One could send NZ’s entire
LSD ‘problem’ (10gms) in
one envelope via NZ Post!
and Dogs couldnt even smell it! Hardcore drugs P, cocaine and Ecstasy gave New Zealand a bill of about $546 million for social costs in one financial year. (Ecstacy “hardcore”, who are these guys kidding, this is proof Accountants should stay away from drugs)
They are a big part of the total $1.3 billion that drug use cost the country in 2005 and 2006.
The figures come from a new index designed by economists to help police decide where drugs do the most harm and enable them to use resources more efficiently.
The Drug Harm Index, released yesterday, will help police determine the socio-economic costs from drug seizures and track the value of the drug trade in New Zealand. (this is laughable – “it amounts in reality to harms from prohibition in dollars per kilo/Blair)
It measures social harms related to drug use such as lost work output, health service use, diverted resources and reduced quality or loss of life. (it does not measure all harms , it does identify a state service that is forbidden from lying, telling lies. This has the signature of CZAR Anderton all over it, and he calls me dangerous!/Blair)
The study investigated harm caused by four drug categories – stimulants (methamphetamine or “P”, cocaine and Ecstasy), opioids (opium, homebake heroin and morphine), cannabis (plants and plant extracts) and LSD (hallucinogens).
It found that 373,310 people used cannabis, but only 17 per cent of these were frequent users.
(evidence of law in disrepute/Blair)
There were 38,390 cocaine users, of which 88 per cent were frequent users.
Nearly 23,000 people used crystal methamphetamine (36 per cent of them often) and 81,890 took Ecstasy (24 per cent often). (How come?, I thought these substances were prohibited? Doesnt the policy work? – Idiots!)
Cannabis was the most used drug by far. At the other end of the scale, LSD use was limited to 2.6 times a year on average.
Men who took drugs were absent from work about 70 per cent more days than abstainers, and women 20 per cent more days. (This is unsupported by evidence that shows cannabis users take less sick days than joe public and on average had a higher mean income/Blair)
Male cannabis users took about 8 per cent more sick days than the average male worker and opioid users took 40 per cent more days. (and alcohol/tobacco ??? you twerps! )
Other findings were:
* Cannabis cost $431 million, opioids $326 million and LSD $7.1 million.
* The most damaging drug per kilogram was LSD, which cost more than $1.05 billion a kg (ROFLOL – do the homework here, $7million/1.05billion – BERL reckons NZ’s LSD ‘problem amounts to a total of about 10gms, or about a third of an ounce )
* About 1578 people – 16 per cent of the prison population – were in jail as a result of drug-related crimes. This was at a cost of about $68,880 per person – $108.7 million in total.
* Court costs were $353 million.
* People serving community sentences cost $20.9 million and those on home detention cost $300,000.
* Hospital costs attributed to patients with drug-related problems amounted to $6.76 million – an average of about $2949 for each of 2292 patients. (Health Costs attributable to Alcohol may be as much as 70% of the total health vote according to UK NHS – Illicit drugs are cheap!)
* There were about 1920 drug-related deaths (including road accidents and homicides), costing $205.2 million, or $106,000 a person (non-of-which can be scientifically thus evidentially attributed to cannabis/Blair)
While stimulants contributed 41 per cent of the total costs, figures showed that in 2006, police and Customs seized 33,480kg of cannabis compared with only 155kg of stimulants. (not bad eh, 33 tonnes of cannabis!, NZ smokes its way through more than 200 tonnes a year and no one died! Doh!)
And police dealing with drug offences spent 55.8 per cent of their time addressing cannabis, against 43 per cent of their hours dealing with stimulant-related issues. (demonstrating what a massive waste of resources prohibition of cannabis is)
Former police detective Mike Sabin, who now specialises in dealing with P users, said police should dedicate as many resources to drug offences as they did to road policing. (what is he suggesting, Random Footpath Checks? )
He said police and the Government had made an effort to reduce road accidents over the past 10 years. “We’ve seen a halving of the road toll in that time …If we saw the same level of policing on drugs I think we’d see a significant reduction in the costs identified in this report.” (absent any proof this is pure speculation – he’s making it up as he goes – the guy is an idiot if he believes that somehow suddenly NZ Police can do what billions of dollars has failed to accomplish, keep taking the pills Mike!, it should help with the delusions.)
Police had started to steer away from drug and organised crime policing, possibly because it was costing too much, clogged up the courts and created statistics that would not exist unless you “went out and found the drugs”, Mr Sabin said. (not while the Police ‘budgets’ for drug interdiction remained an unaccountable cash cow that Mr Sabin is all to ready to suck the tit of)
Police spent about 4 per cent of their time working on drug-related offences, the index showed.
National crime manager Detective Superintendent Win van der Velde told the police Ten One magazine a reduction in social costs since 2000 showed drug seizures in 2006 avoided $485 million of drug harm. (hahahahhaahaaa! your joking… Operation VeeDub cost millions to prosecute and the guys walked! )
“This index holds the potential for police to become more targeted and responsive to areas of crime where greater harm occurs.”
(This is even funnier. Perhaps he’s going to disband the Expert Advisory Committe (on Drugs) for lying to the public about drug harms! Mr Sabin calls himself “Methcon”, is that some kind of cruel joke?)
The study did not include party pills such as benzylpiperazine (BZPs), which were reclassified as Class C drugs from April 1. (Contrary to best practice public health – they reclassified because [Czar] Jim Anderton paid for the research outcomes he wanted to see)
Such appaling ‘cost benefit analysis’ is a drug offence!
Blair Anderson
MildGreens's Backup Blog 