The Defence Brief

Psychoactive drugs "Drugs are bad, M'kay" so says South Park Elementary school counsellor Mr Mackey.  Clearly, the Home Secretary agrees and has proudly proclaimed that she has banned over 500 drugs in the past 5-years. I imagine that making all those orders to ban drugs must get quite tedious, which is why Mrs May has come up with the ingenious solution of banning all psychoactive drugs.  The point of this is to prevent people taking legal highs, which are often made by untrained people, working in unsafe environments and using questionable ingredients.  Quite how that doesn't already breach some health and safety law is beyond me, but apparently it doesn't because the government wants to stop people taking them. As a lawyer, there are two questions I think are important.  First, what is a legal high?  Secondly, what is a psychoactive drug? To answer the first question, I asked Frank who told me that "'[l]egal highs' ... contain on...

I've just come across this story about plans to cut police pay . It seems to me that the Government needs to think about what is important to the people and therefore what is important to it. If I am in dire fiscal straits then I must consider whether I pay off my bills in any particular order.  I could pay all my credit cards and over draft off first while ignoring my mortgage.  The end result might be that I end up with no debt quickly because my personal debts are covered and the bank takes my house away to pay off the mortgage I owe them.  But, the problem is that I am now homeless.  A better solution seems to be to decide what is important to me.  Maybe it is better that I pay my debts slowly but have somewhere to live at the end of it. This is the same problem as the Government faces.  Does it slash all public spending to the bone, pay all the debts but risk leaving the country in an appalling state at the end of it?  Or does it have a real...