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Asked by anon-186547 to Verity, Trystan, Raquel, Danny on 13 Nov 2018.
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Verity Hill answered on 13 Nov 2018: last edited 13 Nov 2018 2:23 pm
A lot of drug policy is to do with politics, and how dangerous people think they are. Often when a new drug is made illegal, it’s because somebody has died from it and it’s made the news so the pressure is on the government to keep people safe by making the drug illegal. I think that now whole classes of drugs are illegal, so even if you make a new one it is automatically illegal.
In the UK we have drug rankings for how dangerous we think they are, and how big the punishment is for dealing them. There is class A (like Heroin), class B (like cannabis, or weed), and class C (like ketamine). These classifications don’t always make a lot of sense in terms of actual harm done – for example ketamine can often be a lot more harmful than cannabis. All three classes are illegal though, and carry strong punishments for people selling them!
Drug policy in the UK is a really interesting subject, and David Nutt, who used to advise the government on drug policy, has a lot to say about it!
If you want more information on illegal drugs in the UK, the website Ask Frank has a lot of very good resources.
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Danny Ward answered on 13 Nov 2018:
Recreational drugs are controlled by governments, they create laws which make them illegal to produce, buy and use. There are many reasons for this. Many recreational drugs can be very dangerous to the users, they can fuel crime, they can cause poverty and gang-violence in developing nations were they are often made/grown and also they are made without any kind of regulation of rules and so often contain other nasty chemicals too making it even more dangerous.
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Medical drugs prescribed by doctors however are different. These are produced by pharmaceutical companies and are heavily regulated to make sure they are safe and effective at treating disease. These aren’t illegal and help many people around the world.
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