The lawful pharmaceutical industry in the United States is the most insidious, vile and addiction-provoking monster of its type on the planet. Until it is properly confronted and curtailed, the migration of addicts from legal highs to heroin hell will continue at its fast and furious rate. My real wrath [is] aimed squarely at every politician and doctor who has enabled this horrendous scourge on society by encouraging Americans to medicate themselves in such a disastrously excessive and unnecessary manner.
They’ve created a real life Walking Dead.
Piers Morgan, Mail, 9 September
The NHS has never been good at engaging with excluded populations and delivering services to challenging individuals. Offenders, the homeless and people with fragile mental health, as well as drug users, often have no GPs, make themselves unwelcome at A&E departments, and miss appointments, and the complexity of their health needs is ill-matched to a system structured around specialities. Too often the very people who need the NHS most are those least able to navigate its various pathways.
Paul Hayes, Guardian, 9 September
While [Rodrigo] Duterte’s obsessive war on narcotics may be horrifying to an international audience, for many Filipinos – even those ambivalent to his presidency – a ‘some action is better than no action’ stance has made a welcome change of pace… Duterte’s victory came as the Philippines’ drug problem was becoming so endemic that a firebrand, cartoon character of a president taking a sledgehammer to the issue became a reasonable gamble… Duterte’s mass execution of the low hanging fruit in the Philippines drug trade will serve only to highlight how drugs have filled the vacuum created by successive governments. Filipinos did not vote for Duterte; they voted for a jab at the establishment that has, for the past five decades, consistently let them down.
Joanna Fuertes-Knight, Guardian, 16 September
Why do suckers always fall for the claims of ‘medical cannabis’? Its advocates are invariably mixed up with the lobby for general legalisation… Cannabis may make some people feel better, but so did Thalidomide. A drug correlated with severe mental illness may just not be the ideal miracle cure.
Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 18 September