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item0046C 764, 765
764
14 July 2003
From
the Lancashire Evening Post
The
powerful testimony of Eddie Ellison...
 The
former operational head of Scotland Yard's Drug Squad, Eddie Ellison, has
praised a woman who uses cannabis for medicinal purposes for speaking out.
He says he backs the argument for legalising all drugs.
This week, the Evening Post has highlighted the plight of Sybil
Lucas-Brewer of Preston, who relieves her crippling pain with marijuana. The
48-year-old mum spoke out to defend her right to use the "God
given herb" and appealed for a change in the law which
currently labels people like her as criminals.
Mr Ellison, 59, retired 10 years ago after a career in the Police Force.
The former pupil of Kirkham Grammar School said:
"I am very proud of
Sybil for making the huge step of being so frank and open about her drug
use. It is just illogical that if someone has found a way of treating their
pain, they are branded as criminals. I personally would like to see all
drugs legalised. I am very strongly anti most
drugs. However, I do not approve of using the criminal law to deal
with drug use. Legalisation does not mean we'll all have to take
drugs. It doesn't mean that we even encourage drug taking. It doesn't
even mean I approve of drug use at all."
Originally from
Lancashire, Mr Ellison applied to join Lancashire
Constabulary, but was turned down after being told he was half an inch too
short. He joined London's Metropolitan Police and
quickly progressed his career, working for the Murder and Drug Squads.
Since retiring, Mr Ellison has been involved as the Trustee of a drug
charity and is a patron of a lobby group for changing the drugs laws.
Mr Ellison said: "All the legalisation argument does is present an
alternative policy for reducing the problems caused to society by the
growing use of drugs."
He says keeping drugs illegal causes all sorts of problems such as
presenting a supply monopoly to criminal organisations with high levels of
illegal profits and maintaining a high crime rate. He commented: "In
spite of the many years of repetitive official claims, drugs do not kill.
Bad drugs kill, bad use of drugs kills, competition between
criminal drugs
suppliers kills - and lack of supporting resources kills.
"But the evidence is clear, most drugs do not kill - and with
a more
compassionate, supporting and informed approach, we have a clear chance to
reduce the harm that using drugs can cause to both the user and the wider
population.
"As far as punishing people who use drugs for pain relief, I think it is
ridiculous. In the UK, almost half the cannabis is home-grown and some
people, who have an excess, supply it to medical support groups to
distribute it to whoever has an acknowledged medical problem. This is
illegal and these people are labelled as serious drug supplying
criminals.
======================================================
Eddie
Ellison is a signatory to The Angel Declaration - you can check out his
name, and sign your own - online at The Angel Declaration.
What do you think? Drop me a line
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765 21
July
2003
Economic Horizons are
limited
for better or for worse
 Last
week, in an international athletics meeting at Birmingham, following a false
start, three highly focused young athletes failed to respond to three rounds
of cancellation cannon, and pointlessly ran their whole race, exhausting
themselves.
They were so wrapped up
in their own sensory world that they did not hear the explosive cannon,
cancelling the race. They lost hopelessly when the
race was eventually run.
 This phenomenon has very important economic implications. Modern
economies are critically dependent for their forward momentum upon the
confidence of
domestic consumers - the "feel-good factor", consumer confidence, the
propensity to spend. Readers of my own essay Multiple Differential
Uncertainty will be familiar with the centrality of this analysis.
Nations, and sometimes provinces and regions, generate their own
psycho-climate. Just as the Birmingham sprinters become so focused
upon, so preoccupied with their immediate racing environment that their
brains even excluded the sensory evidence of the cancellation cannons, heard
by the majority of the sprinters.
This human propensity to
limit ones horizons, to manage anxiety by ring-fencing the mind, is to be
observed at the level of the "national community". For modern
economies, each of which develops its own communication and media network,
have become independent psycho-climates. In media terms, they do
indeed become "national communities", weakening other communal links. Each national economy has its own
distinctive
propensity to spend,
at any one time. And a hundred factors may contribute to the
composition of a "national frame of mind" - and
Confidence is indivisible...
For example, the gun-ho militarism of Republican America may yet
succeed in boosting the US domestic propensity to spend, at a time when
others are rendered more anxious by American warmongering. The
Japanese media reflect and cultivate the deep pessimism which has gripped
Japan over the past decade - and that pessimism relates distinctively to
Japan. I recently had occasion to examine with you the distinctive pessimism
of the German consumerate - none of which is shared by the French, Italians
or the British. And "foreign affairs" cut notoriously little ice with any
domestic consumerate.
National psycho-climates can be
self-limiting, blocking out bad news. For the "world economy" that is
a Good Thing, because it reduces the risk of overall simultaneous systemic collapse.
But it also contains the seeds of risk. For as all "national" systems become
less isolationist and better informed, pessimism will spread more easily,
just like the SARS virus - putting a new premium on the maintenance of
global optimism.
What do you think? Drop me a line
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