by-step against this so-called victimless crime by framing it in the narrative voices of Samantha and Nico. Samantha is the street-wiser or the two, receiving the attention of the older boys at her Dublin school as a pseudo-replacement for an alcoholic mother and an often absent father. Nico is a farm girl, raised in a male-dominant family that betrays her upon reaching puberty by selling her to a sex trader.

It is not just the families that fail the two young women. Time and again, whether it is the drivers who take the victims to their clients, the clients who realize the girls are under-age, the barmen who serve them, the social services who do too little, or the police forces who allow these operations to exist, the systems of civilization fail. At one point Samantha escapes from hospital and when she realizes that she has effectively escaped into captivity she thinks that she must be in the news, the goal of a nationwide search. Of course she isnt. To whatever degree we think about such things as teen prostitutes gone missing, we either shrug it off, ignore it, assume shell grow out of it, or at a darkest level wonder if perhaps shes searchable on Pornhub.

Harvesting is not a light-hearted read, a book to be tossed into the beach bag for a summer weekend day trip. Although, you know, perhaps it should be. There you are with your partner and the kids, the latter playing on the beach, and you lift your eyes from your book and look at the people further down along the sand. What are they looking at through their Ray-Bans? Are they looking at your children? And more what are you looking at and thinking?

The sexual exploitation of women is as old as society itself. It exists in all nations, all cultures, throughout all history. Slavery, which we like to pretend had been eradicated in the nineteenth century, still exists. The rights of children are still ill-defined when it comes to parents custodial rights. True justice will only occur when we face the ills that pervade within our cultures, acknowledge them, yet never accept them. One novel, no matter if it is as well-written and gripping as Harvesting is barely heard as a muted whisper against all the media that assumes girls or women exist purely for sexual pleasure. And yet, Lisa Hardings voice is still a voice, and one whisper joined by the whispers of her readers can in combination become a shout. That, at least, supplies us some hope.

Be seeing you.

Harvesting

Lisa Harding (New Island Books 2017, Trade Paperback) 308 pages

See more here:

Book Review: Harvesting by Lisa Harding (novel) - The London Economic