Doctor Says Stop Terrorism And Criminal Networks By Legalising All Drug Use

In a summit full of ideas...well, 100 or so, including a few new ones, this idea was too shocking, too unimaginable for most to even blink at :

The use of dangerous, addictive drugs should be decriminalised, a medical expert says.

Prison doctor Wendell Rosevear wants Australian-made heroin to be given to addicts in government-sanctioned doses by 2020.

In an idea slammed by family groups, he used Kevin Rudd's 2020 Summit to call for all drugs to be legalised.

The Queensland GP said keeping drugs illegal simply handed money to terrorists and criminals.

"I think it would be better to actually sell the opium that we grow in Tasmania and undercut the profits (of illegal drugs)," he said.

"Now, the profit margin is about 3000 per cent, from the farms to the street."

Dr Rosevear, who has 30 years' experience working in the jail system, wants safe and precise doses of drugs made available to users.

"People are taking unknown doses of unknown drugs from unknown sources, and they overdose and they die," he said.

Dr Rosevear said the change should apply to all drugs, including ecstasy, ice and marijuana.

Legalising all drugs is clearly insane.

The fallout from such a move would be catastrophic, and wide reaching.

Thousands of gangsters, distributors, street dealers and backyard chemists would be out of work, as the price of drugs plummet. Break and enters and car theft would decrease so dramatically that insurance companies would have trouble convincing people that they really need to insure everything in their homes, particularly their wall TVs.

And what about the alcohol industry? Most bartenders will tell you that stoned people drink less booze than the punters who walk in straight, and laser-eyed 20 years old on ecstasy don't drink any booze at all.

The alcohol industry would find its monopoly as legal non-pharmaceutical drug supplier to the nation being stripped away by real competition.

In a free market where most of the drugs now illegal were available to purchase, or consume in a legal venue, alcohol would have a hard time competing. Sales would plummet.

Imagine if one violent boozer, who medicated himself with alcohol, instead became a casual pot smoker? Imagine if 50,00 violent boozers ate so many hash-soaked cookies, instead of 20 schooners, every Friday and Saturday night that the only physical abuse they unleashed was on the XBox?

Ice is clearly nasty crap, illegal or legal. But a few thousand doctors, accountants and lawyers would sleep easier if they knew they could get a monthly prescription for morphine every month from their doctor.

It won't happen. Australians will instead have to make do with brain and society decaying levels of alcoholism, legal speed for attention problems and cheap, day melting doses of over the counter codeine from the local pharmacy.

The majority of Australians will continue to dose themselves almost every day with drugs, soft and hard drugs, because they want to alter their reality, or alter the way they feel, or the way they feel about themselves.

Australians enjoy getting high, and low, via plants, fermentation and chemicals, but the most important question remains how best to limit the addictions and the damage.