Why magic mushrooms should not be banned
Heroin, an illegal drug, causes hundreds of deaths, wastes garda resources and is at the root of a lot of violent crime.
Magic mushrooms, as a legal drug, caused at least one death in Ireland in recent years, but they haven’t caused anything remotely like the problems of alcohol or heroin.
The Government should not have banned them. They should have controlled the sale, made suppliers responsible for the quality, taxed them heavily, put huge warnings on the packets and kept them at the ‘margins’ of society through education and a ban on advertising.
Perhaps they could have tried something imaginative like requiring a long questionnaire to be filled out before every purchase.
It would have been a better way of controlling them, putting the onus on the suppliers rather than the gardaí (as will now be the case).
And it would have been an opportunity to try new methods of control which could then have been applied to the real problem: alcohol.
Rob Hamilton
Oakwood Farm
Rochestown
Cork.
