Drugs ‘deck of cards’ mocks inhaling politicians

Take a deep breath, guys … ‘playing cards’ from the new Nice People Take Drugs website. Photograph: Release

From former presidents to serving ministers, politicians around the world have today found themselves the butt of a web campaign skewering them as hypocrites for advocating a zero tolerance approach to drugs despite having used drugs in the past.

The online “deck of cards” pillories public figures such as Bill Clinton and chancellor Alistair Darling while encouraging web users to volunteer their own “hypocrites” with accompanying quotes to complete the set. The device is a tactic to draw attention to World Anti-Drugs Day and is the latest phase in the Nice People Take Drugs campaign from the UK charity Release, which sparked controversy earlier this month.

Nice People Take Drugs

Our colleagues over at Release – long time reform campaigners and defenders of those who fall foul of the UK’s unjust, outdated and often plain ridiculous drug laws – have launched a new campaign as part of their wider project to drag the drug policy debate out of the stagnant waters of politically driven drug-war posturing and into what rational pragmatists might call ‘the real world’.

update:
see Guardian blog article and discussion: the drugs do work – for a lot of people

As Release graphically point out:

• Over a third of adults in England & Wales have used illicit drugs
• More people have used cannabis than voted for Labour at the last election
• 13,000 children were arrested for drug offences in 2006/07
• Over 1 million adults used class A drugs last year

Release’s Sebastian Saville quite correctly argues that:

“the constant association by politicians and the media of drugs with words like evil and shame simply does not reflect most people’s experience of drugs. The public is tired of the artificial representation of drugs in society, which is not truthful about the fact that all sorts of people use drugs. If we are to have a fair and effective drug policy, it must be premised on this reality first and foremost.”