I drafted this letter to Peter Dunne while sitting on the train this afternoon.
Dear Peter,
Re: Psychoactive Substances bill
I understand that your main motivation for promoting this legislation is safety.
I am concerned that the safety testing process for potentially approved psychoactive substances will be unnecessarily long-winded, prohibitively expensive, cruel (if tested on animals) and either too stringent or too lax to be effective. It will not be practically possible to establish likely adverse long-term effects of new psychoactive substances.
Drug users did not ask for this legislation.
Why not legalise substances such as cannabis, methylphenidate, BZP and MDMA?
All these substances have been trialled on humans and have good safety profiles.Methylphenidate is routinely prescribed to children. Why not legalise it for adult recreational use?
Cannabis has been used safely for millennia. No one has ever died from a cannabis overdose.
If cannabis were already legal, demand for synthetic cannabinoids would be negligible and the proposed legislation would be unnecessary.
Yours sincerely,
Richard
Comments are welcome before I send it.
Brains tend to answer the questions asked of them.
Asking bad questions produces bad answers.
If you ask this way Peter will look for “why nots”.
I like it.
Yet you may as well post it to Santa.
Yet I still an a great believer that we ought to capture our best thoughts and put them to use somehow rather than simply letting them ‘float away’.
They are too valuable to waste.
This blog is a great place to house such dreams, visions, and ideas.
That’s really good Richard; send as is. Perhaps something specific about medicinal cannabis (now in 35 US states).
I’ve been ‘attacking’ Dunne on Twitter over last week, and my last blog post, but he doesn’t interact at all, so I recommend you send through his parliamentary email, as he definitely reads all correspondence via that avenue.
Oh yeah… It’s a good letter.
Forgot to ask: do you mind if I link and copy and paste this letter to my blog, Richard?
Mark
See the syndication panel on the right…
I don’t mind at all, Mark. My letter was partly inspired by your latest post. 🙂