Czech drug legalisation threatens Poland

Polish broder guards and trained sniffer dogs are gearing up for a potential surge of drug smuggling after the Czechs legalised the possession of marijuana and even hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Any comments?

slask.naszemiasto.pl/artykul/275985,od-1-stycznia-2010-legalizacja-narkotykow-w-czechach,id,t.html
rfi.fr/actupl/articles/096/article_3273.asp

Why are there still border guards within the EU?

I don't know how Polish border safegaurds function these days, but I would assume that border guards are still needed to check out non-EU travellers without visas as well as refugees being smuggled into the country and hoping to make it to the West. I udnerstand there is considerable traffic in Vietnamese, Chinese, Chechen and other refugees and asylum seekers swimming icy rivers or trying to corss wooded land borders

Have they done this to increase tourism...? Their country will become a huge version of Amsterdam , with druggies from every nation wandering all over the place...

Poland should increase the penalties for bringing drugs into the country , perhaps hang a few of the scum at the border and leave em swinging in the breeze as a deterent....

I don,t know how bad Polands drug problem is , but i suspect we don,t need any more of the stuff coming in...!

I think I read somehwere that drug dealers in Polish face from 3 to 10 years in jail.

Does not seem to deter them though...there is a village disco goes on a few kms from me every saterday and drugs are sold outside the place , its the sort of area where the policja dont seem to visit , but i am working on doing something about that...

If the police were serious about clamping down on drugs it would be easy. Polish BHP (work safety and hygiene) regulations proihibit keeping toxic substances in public houses such as cafes, pubs, discos, etc. Finding one customer with drugs should be enough to give the proprietor a first warning. The second time he loses his licence. It is his repsonsibility to ensure a drug-free environment in his public establishment using private security guards or whatever. The widely publicised closure of one or two establishments would show disco owners the authrities mean business. But probably the local constabulary is on the take and not interested in clamping down.

Yes the system does work in this respect....a local bar in my village got shut down due to drugs being around the place....i wonder who grassed them up....heh...!

No, there are no guards at the border... There are road patrols, but there is no check point at the border. As for Chech decision they just reconsiled with reality. Prague is full with drug dillers already. You can spot them everywhere around old town. Czechs are quite pratical, they are probably going to tax drug dillers :-)

The idea of locking someone up for two years for a couple of joints is criminal in itself. Have you ever heard of someone toking a doobie a beating his wife afterwards? No. Yet, after the legal drug alcohol, which you can buy in gallons, violence is common.

Good for the Czechs. In Poland heroin and marihuana are clasified both as narcotics. What backwardness.

as if their country, especially Prague, has been short of tourists. Prague has long been over run by tourist hourdes, which is why drug dealers have had an easy time finding customers. As for Poland, you dont really get how it works do you? Poland has some of the stiffest penalties for drugs in Europe, at least on paper. This is convenient for the mafia, which is still quite active in Poland, and they capitilize on it. It is not unheard of for cops to be in cahoots with drug traffickers. In corrupt countries, having stiff penalties for drugs is an excellent way for the mafia to get rid of the competition. The police roll up some "independent" dealers while the mafia-sponsored dealers pay off cops to be able to do their thing.

They said the same thing about Portugal as well. The Czechs have always been really strong supporters of personal freedom. Look at the gun laws, prostitution laws, and the drug laws. The only thing new here is that they are officially stating what the unofficial policy has been since the revolution.

I am all for personal freedom , and if somebody wants to smoke a joint , hell why not , i have done it myself , but to legalise drugs that kill people , and cause them to steal from the rest of us to pay for their drugs is just stupid...

With freedom comes resposibilities....people should not be free to sell poisen on the streets...

Portugal did it and are seeing a decline in violent crime as well as lower user rates. Keep in mind that trafficking is still illegal and heavily punished.

Every little mom and pop shop in Poland sells alcohol, which is a terrible drug for people that can't handle it.

The drug isn't the problem, it's the individual user. There are responsible users of heroin just as there are responsible users of alcohol. If you commit a crime, you should be punished for it. If you are not hurting anyone else, then it shouldn't be of anyone's business what you do privately.

And where do these responsible people , the teenage ones who are unemployed get their money for these very expensive drugs....I have heard of people spending 500 quid a day on their habit....I am sure that very few of these hooded zombies are qualified brain surgeons...?

i use to know a few of em but they are all dead by now

Lets go ahead an throw opiates in a nice group of their own...

William Wilberforce
Walter Scott
Picasso
Billie Holiday
Paracelsus
Arthur Conan Doyle
Charles Dickens
William S. Burroughs
Marcus Aurelius
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Ken Kesey
Ben Franklin
King George V....

Responsible users don't pop up in the media, and they don't pop up in your home stealing your TV. It doesn't mean that they're not out there.

If somebody breaks into my house and trashes it looking for stuff to steal for drug money , i will be very much cheered up by the fact that some people who use drugs are really nice people...

That's an awful lot of money - it would see a serious cokehead right for a couple of days, and most for a week. Heroin, though is a cheap (and generally nasty) drug. A hundred a day would be about the most IMHO, with most log-term users spending rather less.

Of course the intrinsic value (and the price the farmers get) is just a few pence.

So instead of legislative prohibition with all that money going to criminals, let shops sell it openly and freely. Smackheads wouldn't have to come up with all that cash to see themselves happy, there would be no incentive for dealers to mix the stuff with God knows what, and the third-world farmers who grow whatever they can to survive would get more money. Fairtrade Drugs!

You would not mind then if your kids were going into a shop to buy sweets where heroin was on sale also...?

That is, if they are breaking into your house for stuff to steal for drug money. More than likely that money is going to go towards an addiction to £200 shoes, a playstation, £100 shirts...

I'd certainly prefer that to them walking down a street with drug dealers lurking in the shadows.

Not that sweet shops would sell them anyway, if they wanted to keep customers.

We don't mind sending our kids to shops with drunks surrounding the place pissing in the corner, so why not?

But I think that most people would be more in favor of a specialty shop, kind of like the partitioned area that quite a few supermarkets here have.

If i catch them i will never know...it will be a very short conversation....

I agree with you, the crime is breaking into your house, I don't really care why they're doing it, it should be punished. In the UK, they would get a short lockup, in Texas their career would end very quickly.

Wooohooo Chechs! Good for you! About time some common sense prevailed!

It's time to separate the people with mental problems that abuse anything they can get their hands on, from criminal elements making money off them.

And it's time to admit that there are recreational drug users, same way there are occasional drinkers. Making drugs (or alcohol) illegal does not work.

Good point. In the Netherlands we've been doing that for decades and see: we have the least drug-related problems in the world. Why? Because instead of hunting the recreational users like mad, our police focuses on the real perpetrators: dealers and hard drugs users. And besides: why would you tolerate alcohol, which is in fact a hard drug on the same level as cocaine and the like, when you don't tolerate marijuana, which is in fact in itself not even addicting (physically) like alcohol, cocaine, tobacco and the like. It's time that everybody gets some common sense and stops the witch hunt for the kiddo that smokes a joint every now and then and start focusing on where the real problem is: the pushers, the dealers.

>^..^<

M-G (smoked perhaps 4 or 5 joints in his entire life and is not addicted to hash)

In Poland, Palikot and his party haven`t managed to pass the suitable laws yet.

On the other hand, Poland better watch out - Chechs lead the Europe, by a very large margin, in meth production.

Have you been watching "breaking bad"? (great show:)