The government wants your opinions – and the Home Office finally coughs up its secrets.
The Home office has finally been forced to reveal the text of the review ordered into drugs classification by ex-Home Secretary Charles Clarke, more about that later; first to the government we have now. Of course there’s a lot to dislike about the present coalition government– some would say
just the fact that it’s populated by politicians is bad enough, never mind the cuts and other bitter policies it may inflict on us over the next few years. So perhaps it’s all a PR con, but at least they’ve opened a couple of websites for people to suggest laws they would like to see scrapped and to suggest ideas for saving money. Actually there are two such websites, one asks us which laws we don’t like and one asks for ideas of how to do the expenditure cuts we’ve been promised, they are quite separate from each other.
Please go to the Your Freedom website and have a look:
In the Restoring civil liberties section it’s interesting, not to say pleasing, to see that one of the most popular ideas is cannabis law reform. See the cannabis/ drug law reform ideas here and the most commented ideas here and add your own ratings and comments.
In the Repealing unnecessary laws section there are also some drug law reform ideas – see them here, (and add comments and ratings) however the “Cutting business and third sector regulations” is, perhaps understandably, pretty devoid of any suggestions.
Next have a look at Spending Challenge
It looks very much like the freedom site but is different and totally separate from it. A search for “drugs” throws up some ideas that need votes and comments, and there’s this one by someone called “NR23Derek” whoever he is: “Subject all policies to a full cost benefit analysis”
You have to register first – separately for both sites – but then you can vote for and comment on the various ideas. The more comments and votes these ideas get the more they are going to be embarrassed when they ignore them.
OK, advert over. The sites are very badly designed though, the “highest rated” listings don’t take into account the number of votes, so an idea with one 5 star vote is listed higher than one which has 1000 averaging 4.9, so it’s not actually telling us which are the most popular ideas really, so look though the site and find all the ideas you like and boost them by rating and comments.
The other big development this week was to finally see the full Freedom of Information release of the previous government’s plans for reform of the drugs classification system under the Misuse of Drugs Act. This blog has been covering the Freedom of Information request made by the Drug Equality Alliance (see here and here) so we won’t recover old ground, but the newly released information shines a light onto the thinking in the Home Office at a time when the prohibition policy was under serious attack.
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