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GARDAÍ IN CORK seized a quantity of the drug Mephedrone with the estimated street value of €42,000.
As part of a planned operation targeting the sale and supply of controlled drugs in the Cork area gardaí from the Kanturk District Drugs Unit stopped a car at Rathcoole, Mallow at approximately 11.50am yesterday.
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Arrests
Two men in their 50′s were arrested at the scene and were detained at Bandon Garda Station under the provisions of Section 2 of the Criminal Justice Drug Trafficking Act 1996.
Both were released without charge late last night and a file will be prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Mephedrone is a synthetic stimulant drug which has similar effects to speed or ecstasy.
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That is €42,000 that a bottom feeding drug dealer will not get his/her hands on and also €42,000 worth of drugs that junkies will not get to take, so id say that is a good result.
How is it a waste of resources, 2 drug dealers got arrested. How do you know it didn’t stop one person doing drugs. The policy is working better than having no policy.
Steve – some adults were stopped from putting something into their own body and not harming anyone, this equates to success for you? Right on. And what’s with the ‘junkies’ mention? There are more people and junkies using prescription mess than anything else these days.
The question about freedom of choice is a tough one, but society has a responsibility to protect itself from poisons. I think the real problem with drugs is how they are financed, through all different kinds of illegal activity.
So your defence of the policy is it’s not the worst thing we could be doing then Steve? Surely we can aim a little higher than that, despite historical precedents. Ryan is right, people who want to take drugs will take drugs, they really aren’t very hard to come by. 42k of a drug being taken off the street will have zero impact on the supply of drugs as it is not a statistically significant amount. Taking two drug dealers off the street will have zero impact as yet again we will be forced to accept that the laws of supply and demand cannot be legislated away. Certainly the current policy is the easiest one, but perhaps with proper public debate focussing on the facts and evidence, and maybe applying a little more effort, we can come up with better ways to deal with a problem that has been growing for the 50 years of our current policies designed to reduce it.
@Shane that drug dealer has far more than €42k at his disposal I assure you.
As for your second point that is painfully nieve, all said junkie has to do is find another dealer and that’s not hard as does a recreational user.
Were not going to get anywhere interdicting supply, we don’t come close to getting even 1/4 of what comes in, and even if we intercepted half which is pure fantasy all that would do is restrict supply with the same demand which would cos price spikes and a spate of robberies and violent crime from desperate addicts would ensue and the more desperate the addict is the more likley the encounter is going to end violently. So even if this stupid approch ‘worked’ it would make matters worse.
Because @RightWingSteve when you are a drug addict you need your fix and if you can’t get it from dealer A you get it from dealer B , C, D, E, F…..
Recreational users similarly can just go to someone else.
It’s time for some common sense reforms, and while I don’t think fully legalizing them and having them on sale next to the solphadine would be a good soloution, I think we can at least start smaller:
1. Decriminalize drug USE , let adults take their own risks and put whatever they want into their own bodies, run all the information campaigns you want, and continue to battle to keep them away from kids, but a grown adult want’s to use them it should be that grown adults risk to take.
2 Decriminalize private production and consumption of marajuana, it’s less dangerious than alcohol and cigarets and nobody has ever died from it, so this one is a no brainer, it’s also something that works well in pill form for cancer pain control and other medical uses.
3. Focus all the attention on opiate dealers, they are the ones who do the real damage, and the ones who sell to kids, this would be far better use of resources than slamming 20 year olds up against a wall and arresting them for having a joint in their pocket.
Let’s start there, then decide where to go from that point on, theres no doubt what we are doing now is not working, and in the US the DEA won’t even admit that marajuna and heroin are not the same in terms of the danger they pose, that kind of intransegence and pig headed stubbornness is not somethingt that makes for good policy.
Steve don’t be dense, drugs finance illegal activity because they are illegal, it would not be Tommo making a fortune out of them and funding other criminal enterprises if some state licensed company was to make them.
The drug war started when Nixon got a report that said marajuana was not harmful at all and other drugs could be dealt with in other ways, he binned the report, then released a press release lying about the studys results, thats how this all began.
When drugs were legal back in the 1900s we still had addiction etc but we did not have any of the other criminal problems associated with them that only came after.
Hi Steve – they are financed (as u know) by criminals feeding a demand in the market. Drug policy is just not working, it’s time for a rethink before we end up with a policy and structure like the US. If you have time and netflix, watch some of the docu: The house I live in. It’s very good.
The US has gone bonkers, there are people in California under the 3 strikes laws serving 25 to life for 3 drug possession convictions its madness.
Many police depts get funding from state and federal level in the form of block grants determined by how many drug arrests they make, so they are constantly slamming minority youth in bad neighbourhoods up against walls to find little hits of hash etc and that’s turning entire communities against the police cos they see them as a threat not a protector when their son can’t walk to the supermarket to pick up milk without getting slammed against a wall cos he’s wearing a hoodie.
@ Ryan, the US imprisons more of its own citizens than any society in history. While incarcerated prisoners must work or they will be put in solitary, lose privileges etc. For this work I think they get about 35c an hour. This sounds fair enough until you realise that it is not necessarily community service that they are doing, but are primarily concerned with the manufacture of consumer goods; on average c.35% of kitchen appliances in a US home’s kitchen will have been manufactured in prisons. This has allowed the US to compete with the sweat shops in Asia & Mexico, and is considered by some to be just a back door to maintaining slavery in the US. They need prisoners to keep these work camps functioning, and draconian anti-drug laws enable them to keep prison populations high, and predominantly black.
I will check it out Scarr, I still think drugs are a personal choice and if the only problem was personal then fair enough, but it’s not, everybody else has to fund the choices some people make.
You can oppose my changes all you want folks but I don’t see you coming up with any alternatives, we have to do something. Clinging to something thats an acknowledged failure by every former head of state and govt in the world from the Mexicans to the Americans to the Chinese, won’t get your kids any further away from drugs.
‘zero tolerance’ policies always end in disaster, I’ve seen zero tolerance for drugs at school lead to kids being expelled for having an Advil in their pockets.
zero tolerance is a brain dead solution to any problem, life is grey and things have to be treated with approaches and solution’s proportionate and appropriate to their circumstances.
Do you contend that Singapore’s low crime statistics are a direct result of their zero tolerance approach Steve? If so, can you please support this position with research or peer reviews? One of the worst mistakes regularly made in public policy is assuming causation where correlation exists. Fact is, Singaporean society and culture are vastly different to ours, and these cultural differences likely play a major role in their lower crime statistics. Look to America where a zero tolerance approach is also adopted in relation to narcotics offences – would you like to see US crime statistics mirrored here?
Singaporean society is different than ours, wow didn’t know that, they had huge drug problems a lot of their neighbours still have huge drug problems. They unlike the rest of the world have instituted real zero tolerance policies, the punishment for small amounts are large and punishments for importation are permanent. Might be worthwhile trying something like that.
But they’re not unlike the rest of the world, a few other places have adopted zero tolerance approaches but have not enjoyed the same results as Singapore. It is too simplistic to simply say they did this, this happened, therefore if we copy them the same thing will happen. What we are doing doesn’t work, what you are proposing would not work either imho (remember Singapore is a tiny place so their borders are fairly easy to control; we are one of the easiest places in the Western world to import into). Simplistic approaches have got us to where we are now, can we not recognise that it is a complex problem that will likely require a myriad of complex measures to ever come close to coming to terms with?
Also, have you been to Singapore? Drugs can be got, and got fairly easily. The laws of supply and demand cannot be circumvented by government policy. The only difference is drugs are a lot more expensive, i.e. government policy has only managed to shift the supply curve.
Also, you appear to have an incredibly left wing approach to drug control for someone who identifies as right wing. The right wing approach is market rules, allow supply and demand & market forces dictate.
Yep I worked there for 10 years and the best friend and best man at my wedding has just retired from the police there, so I think I can have an opinion. Sometimes complex problems have simple solutions,.
Also you are confusing free market theory with genuine right wing policies, personal freedom is important but not up to everybody else to cover the costs involved.
If that’s true then why have similar results not also been enjoyed in America which adopts similar, albeit not quite so harsh, zero tolerance approaches to narcotics? Simple answers generally only satisfy simple people.
I didn’t mention personal freedom. Right wing economics is Chicago school. What you are proposing is similar to central planning a la communism.
Politics is far more than economics Silent M. Monetarism and the Chicago Boys had their day but it that kind of economics is a little too hard for Irish tastes.
Thankfully that kind of economics is too harsh for Irish tastes, although I would say it is actually just too wrong for Irish tastes. The assumptions they make about markets are frankly bizarre at times, and they are rarely open to correction.
Nonetheless, you have yet to support your position that the low crime rates in Singapore are as a direct result of their zero tolerance approach with any research. Can I therefore trust that this is simply an unresearched opinion of your own?
There is literally zero evidence to support my position, apart from the information I have from my two ex police friends. I’m sure if you google “why is singapore so safe” it might help you.
Ha, I genuinely didn’t mean it as an insult to you, just trying to come up with a suitably irrelevant quote to get myself famous on a UVF mural! And I’m (I think) quite a bit younger than you, so have had more exposure to drugs I would imagine. I have had friends from a variety of backgrounds for a variety of reasons get caught up in the whole thing. What you quickly realise is that political sound bytes and simplistic criminal justice approaches achieve nothing. I would also add however that I have seen more friends find themselves in personal trouble as a result of alcohol than any illegal drugs. Just because a guard or judge says something is okay does not necessarily mean that your liver or brain will agree!
There must be a lot of ratting going on. With such an abundance of drugs out there, The Gardai could announce a substantial seizure on the hour every hour, until the middle of the next millennium.
42,000 street value ! So really it was only 1000 worth I’d love to know what streets the guards buy there drugs on ! That they put a 42,000 street value on it
Serious question
What does released without charged actually mean?
These two were caught red handed but released without charge..
Does it go to the dpp and they could/will get charged at a later date or is that it now they walk away with no charge now or in the future?
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“Some one” is 15 or 20 thousand out of pocket. Theyll just make the money back up the same way. Lose lose situation. Win win for them once people still buy. Which people will defo do
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