Party Vibe

lack of enforcement isn’t the same as acceptance.. people get away with it in some areas because they are physically remote from built up areas, and law enforcement is easily corrupted due to low wages for cops.

China is actually quite liberal for an Asian country about drug use (there’s quite a big hard dance scene out there!) but thats perhaps because it helps dumb down the population and keep them from questioning the other social controls. India seems to randomly goes through stages of tolerance and then massive drugs enforcement (they are actually busting Chinese criminals in India and handing them back to China as part of a clampdown on drugs)

my family are from Malaysia and although the old style pattern of use you mention still exists in border areas, was prevalent until the 1980s and still ocurs amongst tribal people its slowly being “cleansed” out of Asian society; and I’m talking about entire tribal villages getting blasted and burned in the middle of the night under “drugs control operations” – no bail or court, just bullets here.

All across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Phillipines, this stuff happens and the West doesn’t always hear about it. The death penalty for drugs, however, is very often enforced in all these countries and thousands die each year..

One reason the army took over in Thailand was because of the fallout when the last PM armed Civil Service officials and told them to go to the streets and “deal robustly” with drug addicts (they executed at least 2000 without trial)

There are double standards though.. the use of opiates in licensed medicine is slightly more prevalent in the East (its ironic that in Malaysia you can get cough mixture OTC with a level of codeine in it that British addicts would kill for)

Ironically its a combination of the UN (anti drugs initiatives such as Single Convention on Narcotics) and the globalised market forces that make these countries clamp down; the UN waves carrots of funding at them but wields sticks of trade sanctions if they don’t clamp down on drugs, also companies prefer to invest in nations where the population are more prepared to work than party…

the whole of Whitehall works on a “shared pain” approach

the management keep cutting costs and jobs to make the frontline staff angry

the frontline staff (many of whom are fairly young themselves and the same age as claimants) know they can get away with taking their anger out on the customers and there are a lot in whitehall who simply want to punish non-conformists rather than help people…

It reinforces social command and control structures….

BTW if you don’t mind saying what job were you working in that requires drug testing?

yep IMO if the Govt has the balls to ignore (some of) the people and engage in military action in Afghanistan and Iraq it should have the balls to ignore the whingers and moaners and start prescribing heroin in controlled conditions to addicts…

I doubt it would increase the numbers either – I lived in Reading for many years which has been smack city for ages and the easy availability of the stuff never made me want to do it (despite my own often heavy drug use over the years)

They should do it properly this time though (including close monitoring of patients after the initial detox) and not give up halfway…