Drugs Part III

As I said in this post, I had received a stock response from my MP outlining the government's drugs policy. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to indulge in a reply, which was mostly along the lines of what I wrote in the post.

I received another reply, this time very short, thanking me for my letter but saying we'll have to agree to disagree, and that her opinion has been formed after years of seeing the damage drugs do and her idea about what British society should be like. There was a nice typo about being against the 'legislation of drugs'.

I know my MP is extremely busy, but however I look at it, it's a pretty poor service. She hasn't justified her position, she hasn't engaged with my points, she hasn't made any comment about the calls for legalisation. She's just asserted her opinion, and offered nothing to back it up. This is an opinion which not only restricts people's freedoms, but in all probability makes things worse.

What would I like to happen? I'd like her to have a blog, and if someone sends her a thoughtful letter, she could ask permission to post it to the blog, then she should post her reply in the open, and let people critique the whole exchange in the comments section. With as little moderation as possible.

At the moment, she has a standard Tory template website, with a news section that hasn't been updated since March, a Twitter account that hasn't been updated since March, no user comments anywhere, and a few soundbites about being disgusted by MPs' abuse of expenses. It's all very on-message and it's quite depressing. She's quite probably just another cookie-cutter politician who represents the government to the constituents and not the other way around. After all, she's there because of the party machine, if she stands up to it she'll be betraying what got her there. All she has to do is not rock the boat and she'll be rewarded for it.

This seems like a good opportunity to post this. It's about the two party system but it could just as well be about the fact whoever you vote for, you get a self-serving politician who'll mess around with things and get paid handsomely in the process. Whoever you vote for, they win. Nothing except the periphery ever changes.



As for drugs, the war on drugs has failed. Each successive politician who promises to get tough on drugs should be reminded of Einstein's definition of insanity: "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". On the other hand, it all makes sense if the result they're expecting is we just lap it up...