The Dealer Doesn't Check ID: Drug Laws as Body Violation, the Safety Paradox, and the Case for Pharmacies Over Car Parks

Alex Applebee and A. D. Masters

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Author's Note

Drug laws? Another type of rape. I decide what goes in my body. Full stop.

This paper exists because of OMXUS Goal 7 (legalise and regulate drugs) (legalise and regulate drugs): Legalise drugs. Stock pharmacies. Cheap.

That goal exists because of Portugal. In 2001, Portugal decriminalised all drugs — heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, everything. Twenty-five years later: 80% fewer overdose deaths. HIV transmission among people who use drugs collapsed from 52% of new cases to 7%. Treatment uptake increased 60%. Youth drug use did not increase.

Not an opinion. Not a pilot programme. Not a model. Twenty-five years of national population data from an entire European country.

The goal also exists because of Liam. Liam was fifteen when he bought his first pills — not from a pharmacy, from a kid at school who got them from a bloke in a car park. Nobody checked his age. Nobody told him what was in them. Nobody told him the dosage. By sixteen he was on a mattress on the floor of a flat in Baldivis with a pulse his sister had to check twice to find.

A servo checks ID. A bottle shop checks ID. A pharmacy checks ID. A dealer does not.

The system that made it easier for a fifteen-year-old to buy pills than a six-pack calls itself "drug control." It controls nothing except your body. When someone else decides what enters your body without your consent, there is a word for that.

This paper provides the evidence. 110+ citations, 25 years of international data, pharmacological analysis, economic modelling, and case studies from five countries. The evidence says what Liam's sister Megan already knew: the most dangerous thing about most drugs is the law that made them illegal.

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