Rory Fellows

Hi, hello.

I think I have to go very carefully here because obviously we've been listening to the most distressing stories

that can be attached to drug use.

In the 18th century, gin was first discovered and manufactured and it was produced at random by various different people.

And people were dying in the streets drinking it because there was no kind of control over the strength of the alcohol.

Now, what they did was they legalized it and then they bonded it

which is to say they established exactly how strong it could be, so that nowadays, if you buy a bottle of gin, every bottle of gin you buy will be 40%, I think it is, and it's standard, and you know exactly what you're getting.

Half the problem with the use of drugs of any quality is that you don't know from one prescription

type to another particularly the powdered cocaine and heroin and yeah morphine and things like that um they cut it as they say uh they cut it with all sorts of things some of which can be extremely dangerous but more importantly the actual strength of the of the dose changes so somebody who's been buying say quite weak heroin may suddenly get hold of a very high quality heroin

and take the same amount and they overdose.

I don't want to minimize this, but I have to say, first of all, on the issue of the blood, as you call it, there is no other multinational billion dollar industry that has been in existence for thousands of years

because human beings have always looked for ways to get high, as they say, or whatever it is.

And we hand this industry tax-free to criminals.

So what has happened is that, I mean, listen, I'll be 80 this year.

I had my first smoke of cannabis when I was 19.

Nowadays, I mean, my own daughter had her first smoke of cannabis when she was 14, because criminals have no conscience about what they're selling and to whom they're selling it.

The money that can be made is so much that they are willing to kill each other in gang wars.

I mean, I hesitate to recommend everything being licensed, but I can tell you, actually, I was in Nepal back in 1968.

you could buy heroin in the chemist.

And the result was that of the 200 or 300 of the people that were there, I should say maybe half a dozen or a dozen of them would go for the heroin.